Trying to connect with a remaster of a game that I have zero prior knowledge of is an interesting task. Usually, you can compare against the original to really appreciate what is in this new version. Even with titles where I didn’t play the OG like Slay the Princess: Pristine Cut, there are still plenty of stills and videos everywhere to grade against. But with WiZmans World Re;Try, you’d have to have a pretty strong knowledge of a Japan-only Nintendo DS RPG from 2010. Trust me, I’ve played a ton of DS games over my time and still hold certain titles close to my heart, but WiZmans World never appeared on my radar whatsoever. So with this Shin Megami Tensei meets Powerpuff Girls title, I have to trust that everything is better, stronger, and the game still failed to capture my attention in spite of it all.

WiZmans World Re;Try comes presaturated with positively dense lore. You’re in a world where, out of nowhere, this city was locked off from the rest of existence by a sprawling, labyrinthian forest that prohibits anyone from leaving. Then, the people discovered magic at some point, and the magic drove some of them mad and ruined the minds of others in more of a “I can’t remember anything” sort of way. Now, because those first two things weren’t enough, the land around us appears to be dying, so the inhabitants want and need to find a way through that forest that imprisons them. You play Claus, a young man who mysteriously appeared in the care of Giselle, a famous alchemist some years ago, and she has now vanished into the dreaded woods. Our protagonist must now fight for answers and survival, but he won’t adventure alone.

As a concept, WiZmans World is rather interesting, and the game itself raises a lot of questions right out the gate. You are a magician with decent but still rather new skills, and your assistants are three fairy-like homoculi that were created by the now missing and potentially deceased Giselle. Since they aren’t human, the trio are able to continually change and adjust their physical appearance and their abilities through fusion with monsters’ souls. Not body parts or organs, but their actual souls, which get dropped in battle. The three magical beings, being distinctly female, are never exact versions of their monster fused counterparts, but slightly feminine, visually more appealing beings. Why must we make sure anything and everything female in video games looks female according to male standards? I don’t know, but people are still mad Aloy had slight hair on her face, so work backwards from there.

Diving into the mystical forest is engaging enough, and the game will alter the maze within as different conditions (both storydriven and otherwise) come to light. You can focus on just getting through the woods and trying to put together the story as it comes, but there’s also the handful of quests from the NPCs of the town that can give you opportunities for more items, more money (which you use for purchases and fusion expenses), and more reasons to justify the seemingly neverending amount of grinding that takes place at the forefront of WiZmans World. Leveling up will lend your main character some stat boosts and, on occasion, some new spells, and the homoculi will get stronger but see the most improvement through the fusions and constant improvement that only forbidden magic can get you.

It’s really difficult to gauge how much this game has improved from its DS origins because I have little frame of reference and, frankly, the graphics don’t look like they’ve advanced much from that era. The sprites are very blocky pixel art, and you can see it looking and feeling quite dated in almost every combat encounter. When you see the portraits either during speech or during fight-based triggers, the art style is quite clear and polished, but nothing that makes you sit up and pay attention. I have a hard time imagining how this game would have been fundamentally different on the DS outside of the map that can be toggled with a button just being a constant presence on the lower screen. Again, this isn’t necessarily a complaint, but I don’t see anything that screams “I am brand new.”

Additionally, the game itself is incredibly boring. Look, I am completely on board with the plot and the way the general storyline unfolds. I think it’s fascinating that, instead of making a bunch of places to traverse and explore, the forest “collapses” and “reforms” at different points of the game, essentially letting the dungeon level itself up the more you, yourself, level up. It’s quite novel, and it allows for a fresh perspective on the concept of dungeon crawling. Not to mention that, even as the forest morphs, it adds new facets that look and feel different, like caves and certain bizarre zones that seem unaffected by the forest itself. The set design is a cool idea, even if it doesn’t look spectacular and also doesn’t perform that great.

My huge issue is that 85% of the game is combat, and WiZmans World completely botches the balance and utilization of the fights. There’s a traditional rock-paper-sissors approach to the elemental damage circle, and you can figure out the correlation between wind, earth, water and fire fairly easily. Everything is turn based, and you can see the flow for how the next ten moves will go, so you can plan accordingly. Additionally, you get bonuses for each turn in a row for your team, with the bonuses improving your stats for this fight. So if you manage to get two homoculi and then a third lined up on your team, you can do some real damage. The flowchart then lets you figure out who to target in order to potentially score a knockout, rearrange the battle turn line, and potentially boost the multiplier even higher.

But you are going to spend SO MUCH TIME fighting in this game that it quickly becomes dull. Enemies appear on the overworld map, so they’re quite easy to avoid, even more so with the broken AI only confining enemy roaming and targeting to a limited field and number of steps. I’ve come to a complete stop just inches from an enemy, and it won’t go beyond its own imaginary borders to start a fight. This is very confusing because the game actively promotes the danger of multiple enemies ganging up on you, creating “waves” of fights that happen back to back. In all of my time in the game, though, I think I only got the waves once, and that was with very, very deliberate attempts to aggro-activate a couple of mobs at once.

Moreover, the fighting in WiZmans World is wildly unbalanced, which plays into the dull factor. This is one of those RPGs where, for the main character, all bars are reset at the end of combat, negating the need for healing or mana items beyond being in the middle of a fight. For the homoculi, only HP regens, so spells still need to be accounted for. As a result, you just go into every minor fight with balls-to-the-walls brazen appeal, using Claus’ strongest magic and throwing the fairies into the wood chipper, knowing they’ll be okay (even if they get knocked out, they’ll revive at the end of battle). So there’s no real danger in exploration or attempting stronger mobs. I was told early on “oh, that monster is too strong, best to avoid it now” and then beat it up through the power of “anything goes.”

To “balance” this out, the EXP from monsters is relatively low. You will grind for a long, long time before a level up occurs, and you need to because the boss monsters are significantly stronger than the surrounding mobs. You can supplement this by doing more fusions to boost stats of your companions, but the soul drops are randomized, so you can’t rely on that to even be a steady source of support. You either need to buy a silly number of expendable items and hope they do the heavy lifting to keep the fight going, or you need to defeat the same dudes over and over again till you’re overleveled. I get this is a tentpole of classic JRPGs, but the DS didn’t come out during the era of the 386. This feels like a deliberate choice to extend the lifespan of the game by making progression a chore.

WiZmans World Re;Try is fine enough, but the bad overpowers the good. The dialogue is so long and verbose, often purposely trying to sound more grandiose than it actually is, that you feel the longing to skip when people are talking even if you’ve never heard it before. The soundtrack is decent, no real complaints, but I would have liked for this redux to have included some light vocal work to really underline that it’s a modern adaptation. In regards to my earlier comment on the graphics, there’s a big difference between preserving the sprites to capture the classic feeling and simply leaving in assets because they’re good enough, and I think some consideration needed to be made that these sprites were being blown up to cover significantly bigger real estate. The overall effect is just…mediocre to poor. This would have been better remaining as a DS memory.

Graphics: 5.5 The graphics look and feel like a DS game stretched onto the big screen. There are some elements that work and plenty that don’t, but nothing is offensively bad. It’s just…not great.	Gameplay: 4.0 The fusion mechanics is interesting but tied to the randomness of soul drops. Leveling up is very slow and incremental, but also mandatory to get past bosses and and go through the rest of the game. The combat is so repetitive without any challenge outside of the elemental aspects.
Sound: 6.0 The soundtrack is a solid composition of fantasy ideas and notes that make up the background of WiZmans World. The best and worst I can say is that it’s definitely music, no vocals, and it does the job that’s required without anything standing out.	Fun Factor: 3.0 I was filled with trepediation from the moment the game began with such overly verbose speaking, and i held on as I fought the same things again and again to grind levels. Then I remembered: there are better games out there, and I can be doing anything else.
Final Verdict: 4.0

WiZmans World Re;Try is available now on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series One X/S, Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of WiZmans World Re;Try was provided by the publisher.