Wizardry

As another reviewer wrote: don't let the ratings dissuade you, this is a pretty solid anime.

Loosely based on a 1981 video game with the same name (I'm a big fan of old video games), this anime doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is: a dungeon-crawling story about a party that decides to brave ancient ruins for treasure, fighting monsters, and also somehow saving the world in the process.

Is it a genre-defining, groundbreaking anime that will make you re-think your whole life? No. Does it have to be? Also no. You could rightfully accuse this anime of being "forgettable" or "mediocre", but all ... the things it does, it does well, and it does in a style.

It has some added sense of realism (e.g. delayed reactions to pain), it depicts magic quite well, is rather faithful to the source material, and I personally quite like the art style and sound design, even if it includes sound effects stolen from other anime (e.g. Gundam) and Star Wars. I particularly appreciate their choice in colour palette.

It's an anime for those who want to see a fantasy party defeat an evil villain within 50 minutes rather than 240 minutes. It's an anime for RPG lovers and appreciators of old games, chiefly fans of the original Wizardry series.

Now, obviously, this anime is not without its fair share of flaws either: if you expect a ton of character development, this anime is not for you. There is not much to the story (group of adventurers go underground to defeat bad guy and save the world, the end), but as I said, the anime manages to tell this story in a style. As lamentable is the lack of character development and worldbuilding, one has to understand that this is a 50-minute OVA. And honestly... It's still a recommended watch from me.

Let's keep this simple: This is nothing more than a generic Dungeons and Dragons story. Straight up, and nothing more. If that's what you are after, you've found it.

This one-shot OVA story is based on a much longer game series. But really, that was twenty-plus years ago -- most of the people looking at anime these days weren't even BORN at the time. I am not familiar with the source material in the least, so I have absolutely no idea on how faithful it is. And, I think it really doesn't matter. ...

But I *do* know Dungeons and Dragons, and anyone who has a passing familiarity with D&D (and similar games) knows exactly what this is: your generic "dungeon crawler". You have the most generic mix of fantasy characters (the elf, the dwarf, the human, etc), the generic mix of classes, going through an underground dungeon fighting your generic mix of monsters with generic swords and magic and all that crap.

The way I say it makes it seem like it's terrible. But it isn't. It's just...unremarkable. It's like any other high fantasy dungeon crawler story, nothing more and nothing less. And there's nothing wrong about that. At the same time, there's nothing noteworthy, either.

Aside from that, the quality of the character designs (sans the distractingly big pointy ears), the artwork, and the animation quality are pretty decent.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that there was, for some reason, an anime based on one of the first ever computer role-playing games. Now that wouldn't be all that unusual if the game in question was made in Japan, but Wizardry is an American property originally developed by two college students. I never thought the series would be popular enough in Japan of all places to receive an anime adaptation of any sort, but after looking into it a little bit it seems that even to this day there are still some spin-offs released in Japan.

But enough about the game, we're on MyAnimeList and ... I should talk about the anime not a game that my grandpa would've played.
Where to even begin? There is not much to say about Wizardry. As far as anime go it's quite innocent and doesn't having anything that would make someone frustrated or angry or any other undesirable emotion. It just sort-of is.
The anime starts off presenting some of our party members mid-battle showing us exactly how skilled or cheap they are since they seem to be one-shotting all the monsters in the area. They're probably grinding low-level monsters for exp. The plot to the anime honestly matters very little, all you need to know for the purposes of this review is that there's some evil bad guy living at the bottom of a dungeon and that our group of heroes originally comprised of Alex the guy with a sword, Hawkwind the god damn ninja and Shin the other guy with a sword go into the dungeon to maybe defeat the bad guy. They don't know, they're not quite sure yet.
Along the way they meet the mage Joeza who for all intents and purposes serves as a heal-bot, Albert who I don't know why he even exists, and Shiela the female mage who exists to make this less of a sausage party. These chance encounters with new friends prompt our intrepid trio to actually go after the bad guy for real, because I guess they don't have anything better to do today.

From that rather long-winded description you can probably puzzle together most of what happens in the anime without having seen it so I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that the story doesn't leave any sort of impact after it's gone, even though it so desperately wants to, having not one but two named characters die. Wizardry only has 50 minutes to cram in a bunch of fight scenes, a romance subplot and a few dramatic character deaths along with the main story and the lack of time for developing any of the characters or plot really shows.
Mind you, with the set of characters and plot that we do get I don't know if a longer running time would've made much of a difference, but I think it would've at least helped in not making the more sad scenes fall flat on their face.

The anime is really like a dive through a dungeon in one of your grandfather's old computer games. You have a party of characters and you fight monsters, simple. Since we've established that the characters might as well be faceless ragdolls and that the story is as basic as they get all we really have left are the fights. So how are they? Not very good. The art in the fights, and just in general, is pretty good, mind you. And that is definitely the only thing even remotely praiseworthy about Wizardry, is that most of the time the art is at least above average (maybe except during the scene with the guy who has abs that look like they were drawn on with a permanent marker). The good art is not helped, however, by the downright boring fight coreography. Most fights end in one or two hits and those that don't are usually solved by random magic pulled straight out of the writers' asses and the game manual. The spell effects are nothing to write home about most of the time the spells just looks like some coloured mist that envelops the target. There are some that have decently satisfying effects but there's only like a couple of those and they're still used poorly in fights.

Since I was somewhat praising the anime just now I'll throw it a bone and say that the ending song was pretty good. It's the only song that I noticed all throught the anime and that's just because it was front and center during the ending sequence. For all I know the rest of the anime could be devoid of any music.
Now, to take that praise back in some way because I don't feel the anime deserves being praised so much otherwise you might think it's actually good I'll go into the overall look and feel of the anime. So, overall the anime looks pretty drab having dark colours and backgrounds with our main party being the only slight splotches of colour, though their colours are also muted. Wizardry is just not pleasant to look at, and while you could say that they're in a monster infested dungeon and that it's supposed to be dark that still doesn't make it any less drab. They could've used a torch's light to give the place a warmer feel on occasion or used colours other than musty blue and grave dirt brown. You can give the viewer the feeling they're in a dungeon without boring their eyes to tears.

Well, that's pretty much all I have to say about Wizardry. It's a weird little OVA that I found worth watching just because of how odd its heritage was. You may not feel the same way however, so if you're looking for some good old fantasy anime to watch then I suggest you look elsewhere. Wizardry is certainly old but it is far from anything I would call good, the best praise I could give it is 'harmless.' So if you're in the market for some anime that simply suck up 50 minutes of your time without giving you anything worthwhile then go for it, otherwise stay away.