Japan spent years completely obsessed with a Western role-playing game that changed everything. So much so that its industry spent years making dozens of clones. The dungeon crawler Wizardry was a true mass phenomenon among the Japanese when it was imported from the United States.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, iconic creator of Final Fantasy, once admitted: “I became obsessed with games like Wizardry during the Apple II era, and I can’t deny their influence.” Amusingly, Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest, said almost the same thing—he even credited Wizardry for inspiring the iconic slime mascot of the Square Enix franchise.

It might sound like a coincidence, but it’s not. Wizardry (1981) set a new standard for an entire generation of Japanese fans, which is why so many of our favorite Japanese RPGs are essentially refined and evolved versions of Ultima and especially Sir-Tech’s classic dungeon-crawler formula.

Most Japanese Wizardry spin-offs are reimaginings of the 1981 original

Wizardry made a splash in the U.S. just as Dungeons & Dragons fever was taking over pop culture, bringing those tabletop adventures to life with 3D graphics. It was only natural that the franchise crossed over to Japan via ASCII Entertainment.

Japanese players fell in love with Wizardry—even though the franchise hadn’t localized its humor or puzzles for the market. What’s truly remarkable is that, even after Americans lost interest in these games, Japan kept them alive by creating their own. While the U.S. produced just one official Wizardry spin-off, Japan has released 39 (!)—and that’s not counting the countless indie adaptations and reinterpretations that remain popular to this day. Thanks to this, the series has survived across generations and platforms, from PS3 to DS, GBA, and Android—even if most of these titles never reached the West.

The rare few that did, like Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls (2009–11), featured pure anime-inspired art, a far cry from Japanese fans’ original tastes. On top of that, the core series lost its direction after Episode VI, which explains why some people today wrongly believe Wizardry has always been an Asian property.

Meanwhile, the U.S. stuck with D&D, and the students who grew up on tabletop RPGs founded studios like Black Isle (Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment), paving the way for modern teams like Obsidian and Inxile.

Japan, on the other hand, absorbed the mechanics of Ultima and Wizardry, launching the careers of young designers like Hironobu Sakaguchi (FF), Yuji Horii (DQ), Akitoshi Kawazu (SaGa), Yōsuke Niino (Shin Megami), and Yoshio Kiya (Dragon Slayer). Early JRPGs blended Ultima’s world map with Wizardry’s classic dungeon-crawling structure.

This divide is still visible today. For instance, Wizardry featured a “prestige” system where you could reset a character to level 1 but keep all learned skills—a necessity given the punishing difficulty. Japanese players spent hours grinding levels just to stand a chance.

Llylgamin Saga: The original Wizardry trilogy became a cultural sensation in Japan

That’s why in Baldur’s Gate 3 you can only reach level 12 (still D&D rules!), while almost any JRPG lets you grind to level 100. This is also why early FF and DQ had such deep class and level systems—though these have been simplified over time.

References to this legacy still pop up. Maybe not in Final Fantasy XVI, which lacks random world encounters, but certainly in the recent Magic: the Gathering collab, which revisits classic job mechanics. Just last year, Ukrainian indie developer Romanus Surt used code from a Wizardry clone (Javardry) to create Dragon Ruins. By adding a CRT filter, he made such a splash in Japan that 35% of sales came from there.

How the role-playing genre evolved around the world

While this article focused mostly on JRPGs and Wizardry’s influence, it’s just as important to consider where it all started: in the U.S., with Dungeons & Dragons (1976).

D&D and “pencil-and-paper role-playing” were obsessions on American campuses, inspiring students to build their own adaptations for university mainframes. That led to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), which, as the home internet took off, evolved into commercial MMOs—culminating in World of Warcraft and its contemporaries. The evolution never stopped: every new generation of game dares to take the formula a little further.

One of the first college D&D adaptations was Oubliette (1977) on the PLATO system—the direct inspiration for Sir-Tech’s original Wizardry. The core series has eight installments, but the franchise’s legacy reaches far beyond that. Those early MUDs can still be downloaded and played, and fans continue to build new ones even today.

Source: 3djuegos