Wizardry V

I found this title for $5.00 at the Exchange (a used cd & game store down here in Cincy). Though I've never heard of the series before upon closer expection I find that low & behold it was published by Capcom. Why it must be good it's a Capcom game, right? Wrong! Let me tell you something, you'll definitely need the manual to play this game. Otherwise you'll be goofing around for an hour or so just trying to figure the controls out. Once you get rolling, you'll find yourself in a 1st-person RPG/Dungeon Exploration game. They were plentiful back in the classic gaming days, but the only good example I can think of today is Shining Wisdom for the Sega Saturn. I know these games aren't that exciting & there's usually alot of text to read, but this is ridiculous! There is zero animation in this game. Everything is a static 2D sprite! And the dungeons are completely monotonous using the same pictures over & over again. Not to mention that movement through the dungeons is horrifically choppy. It works on a pic by pic basis. Heck, I expect this kind of stuff on the old NES. And since nothing is animated, all the action is told through huge text bubbles with an extreme amount of detail. It seems fitting in a novel or book, but when you play a video game you expect some action over reading loads of colorful text. It's plays just like every other game of this type & nothing new has been added to make it any different. You should expect a ton of random battles & continous exploration of dungeons that all look the same. Whoopy, talk about fun (note sarcasm). On top of that the game doesn't start you out with any kind of story so you don't even know why you're here or what you're doing. If Capcom went in and added some animation & perhaps a more fluid set-up things could have turned out for differently for this title. But as it stands it's a cookie-cutter example of the genre & lacks anything that would interest the normal gamer.

Overall 1.4