Wizardry’s new remaster is a historical must-have for JRPG fans

When game director Hidetaka Miyazaki tried to explain his new game The souls of demons to the masses, he chose another game as his reference point: the classic role-playing game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons Witchcraft.

FromSoftware wanted to “make the fun and charms of a classic RPG interesting again with the latest technology available,” Miyazaki told Famitsu in 2008. “Having long weapons hit the walls, lighting the area in real time with the torch in your hand (…) taking the things you have done through the menus in Witchcraft and allow you to achieve them in real life.

Miyazaki wasn’t the only one to think this. Witchcraft – alongside another RPG powerhouse from the early 80s, Ultimate – has been cited by dozens of Japanese game developers as a major influence on their seminal work. This includes Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Secret of Mana game director Koichi Ishii. Witchcraft And Ultimate defined the formula for menu-driven turn-based RPGs for decades to come, inspiring developers to embrace and break free from its model.

Thanks to the new release Magic: The Mad Overlord’s Proving Groundit’s now very easy to discover what dazzled dungeon crawling fans of the early 80s. Witchcraft: Mad Overlord Proving Ground is a modernized overhaul of the original Apple II game, with stunning new 3D visuals and dozens of quality-of-life improvements that make Witchcraft easier to play – but by no means easy — in 2024.

New Witchcraft serves as a simplified entry point into a game designed for a very different type of player, someone who would bang their head against the RPG’s unexplained rules and rudimentary graphics to savor its authentic, party-based D&D-style gameplay . The new version is richly repainted with graphics that exude the atmosphere of classic tabletop RPG book and vintage. Witchcraft Magazine covers. This also makes stats and percentages more visible, explaining why you may have failed during an encounter with a group of kobold skeletons, slimes, or angry bushwackers. There’s even a rich bestiary that provides new entries on the game’s 101 monsters and other threats.

Running under the hood of Witchcraft remaster is the game’s Apple II source code, restored by developer Digital Eclipse from the original Pascal programming language. All the dice rolls and random encounters defined by the classics WitchcraftThe rules are present in the new version.

Alongside this respectful attention to the original rules of the game, Digital Eclipse has inserted a long list of quality of life features into its new Witchcraft. You can easily assemble a party of adventurers with a single click – or you can create your team of fighters, thieves, clerics, and mages from scratch. There’s a nice GUI that lets you easily move from the Inn, where your characters rest and level up, to the Shop, where you’ll find useful information about the weapons and armor you can buy, to the maze, where you will do your perilous dungeon exploration in first person.

Image: Digital Eclipse/Sir-Tech

Magic: The Mad Overlord’s Proving Ground does a wonderful job of allowing players to play both ways; Digital Eclipse lets you choose which streamlining features you want to keep and which ones you don’t. The remaster even offers the option of different maze configurations, allowing you to choose between the PC version or the 8-bit console versions. (You can also choose to see the original Apple II visual displayed in the corner of the screen, so you can regularly marvel at 40 years of graphical evolution.)

During my first playthrough of the remaster, I defaulted to the most simplified version of Witchcraft and I quickly discovered that these changes definitely didn’t make the game a pampering experience. Witchcraft remains extremely difficult, even in its new form. I often lost members of my party after outrunning them by pushing us all further and further into the maze. But the mysteries and chance encounters of Witchcraft invites you to do it – to explore, to die, and to try again. And maybe collect the corpses of the previous team of unlucky adventurers you sent to their deaths in the maze earlier in the game.

Digital eclipse Magic: The Mad Overlord’s Proving Ground is worth playing, especially if you’re 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 (Atari50, The creation of Karateka, Llamasoft: the story of Jeff Minter), it’s a new way to experience a classic game in a form clearly developed with respect for the source material.

Magic: The Mad Overlord’s Proving Ground is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was played on PC and Steam Deck using a preliminary download code provided by Digital Eclipse. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.