A playthrough of Brøderbund's 1989 action-adventure game for the NES, Legacy of the Wizard.

There were many nonlinear, pseudo-RPG adventure games making their way to the NES in the late eighties, but few were ever as revered - or feared - as Legacy of the Wizard. It quickly garnered a reputation for being one of the toughest NES games out there, and that reputation was well earned. If you were still craving a challenge after conquering the likes of Zelda, Milon's Secret Castle, and Blaster Master, you wouldn't have been disappointed with Legacy of the Wizard.

Remember how many times it showed up in Nintendo Power's "Counselors' Corner" column?

Legacy of the Wizard is a port of Nihon Falcom's 1987 MSX2 game "Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family," and it was developed in-house by Falcom themselves. (As far as I know, it was the only NES game that Falcom worked on directly. Most of their console conversions at the time were outsourced to Compile and Advance Communication.) It also features a soundtrack by two absolute legends of FM synth, Yuzo Koshiro and Mieko Ishikawa.

Since it's the fourth game in the Dragon Slayer series, it has ties to several other games you may already be familiar with. Hudson's Faxanadu (https://youtu.be/FwWoDAFOSWc) was an NES/Famicom-exclusive spin-off of "Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II"; "Sorcerian" (Dragon Slayer V) was ported to MS-DOS and localized by Sierra Online; and "Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes," the sixth in the series, was ported to the TurboGrafx-CD and localized by Hudson (https://youtu.be/kRf_NVsI1EY).

Legacy of the Wizard is a puzzle-platformer that stars the Drasle family (Drasle = "DRA"gon "SLAY"er), a family that lives in a log cabin situated right near the mouth of a cave teeming with monsters. Grandpa Drasle, the titular wizard, long ago sealed a dragon away in those depths and saved the kingdom, but the seal is now beginning to weaken. The only weapon that can defeat the dragon is the Dragonslayer sword, and so the remaining Drasles set out to search the caves for the four crowns that protect the sword.

The game world is an enormous, sixteen-story deep labyrinth, and it is divided up into areas tailored to the talents of each individual family member. These areas are filled with items that will enhance a specific person's abilities, but since a character's items are not usually found in their own area of the labyrinth, a lot of careful planning and coordination is needed in order to get everyone to their respective crowns.

Once Xemn (dad), Meyna (mom), Lyll (sis), and Pochi (the family's pet monster) have collected the four crowns, brosef Roas can use them to find the legendary sword and finally, to challenge the dragon.

Legacy of the Wizard is an intricate, sadistic jigsaw puzzle that demands your focus and dedication. The trial-and-error nature of the gameplay can feel directionless and frustrating at first, but it becomes less intimidating as your repeated failures start to give rise to a better understanding of the game's inner workings.

The experience is a slow burn, and everything about it, from the combat to the platforming, and even simple navigation, is brutal, but each victory, however insignificant, feels like a meaningful achievement when it's so hard won. I love the way the gameplay loop is structured, and the dungeon design is surprisingly varied considering the scope of the game world.

I have to admit, it took a long time for me to warm up to Legacy of the Wizard, and I never did learn to embrace it completely. The controls are awkward and fussy (those block puzzles... argh!), and the stiff platforming and sloppy hit detection mimic the feel of an 80s PC action game to a fault. I enjoyed the game for its ideas and for the flow of the level design, but the rough edges knock it down several pegs. It did a lot of things well for its time, but as a complete package, Legacy of the Wizard has not aged particularly gracefully.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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