Wizardry Empire: Inishie no Oujou

Wizardry is a series of computer role-playing games, developed by Sir-Tech, that were popular in the 1980s. Originally made for the Apple II, they were later ported to other platforms. The latest game in the series, Wizardry 8, is available only for Windows.

Wizardry began as a simple dungeon crawl by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was written when they were students at Cornell University and then published by Sir-Tech. The first five games in the series were written in Apple Pascal, an implementation of UCSD Pascal, and was ported to many different platforms by writing UCSD Pascal implementations for the target machines (Mac II cross-development).

When Wizardry was first introduced in Japan, the lack of available information as well as a low quality of translation led to the game being far more seriously interpreted by Japanese players due to overlooking in-game jokes and parodies. For example, in early games Blade Cusinart was introduced as “a legendary sword made by the famous blacksmith, Cusinart” as Cuisinart and its food processors were virtually unknown in Japan and thus its meaning was misinterpreted. However, this misconception appealed to early computer gamers who were looking for something different and made Wizardry series popular. Conversely, the fourth game, The Return of Werdna, was poorly received as lacking the knowledge of subcultures necessary to solving the game; Japanese players had no chance of figuring out some puzzles.

Wizardry Empire – Princess of the Ancient (aka Wizardry Empire – Inishie no Oujou) is the first game in the Empire series for Playstation game consoles, a sequel was also released in Playstation one and the third game in the series was released for the PSP console.