It’s no surprise that the NES versions don’t support importing the party between episodes, but in Japan ASCII actually distributed a tool called Turbofile, which allowed to store save files separately, and thus enabled the transfer even on the cartridge-based console. For the American NES release Asciiware waited for Knights of Diamonds to come out to bring them back into the original order, but in the end they never got around to releasing Legacy of Llylgamyn in the West. Also for reasons unknown, ASCII switched the second and third episodes around this time. The change seems even more puzzling considering that these levels are completely optional, but they’re kept through all future versions based on this. Dungeon level 6 to 8 in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord have their layouts changed for some reason. The Famicom version was also the first Wizardry title to eschew wireframe dungeons in favor of monotonous, but at least textured brown walls. Wizardry was never big in Europe – only the French received translated versions of the original trilogy on Apple II – but in Japan the franchise had already caught on a life on its own by 1987, and ASCII had produced Japanified new variants of the games for the Famicom and MSX2 (the original MSX had been pretty much the only notable platform left out the first time around), with a soundtrack by anime musician Kentarou Haneda (1949-2007) and new monster art by illustrator Jun Suemi, whose designs have become so popular that most recent Wizardry games still base their graphics on them. Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Macintosh) These new versions also had a number of balancing differences to the original Apple version. Since they were all running on the same basic engine, they only differed in graphics, which look best on PC-9801 thanks to the higher resolution. ASCII brought the game to pretty much all home computers out in Japan. In cooperation with a Japanese team at ASCII, Robert Woodhead created a kind of virtual machine especially for Wizardry, to make porting it to individual platforms much easier.
It introduced all new monster graphics which were then used for subsequent home computer versions. In 1984, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was finally ported over to IBM PCs, not to be run in an MS-DOS environment, but booted directly from disk. At first, Wizardry wasn’t much of a multiplatform title – it remained a system exclusive to the Apple II until after Legacy of Llylgamyn introduced the new windows-based interface, which was then used for almost all ports of the first two scenarios as well.
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