wizardry at its core absoluely has to revolve around a very SPECIFIC kind of resource management and the vancian spell system is one of the most essential parts in those games' DNA. there are also other things that are different for what might seem arbitrary reasons to somone not exposed to the more japanese influences; a very quick example being the traditional free MP/resting stables in wiz/elminage/etc. They like to challenge you but also they know when to throw the player a soft-ball so they can assimilate the games psychological pressures better.
wiz-clones are 100% all about those sweet, sweet fixed monster encounters PAIRED ALONG with a moderately conserved "random-encounter rate". the famous monster-doors if you will. when you analyze that type of design goal and what it's supposed to accomplish among the many conclusions one can reach is the simple fact that the game itself psychologically educates and controls you the more you explore its dungeons. they are absolutely brutal at the beginning with basically your first fights really being possible party wipes and that's totes normal; but if you stick with it you get the rhythm of the mazes and (i don't know how to explain this better) eventually you WILL KNOW EXACTLY WHEN A MONSTER IS BEHIND A DOOR. i don't mention that as some sort of negative, on the contrary what i mean is that the the vancian spells combined with the hand-placed encounters serve not to complement but to COMPLETE the wizardry-style mazes.
this is a huge part of the reason i loved (love) elminage series so much because it gets allll of those things down PERFECTLY. it is as wizardry-bred as any fucking wiz game itself. it's more so than even any wiz after wiz5 and onwards. i'm gonna stop writing here because i don't really have any legitimate points to make other than these observations but one final thought i have on this matter is the itemization: EO-type games (and you know exactly what i mean by EO-type) usually boast a fucking overabundance of loot but 70 percent of it are usually either materials/parts you need to "collect" (that is a very strong key-word there; EO has "collecting" ingrained in it to the bone) and usually you have to collect x amount of y crap or kill z type of enemies in x area or whatever. JRPG-ish stuff. you rarely see that in the west except in an even WORSE and more degenerate form in western mmo's. to finish up and give an eo 3 example: one of the most addictive things about the continual plundering of the dungeon floors in wizardry and in elminage is that you ALWAYS end up looking foward to the next battle; every battle means a chest, and every chest means a random chance of a great loot drop. Wizardry (and Elminage) don't utilize loot-by-monster drops btw, and not many people realize that detail and that is HUGE.
wiz-games utilize loot-by-dungeon-floor, not by specific enemy types. that means that you always want to keep going, you always want to see how low you can go so you can reach the best loot in the best floors. and you don't have to worry about things like "oh i want this item very badly but i have to kill this stupid stupid tough enemy 25 times in a row at least for a chance of it dropping it!" -- that does not exist in the world of wizardry-clones. loot comes after the fight, IF you manage to succesfully survive the high-stakes bomb--under-the-table scene that is disarming every single chest. once you disarm the chest you get the loot and the loot is GLOORIOUSS.... or your ninja fucked up inspecting the chest and your party just got teleported into a wall. Anyone who doesn't find having STAKES LIKE THAT to be PERFECT instruments for great, enjoyably adrelanine-fueled dungeon-crawling looting and surviving by the skin of your teeth. these elements, these "high stakes" scenarios of which thre are many more examples than just the chests are absent from EO3. i was disappointed when i realized that you do not getactual loot or gear after winning fights.
in eo 3 you fight to collect an amount of specific enemies "droppings" if you will so you can then take back to town and hand them over (sell them, etc) to the shop so they can un-gate the loot tiers little by little, a dribble at a time. just enough to make it seem enticing but not really. games like EO series usually heavily front-load the player with a vast amount of collectibles they can get or need to get but it's always incredibly stretched out; like droplets of water on the tongue. this is a direct difference to the core of itemization in wiz-clones where (usually) the design goal that is the eventual conclusion of hand-placed enemy encounters and a loot-system that lives independently of the game's enemies but is instead directly tied to the exploration of the dungeons serves to deliver BIG STUFF, i.e. EPIC DROPS or finnaaallly getting that class change you've been levelling for; or whatever, my point is that the player works hard and consistently to get consistently random results that are skewed in the high-end of the scale. there really isn't much "mundane" stuff in wizardry games. there's very little filler. everytihng has to be worked for but the payoffs come big and are character/class-defining and thus gameplay changing.
in comparison i found the skill point systems in games like EO 3, DQ 9 and recently 7th Dragon to be polar opposite models that seem almost intentionally designed to string you along on very weak and very un-felt level-up consequences. you get 1 million times more "points" to mold your char in EO than in any Wiz game (in Wiz you have zero control over what a level up brings), and yet ironically you literally have to spend the equivalent of 10 or 15 levels' worth of points to achieve an ability/class/result/whatever comparable to something that might be just a "tier 2 floor drop" in a wiz-clone. too many points and yet you barely feel like the character you're deeloping is growing at all everything is so unbelievably GATED and controlled by the game that the illusion of wild player freedom seems to evaporate. i've just never found filling out a skill tree to be even remotely as comparably addictive or mechancally enjoyable as the many ways wiz-games revel in their levelling systems and their character development. getting levels in wiz is BIG. in EO 3 it means oh look, i get to put point 3/25 towards unlocking "shield bash".
it's an unbelievably drawn out process and sure, it's a legitimate itemization alternative to trapped-chests but IMO it's an abysmally inferior one. anyway i have of course a million more thoughts about the differences in styles between these two pseudo-genres but i'm just rambling at this point.
