I’ve been playing Wizardry Variants Daphne for about six months now, since the original launch. I wrote a blog post pretty early on about my feelings, but I’ve had a lot more time with the game so I thought I would talk a bit now about things I wish I knew when I started, and how I feel about the game now.

My Wizardry Background

I’ve been playing various versions of the Wizardry series for a long time. I started with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and years later (like only recently) did I learn that it was implemented in Pascal running on a virtual machine. That’s super interesting – I always thought virtual machines were new with Java, but even back then I should have known that Infocom’s text adventure games were running on a virtual machine. I played Wizardry 1, and finished it, but never completed other Wizardry games. I did play Bane of the Cosmic Forge on the Macintosh, and I have vague memories of completing it. That was right before I went to college. In college I was mostly consumed with Street Fighter, so didn’t play much Wizardry.

Until in grad school, when I picked up Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land on Playstation 2, and played that to completion. I really liked that game. I loved the anime art style, and the dungeon exploration. Wizardry has always had a bit of humor in it, and this game was no exception.

Generally, I’m an old-school traditional Wizardry player. I was excited for Wizardry: Variants Daphne, but concerned about the Gacha game mechanics. I’ve been very happy with the game though, and haven’t spent much money beyond small amounts that I think are completely reasonable to support Drecom for making the game.

Things I wish I knew

What can you do with Gems of Org?

You can use Gems of Org to get stuff from the Jeweler. There is another type of Gem – the purple one – that you have to spend money for. You can get more useful stuff using that currency, but I don’t ever buy any of those. I don’t like these Gacha game dark monetization systems.

When I first started, I thought those items that have green and purple gems needed both of them, but it turns out you need either 2000 Purple Gems or 2000 Green gems (Gems of Org) for them. So the thing that I think is worth getting is 11 Legendary bones for 2000 Gems of Org. I have a large number of gems saved up since I thought you needed both before, and for each new character that comes out that I want, I use the Jeweler to get chances to get the character by getting those bones.

You can also get “Junk” – this is basically the same thing you pull from chests in the dungeons. So it isn’t worth paying for. You can get “Grade Markers”, which are necessary to take the tests that lets your characters advance to higher levels. By default characters can only level up to level 20. To get to level 30 you need to take the Lead Grade Test from the Adventurer’s Guild in the Capital (and only there). That is a small dungeon that has a boss monster randomly positioned near poison squares. If you beat the boss monster, you get a “Marker”, and then can “Grade Up” your character, if you have an adventurer dogtag of the right grade. So you can buy the markers, which means you don’t need to take the test – and that really isn’t worth doing because the test is either hard, and a good way to make sure you are utilizing your party for the level, or trivial because you have beaten it before and you can bring in overpowered characters with the one you want to level up.

They also have “Amnesia Incense” which lets you un-bond a bondmate that you may have added in the training room of the Adventurer’s guild, but I haven’t bought any of those because I’ve only used that bandmate feature a little. You gain bandmates by progressing the story and side-quests. They give a small bonus, I’m not sure how noticeable it is though.

The only other thing I think is worth getting is under the “Weekly” tab of Limited Time Offers option. At the bottom of the weekly deals, there are two random Handbooks that let your party members change classes. Each party member has one other class they can change into. Note that once you use the book to change into the new class, you need another book to change back into the original class. And there are only two a week. Randomly. And they are bound to a particular character. So if you see one for a character you think you might have at some point, it’s worth picking up. Though it will take precious space in your storage box.

The Gems of Org then are pretty useful for Legendary limited Bones (which give you a chance – only a chance! – at getting characters), and class change books.

Maximizing your Gems of Org

First, you can get 50 free Gems of Org a week by claiming them from the web store. You just need to enter your User ID to log in – you can get that when you open the app, it is listed on the login screen on the lower right hand part of the screen. You can also get it from the Options Menu -> Link Data -> Link via Password -> Issue Password, and there will be a box that has your User ID, and a Password. You can use this approach to link your account to the Steam version, which I’ll talk about later.

You can also get 10 Gems of Org by going to the Jeweler and selecting the “Limited Time Offer” menu, then the Daily tab. You can buy 10 Gems of Org for 100 Gold. 100 Gold is nothing. Once you get beyond the beginning Abyss it is pretty easy to get money – though you can also spend it SUPER FAST by Enhancing Equipment, so Gold is always something you have to think about. 100 Gold is nothing though, and you should buy that every day.

Every day go to the Adventurer’s Guild and collect your Daily Supplies. Sometimes Gems of Org are in there. You should also check the Guild Mailbox which has Gems from maintenance or other things the devs give you. If you get the Gems from the web shop, they show up there too, and you need to claim them to get them.

Always keep a Hook of Harken in the party

The Hook of Harken is an inventory item that you can use in the Dungeon that will warp you out of the dungeon. Very useful. You should always have one on you at all times. I bought a pack of 10 or something for real money when I first started, and over 6 months I think I’ve used like 5 of them.

Actually, you might not really need these. When you get killed in the dungeon, you can revive up to three times using a green flame thing. That is a resource that regenerates given time. That only brings you back a step or two, and you will almost definitely run back into whatever monster party killed you. So you could be in a situation where you are up against a fight you can’t win. In those cases, I revive, then quickly hit my main character to bring up his inventory – once you bring up that page you are fine and don’t need to rush. Then I use the Hook of Harken to get out of there. You could also use a Priest to heal and try again.

You might not need the Hook of Harken if you are OK with “Accepting Death”, which will reverse time back to the previous save point in the “Cursed Wheel of Time”. I’m a bit wary of doing that because I’m not super clear how far back that may be. But it isn’t really all that bad of a penalty because as far as I can tell you keep your experience, items, and gold.

Don’t always resurrect people in battle

When party members are killed in battle, you have the option to resurrect them with your “Right Hand of Reversal”. You have to play a mini game to click a button at the right time. The game is more difficult the lower the character’s Fortitude is. I usually can’t do it on the first try, but usually can on the second. When you resurrect someone, they take a bit hit to their fortitude, 30 points (out of 100 if they have a max of 100, some characters have lower max fortitudes – it is random when you roll them). Sometimes it is better to intentionally fail the mini game and kill your main character instead of resurrecting the fallen party member. If you kill your main character, you can use the green flame resource to move back a step or two before the battle, and your party members’ Fortitude will not have decreased from dying. So sometimes I think about whether it was just back random number generation that led to the death, I’ll kill myself and re-do the battle, usually for the better.

The Main Character can change classes

Go to the Ruins, and check out the Well of the Mind. That allows you to spend points that you get by progressing the main story. What I didn’t realize for the first five months is that your main character can change classes here! What you can change into depends on the choices that you make.

I first took Strength type upgrades, and eventually I opened up a node with a sword on it. That let me change class to Knight from the default “Wanderer”. I wish I had known this sooner, because I got my character up to a point where he was not gaining any more experience. When I changed to Knight, that reset me to Level 1 (I retained all the skills I had, but stats also reset), and then I started to gain levels in Knight and learn new skills, which I will retain when I change into another class. If I can figure out where they are on that grid.

Dirty party members are less effective

When party members are out fighting, they get dirty. The front line seems to get much dirtier than the back line. At any rate, when characters are dirty the complain about it, so you will hear them say stuff. You definitely want to take them to the Inn to stay at the Private room or above to clean them up. There are mechanical implications here, they hit less hard and take more damage. Probably. People say you are more likely to get ambushed too. So keep your people clean! The more expensive rooms apparently get people more clean, but I find that staying at the Private room is good enough for what I need.

The Cursed Wheel

The Cursed Wheel is a time travel mechanic. That works really well with the game, the general cadence is that you dive into the dungeon, do stuff, something happens, and the outcome is bad. Then you reverse time to before that, and use that information to do something different and make things turn out better. What I didn’t really realize is that you can go to the Cursed Wheel and look at which options you’ve taken. I did that a few weeks back and realized that there were “???” options in the Begging Abyss that I didn’t know about, so jumping back to before that and trying different stuff let me get better outcomes, which usually means you pick up a new Bondmate. But it also is just cool.

How to start a Special Event

It took me a long time to realize that for most special events, you need to click on the “Event” shield icon, and do something there. There is also a Cursed Wheel button for the specific event there. I kept trying to do stuff in the Ruins, but that is only for the main storyline apparently.

For example, here is a shot of a recent event page. You can get information about it, check your progress, and click the “Cursed Wheel” button to reset to the start, which you will want to do so you can run the dungeon multiple times to increase the level of the Bondmates from the event.

The curent event is the Blade & Bastard crossover event. As part of that, two characters from the series are special event characters you can randomly pull for a limited time. I got lucky on the 22 pulls I used via Gems of Org.

A lucky ten-pull got me the other character, who I have not yet met in the book or manga.

Limited Resources and how to use them

Bones

One of the main limited resources you have are bones. These are the things that you can use at the Ruins to get characters. There are different probability distributions for each character. There are characters that don’t have names. All of them end up being useful in some way because you can “consume” the characters in different ways.

You can sometimes randomly run across an NPC in the dungeon (the Bone Picker, or in the 3rd dungeon a skeleton) that sometimes will sell you bones for 1000 Gold. It is always worth buying this, since for the most part you only get bones for Gems of Org or real money.

There is a way to get bones by using the right hand of reversal to reset quests and explore parts of the dungeon where the bones are. Here is a Reddit post talking about how to get bones – these reset either on weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly timelines apparently, but I don’t really take the effort to try to get more bones.

Enhancing Equipment: Gold and Ore

I didn’t really do much with enhancing equipment when I first started, but a few months in I started doing that more as I got to the end tier of weapons (Steel at the time – now it is Ebonsteel). It takes a lot of money because the increase for each plus level grows geometrically it seems. You can enhance to level 5 with just gold, but beyond that you first need to “Unify” the weapon. That means you need 2 more of the same type of weapon that are consumed, which lets the weapon upgrade another 5 more levels. Those levels take some sort of Ore. When you progress the story enough you can go to the Den of Earth (or Air, Fire, or Water) where there are different ore types. It is super slow to get the ore from those areas, so I am always bottlenecked on Ore. Until one time they started running Dispatch quests – you take party members that are just hanging out and not doing anything – and send them out on missions. The Ore missions were great, because I built up to something like 300 low grade Ore. They just brought those missions back, so I bought a Pass that lets me run one extra Dispatch (so 3 total) and I’m farming all three of those each time I can.

Note that if you want to unify a weapon that is at +10, you need to unify with weapons that have also been unified up to that grade of weapon.

Weapons also have blessings on them – basically additional stats – that determine the color. Every +5 you get another blessing, so the color goes up one.

Weapons also have stars. Higher stars are better, but I don’t really know why. Sometimes they might have better stats I guess, and I think there was something about higher stars can be enhanced to higher levels? I don’t know. I usually sell off one, two, and three star things.

Enhancement Inheritance

So what happens when you move on from your old Bronze stuff that you enhanced up to +15 at great expense of Gold and Ore? The store will buy them for the same price as regular old weapons. What a waste! You can use “Enhancement Inheritance” which will take some of those plusses and move them to another piece of equipment. That was nice, I’ve been using that a bit more lately, but you pretty quickly run out of equipment since it isn’t a 1-1 exchange (of course it isn’t).

Characters

That’s right, Characters are consumable items. There are two ways I know of to use characters. For the named characters, you can “Discipline” them, which basically means the character eats one of themselves, and they get a stats boost and if they have a special skill it might get better. Like all things in this game, one character gets you to level 1, it takes two for level 2, three for level 3, so really unless you are spending a lot of money to get lots of bones, I’m happy to just do that one time for characters I like.

The other thing you can do is “Inherit” skills. Each character has one skill they can pass on to others. Some of them are generic passives from the generic units, like “MP Increase”, others are active skills. So if you have lots of characters, you can get use out of them. Since it takes multiple copies for higher levels of skills, this can also be an expensive way to raise skills.

Both of these are done at the Training Room.

My thoughts on the game now

I really enjoy it! It has a real story to it, and I enjoy the dungeon crawling aspect. I don’t like the Gacha system and mechanic, but I’m also not spending much money on the game, so I guess that is ok. I don’t feel the need to have every character though. What I like is that there is a story here, and it isn’t just a mindless time management thing, there is a game here. It has the tactical turn based combat that I have always loved. You can get strong enough that lower level content you can use auto-battle, but if you are at any content that is close to your level you can’t do that easily.

It’s certainly a fun thing to do when you have some time. Having a real game on my phone makes it a lot easier to play. It is really hard to make time to play a game, but if I am watching a basketball game, I can pull my phone up and play a bit.

Drecom’s financials and Wizardry media

I came across Drecom’s Financial Results Presentation they put out on Jan. 30th, 2025. I think this is 2024 Q3 results. They clearly want to focus on Wizardry, which I’m happy about. Because of this game, I found out about the Blade & Bastard light novel and manga, and started reading those. The will be an anime as well. That’s pretty cool!

It’s interesting that Drecom has other IPs they are developing and is taking a strategy of publishing books and manga about them.

In their prospectus Drecom says that they had more users than the expected for Wizardry: Variants Daphne, which is great. They also say they had to pivot to work on bug fixes, delaying their planned schedule. They have been making updates which is nice. I was surprised to see they have a Disney based Pokemon-Go like game releasing. I’ll pass.

I’ve been reading through the novel, and enjoy it. It’s not literature, but it’s a fun read. There are some things that annoy me – directly talking about things like Hit Points – but generally is fun. I’ve also been reading the Japanese manga, but I’ll link the English manga since this whole post is in English.

None of those are affiliate links, mostly because I’d have to figure out how to do that. It’s nice that WordPress has ways to link to Amazon and pull in the cover though.

Steam version

A few weeks back Drecom released a Steam version of the game. I was able to link that on my PC and Steam Deck – it works reasonably well on either. You link your account by going to your phone, in the game click on the Options cog wheel, click “Link Data”, then “Link Via Password”, and “Issue Password”. So the same thing but use “Enter Password” on the Steam version, and type the stuff in. That links your accounts.

The Steam version is very clearly a quick port of the phone game. It only uses the middle third of the game, though you do get a wider field of view in some places. In battle though, it is still just using the phone aspect ratio. It is also at a max resolution of 1920×1280, so stuff looks blurry. I haven’t really been using this version much, especially since having it on the phone is super convenient. I had hoped I could use my Steam Deck that has a bigger screen to make things easier to read, but that is not the case. It somehow seems harder to read. I hope that they make the desktop / Steam aspect ratio better and use the screen more efficiently because then I think I might play there more.