Review | Dungeon Antiqua - Is it Wizardry? Is it Final Fantasy? No! It's Dungeon Antiqua

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is undoubtedly one of the most influential computer role-playing games ever made. Unfortunately, it can be a chore these days to actually play. The first-person perspective demands that the player draw their own map; losing your party in the dungeon requires that you train up a new squad of adventurers to replace them; enemies are capable of murdering characters in a single hit or (horror of horrors!) even draining their levels. Not to mention pitch-black levels, teleport traps and all sorts of other nasty tricks. 

That’s not to say that Wizardry is a bad game. Its pain points give it a unique flavour compared to modern computer RPGs. There are also various remakes which change up the game for curious players. The recent Digital Eclipse release implements optional convenience features like point buy levelling. The earlier SNES and PlayStation versions have particularly nice graphics. All retain the first-person perspective and demand that the player maps the dungeon or else. You might wonder: what might Wizardry look like if it junked the first-person perspective entirely?

Last year, the game developer Shiromofu Factory released Finardry, a Wizardry clone developed in the Python-based Pyxel engine. Like Wizardry, Finardry had you build a party of adventurers to explore a dungeon in search of treasure. But Finardry also borrowed graphics and mechanics from Final Fantasy 1. Its dungeons were presented not as first-person labyrinths but as top-down pixel maps. 

Combining Wizardry and Final Fantasy isn’t as unusual as you might think. The first Final Fantasy utilizes the Vancian magic system that Wizardry itself took from Dungeons & Dragons. Many of its potential party members (fighter, thief, white and black mage) maps neatly onto Wizardry staples (fighter, thief, priest and mage.) It wasn’t until Final Fantasy II, and its introduction of series staples like airships and a more traditional fantasy epic narrative, that Final Fantasy became recognisable as the series we know and love (depending on your thoughts on 16’s gameplay reboot) today.

Still, the use of characters from Final Fantasy limited Finardry’s commercial appeal. It also opened the game up to potential legal action. So Shiromofu Factory tweaked the graphics and interface. The result is Dungeon Antiqua, a legally distinct version released on Steam this October. Its characters, music and tilesets evoke the early Final Fantasy games but no longer copy them. Most importantly for our purposes, the game comes with a rough but playable English translation. 

Dungeon Antiqua features two great conveniences that no early Wizardry title has. The first is its top-down rather than first-person perspective. The player can play through the entire game without ever needing to make a map. This will inevitably rub some players, particularly Wizardry diehards, the wrong way. But, despite this helpful change,  Dungeon Antiqua isn’t necessarily easy sailing. Its map loops, meaning that walking too far in one direction will inevitably take the player back around to the other side. Orienteering is still necessary in order to navigate each level of the dungeon.

The second is that while the game’s classes lean towards Wizardry, their visual aesthetic is pure early Final Fantasy. The significance of this goes beyond simple aesthetic appeal. I would venture that at this point, many more people have played a Final Fantasy game than Wizardry. They know what a fighter or a black mage looks like and how they function. They also probably have an easier time navigating Final Fantasy-style menus than the original Wizardry’s tangled UI. By wrapping its Wizardry core in Final Fantasy packaging, Dungeon Antiqua provides a map by which players might learn the game for themselves.

Shiromofu Factory makes the Wizardry experience approachable in other ways as well. Revival fees are affordable rather than crushing. The player earns money fast enough to afford new weapons and armour in town every few trips. Most importantly (and I can’t exaggerate how important this is) the player controls when and how many times they save. The only way to rewind time after a party wipe in the original Wizardry was through cheating. Dungeon Antiqua is far more merciful.

To be frank, I wouldn’t mind if Dungeon Antiqua had even more Final Fantasy in it. The classes largely hew towards Wizardry with a few flourishes, like the Lord class having the ability to take hits for allies with low health. I’d love to see a sequel of this game with weirder classes like Geomancers, Dancers or Dragoons. Not to say a proper job system or even an action time battle system. Dungeon Antiqua wouldn’t even be the first. Dungeon Encounters, a game published by Square-Enix in 2021 and led by RPG legend Hiroyuki Ito, shows what happens when Square staff are given the chance to really cook with old-school dungeon crawling mechanics.

The most heretical change that Dungeon Antiqua makes to the Wizardry formula is its map design. Rather than a set of consistent maps, developer Shiromofu Factory (as far as I can tell) implemented an auto-generation feature. Maps are static in-game but change with every new save file. Thankfully the game errs towards switching up pre-made layouts rather than pure randomization. Players will recognize certain corridors and navigation setpieces if they choose to play through the game again and again.

Dungeon design is perhaps the single most crucial aspect of a dungeon RPG. Wizardry itself is famous for its early floor layouts. I wouldn’t say that Dungeon Antiqua feels that different from the older Wizardry games in map design. Many of its rooms are empty dead ends, but so were many rooms in Wizardry. Still, Dungeon Antiqua’s generated maps may be enough to poison the game for many devoted dungeon crawlers.

I think there are three kinds of players who might enjoy Dungeon Antiqua. The first are former Wizardry fans tired of putting up with the bullshit found in classic dungeon crawlers. Dungeon Antiqua is short enough (at just three or four hours) and comfy enough to be worth their time, even if it isn’t particularly complex. The second are folks curious to discover what dungeon crawlers are all about. For those people, I think Dungeon Antiqua keeps just enough grit from early Wizardry games (like the assassins in the dungeon, which can K.O. your party members in one hit) to be a great introduction to the genre. It’s also very cheap costing less than $8.

The third kind of player is curious about the Japanese independent games scene. The country has a long history with small-scale games development, particularly when it comes to role-playing games. Yet the majority of these titles, as well as most information about them, are only available in Japanese. Dungeon Antiqua is a rare window into this corner of the independent games movement accessible to English speakers and readers. It’s for that reason that I consider its accessibility to be a boon rather than a drawback. Nearly anybody can pick this game up, play it, and get a sense of what the developer wanted to accomplish. That’s no small feat for a Wizardry clone.