The first Wizardry was one of the original dungeon-crawling role-playing games, and stands along with Ultima andMight & Magic as one of the defining staples of the genre.

Tags: Fantasy, Turn-based combat  

Platforms: Apple II, Commodore 128, Commodore 64, FM-7, Game Boy Color, Macintosh, MSX, NES, PC Booter, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1, WonderSwan Color  

Year: 1981

Wizardry II is a first-person, grid-based,  RPG that is part of a series that had helped to set many standards within the PC-RPG genre with its graphical interface and gameplay mechanics.

Tags: Fantasy, Turn-based combat  

Platforms: Apple II, Commodore 64, FM-7, Game Boy Color, Macintosh, MS-DOS, NES, PC Booter, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1  

Year: 1982

A generation has passed since your band of adventurers reclaimed the Staff of Gnilda and the armor of the Knight of Diamonds, and the land has been at peace. But now nature itself seems to be attacking the land of Llylgamyn, as earthquakes and tidal waves ravage the land.

Tags: Fantasy, Turn-based combat  

Platforms: Apple II, Commodore 128, Commodore 64, FM-7, Game Boy Color, MS-DOS, NES, PC Booter, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1  

Year: 1983

Bane of the Cosmic Forge is the sixth entry in the Wizardry series. While retaining the basic premise of creating a party of up to six adventurers to roam first-person dungeons and fight enemies in turn-based combat, this installment contains numerous enhancements and new features.

Tags: Fantasy, Sci-fi, Turn-based combat  

Platforms: Amiga, FM Towns, Linux, Macintosh, MS-DOS, PC-98, SNES, Windows  

Year: 1990

Wizardry I-II-III is an excellent remake of the first three Wizardry games for the Super Nintendo, combined into one. Needless to say, the game sports much better graphics than the earlier Nintendo versions (which were already a far cry from the stick-figure graphics of the original Apple II classics). The gameplay, fans will be happy to note, remains the same: it's a tough first-person dungeon crawl that many die-hard RPG fans cut their teeth on back in the 1980s.

Tags: Fantasy, Turn-based combat  

Platforms: SNES  

Year: 1992

Crusaders of the Dark Savant is the seventh installment of the Wizardry series and a direct sequel to Bane of the Cosmic Forge. In the end of the previous game, the party of heroes finally acquired the Cosmic Forge. However, before they were able to decide what to do with it, it was taken away by a servant of the Cosmic Lords, the cyborg Aletheides. It appears that the Cosmic Forge was in fact a clue to the location of the Astral Dominae, the artifact of life, somewhere on the planet Guardia, which has now been revealed to the universe.

Tags: Fantasy, Sci-fi, Turn-based combat  

Platforms: FM Towns, Linux, MS-DOS, PC-98, PlayStation, Windows  

Year: 1992

This game is a spin-off of Sir-Tech's famous Wizardry series. It is a hybrid game that incorporates elements of both puzzle-solving adventure and role-playing. The game is viewed from first-person perspective, with locations represented by pre-rendered background images, similarly to Myst, though with animation during movement. A point-and-click interface is used to interact with the environment, talk to characters, and manipulate objects in order to solve puzzles.

Tags: Adventure, Fantasy, Puzzle-solving, Real-time combat  

Platforms: MS-DOS, SEGA Saturn, Windows  

Year: 1996