Wizardry Variants Daphne Review – Hardcore Droid

Gazing Into the Abyss

The venerable Wizardry series originated with Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on the Apple II in 1981. While comparatively obscure now, it had a massive influence on the JRPG genre, with its descendants including Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem, and Dragon Quest, among others.

However, we’re not here to talk about Wizardry’s influence on the game industry and the evolution of console RPGs. We’re here to discuss Studio 2Pro and Drecom’s Wizardry Variants Daphne. The turn-based, first-person, RPG dungeon crawler sees players recruit a party of adventurers and delve into the depths of a sprawling dungeon known as the Abyss.

Our story begins deep in the bowels of the Abyss, with our protagonist alone, injured and hunted. After being cornered and killed by the Abyss’s denizens, he wakes up with no memories as an undead in the upper levels. There, he encounters the ghost of a long-dead adventurer named Lulunarde, who serves as the player’s guide for the rest of the game. After escaping to the surface and finding a suitable disguise, they learn that the King has been lured into the Abyss and captured. Now called the Masked Adventurer, the player joins the expedition to save the King, hoping it will aid in the search for Lulunarde’s body and learn more about the Adventuror’s mysterious new powers.

The Right Hand of Reversal

The Masked Adventurer possesses an unusual magical ability called the Right Hand of Reversal. Players can use their hands to restore fast-travel shrines and wells for camping and to clear collapsed passages. They can also use it to resurrect dead party members, though doing so in battle is more difficult and much riskier as failing the QTE hits you with a paralysis debuff.

The Right Hand of Reversal is also the primary method by which Wizardry Variants Daphne players get new equipment and party members. Players will recover broken equipment and skeletal remains by exploring the Abyss, completing side quests, and from login rewards. Restoring the pieces and people is the game’s version of gacha pulls, giving you a random item or character after each attempt.

It is a little morbid, I suppose. Note, however, that these are proper resurrections, restoring your new friends to how they were the moment before they died. The Masked Adventurer may be a gnarly zombie man, but he’s the only one.

Assembling a Team

Much like the classic Wizardry games, Variants Daphne sees players leading a party of six Adventurers as they explore the Abyss and face deadly foes in turn-based battles. Party members come in four races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, and Beastfolk, and five classes: Knight, Fighter, Mage, Thief and Priest, and you’ll want at least one of each class in your party. Fighters and Knights join you on the front lines, serving as damage-dealers and tanks, respectively. As for the rear-line classes, Priests heal and buff, Mages debuff and Thieves are vital in avoiding traps and opening chests.

Both caster classes also have some powerful direct damage spells at their disposal. However, MP is a finite resource in a long expedition, and eight times out of ten, you’re better off boosting your party or weakening the enemy.

Speaking of your party, there is something weird about the character designs. The Abyss is dark and gloomy, and the player character and enemies are highly detailed and quite grotesque, occasionally dipping into full-on body horror. That’s fine, but it’s pretty jarring to compare them to your party members and the friendly NPCs, most of whom are handsome boys and pretty girls with a standard anime-inspired JRPG art style. I suppose it does a good job distinguishing people from monsters, but it was a little jarring at first. Still, both categories are well-designed, and the recruitable characters have distinct personalities in their design, animation, and voice acting.

Daphne’s Highs and Lows

One area where Wizardry Variants Daphne unmistakably succeeds is that the first-person perspective makes it more immersive than most turn-based RPGs. It’s unnerving when monsters charge at you or rush past to target your teammates. Your character will turn his head to look when a party member activates an ability, and your teammates will sometimes jump out during exploration to warn you of a trap. It helps to pull the player in, in a way I didn’t expect from a turn-based game.

If I were to point to one thing I don’t care for, it’s the game’s side quests, called Requests. While most requests are simple, quite a few involve farming random encounters or searching identical corridors based on vague directions. Considering that every journey into the Abyss is a battle of attrition, it can get rather tedious.

Looking at it broadly, however, I like Wizardry Variants Daphne a great deal. The battles are challenging, and the story is engaging, even if the corridors become repetitive. There is some grind if you intend to play for free, but it’s not significantly worse than you get from some console RPGs. I’d strongly encourage you to try Wizardry Variants Daphne, and I look forward to seeing where the franchise goes from here.