The new Wizardry remaster is a historical must-play for JRPG fans

When game director Hidetaka Miyazaki tried to explain his then new game Demon Souls for the masses, he chose another game as a reference point: the classic Dungeons & Dragons-inspired role-playing game sorcery.

FromSoftware wanted to “bring back the fun and charm of a classic role-playing game using the latest technology available,” Miyazaki told Famitsu in 2008“Throw long weapons against walls, illuminate the area in real time with the torch in your hand […] the things you have done through menus in sorcery and let you implement them in real life.”

Miyazaki wasn’t the only one who thought that way. sorcery — alongside another RPG powerhouse of the early 80s, Last — has been cited by dozens of Japanese game developers as a major influence on their work. This includes Final Fantasy creator Hironobu SakaguchiCreator of Dragon Quest Yuji HoriiAnd Secret of Mana Game master Koichi Ishii. sorcery And Last defined the formula for menu-driven, turn-based role-playing games for decades to come, inspiring developers to both adhere to the template and break away from it.

Thanks to the newly released Magic: Testing Grounds of the Mad Overlordit is now very easy to experience what thrilled dungeon crawling fans of the early 80s. Sorcery: Testing ground of the mad overlord is a modernized reworking of the original Apple II game, with stunning new 3D graphics and dozens of quality of life improvements that sorcery easier to play — but by no means simply — in 2024.

The new sorcery serves as a streamlined entry point into a game designed for a very different type of player, someone who will grind through the RPG’s inexplicable rules and rudimentary graphics to enjoy the authentic, D&D-style party-based gameplay. The new version is lavishly redesigned with graphics that exude the atmosphere of classic tabletop RPG book art and vintage sorcery Magazine covers. It also makes stats and percentages more visible, explaining why you might have failed an encounter with a group of angry goblin skeletons, slimes, or bush fighters. There’s even an extensive bestiary that offers new lore entries on the game’s 101 monsters and other threats.

Under the hood of the sorcery remaster is the Apple II source code of the game, recovered from the original Pascal programming language by developer Digital Eclipse. All dice rolls and random encounters created by classic sorceryThe rules of are present in the new version.

In addition to this reverent observance of the original rules of the game, Digital Eclipse has included a long list of quality of life features in its new sorcery. You can easily assemble a party of adventurers with the click of a mouse – or you can build your team of fighters, thieves, priests and mages completely from scratch. There’s a nice graphical user interface that lets you easily jump from the inn, where your characters rest and level up, to the shop, where you actually get useful information about the weapons and armor you can buy, and to the labyrinth, where you do your dangerous first-person dungeon exploration.

Magic: Testing Grounds of the Mad Overlord does a wonderful job of giving players both; Digital Eclipse lets you choose which streamlining features you want to keep and which you don’t. The remaster even offers the option of different maze layouts, so you can choose between the PC version and the 8-bit console version. (You can also opt to have the original Apple II graphics running in the corner of the screen, so you can periodically marvel at 40 years of graphical evolution.)

During my first playthrough of the remaster, I defaulted to the optimized version of sorcery and soon realized that these changes definitely do not make the game a pleasant experience. sorcery remains immensely difficult in its new form. I often lost members of my group after I overwhelmed them by driving us all further and further into the labyrinth. But the secrets and chance encounters of sorcery wave to it – explore, die and try again. And maybe recover the bodies of the previous team of unfortunate adventurers you sent to their deaths in the labyrinth earlier in the game.

DigitalEclipse Magic: Testing Grounds of the Mad Overlord is worth playing, especially if you are a fan of the classic Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games and want to learn more about their inspiration. As part of Digital Eclipse’s growing library of beautifully restored historical games (Atari 50, The origins of karateka, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story) it’s a new way to experience a classic game in a form that’s clearly developed with respect for the source material.

Magic: Testing Grounds of the Mad Overlord is available now for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was played on PC and Steam Deck with a pre-release download code provided by Digital Eclipse. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These have no influence on editorial content, but Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information about Polygon’s ethics policy, please click here.