Past meets present: WiZman's World Re;Try

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

WiZMan’s World Re;Try feels like a Nintendo DS game, which is not meant as a negative. It might be on the Switch and Playstation 5 now, two systems far more high-powered than Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld, but new skins on old bones do not betray the era it released in, nor its spiritual relation to the idea of “Nintendo DS RPG.” It has complexities and intrigue, it experiments with some levels of freedom that did not exist in previous eras of role-playing games, it expects a baseline level of knowledge of the genre and its workings, and it tries to marry multiple genres of RPG together into one — the marrying of Playstation-era visuals with Playstation 2-era advances in structure was what the DS was all about in terms of its RPGs, which also tended to scale back the sheer volume of hours required to complete the games from its PS2 inspirations, given the portable nature of their platform. It’s not quite a standout, either — few DS RPGs actually were — but if you have a very particular itch, WiZMan’s World Re;Try is going to scratch it for dozens of hours.

Wizman’s World, originally released by Jaleco in 2009 on the DS in Japan, is presented as a turn-based RPG with character customization and dungeon-crawling elements. The latter feels like a stretch, since there aren’t that many items or different layouts for the dungeons, and they certainly are not overly complex. The maps, for instance, are presented as squares and rectangles with connective points on something of a grid, and that’s plenty to follow along with if you’re attempting to pick a direction. There is only so much to explore in each, though, you will want to in order to not miss the occasional hidden, higher-powered enemy with better rewards, or the items that are scattered around waiting for you to collect. What gives the game its dungeon-crawl feeling is that you will occasionally be ejected from whatever venue you are exploring, due to instability that threatens your survival. When you reenter, the dungeon will look different than it did, even if only slightly: different music, different backgrounds, some different enemy placements and types, access to some chests or areas you could not previously access. This isn’t, say, a roguelike setup, where the dungeon would be completely different a la Shiren the Wanderer, but it adds some variety to otherwise basic areas to explore.

It’s a dungeon-crawler for lack of a better term, is the short way of putting it. The part of the game that stands out far more is its character customization, but getting to that will take a little bit of backstory and preamble. You control Claus, a young mage in training whose master has disappeared with nary a word nor trace, in a world its inhabitants are trapped within. They are all living in one town, Wizarest, which is isolated from the rest of the world. Surrounded by dungeons with seemingly no exit, unable to escape this perimeter, the mages are unclear as to why they are even placed here, and why the small world they do inhabit is closing in around them — the dungeons are unstable, continually “collapsing” as they lose energy, making them even more dangerous to traverse and threatening Wizarest with its own eventual collapse.

Claus is a silent protagonist, but there is plenty of chatter coming from your party. He is joined by three homunculi that all appear, in size and look, as faeries. They were the creation of Claus’ missing master, Giselle, and have been tasked with helping him continue to grow in his abilities and mastery of magic in her absence. The homunculi, on their own, do not have any abilities or power or battle expertise. They can be fused with the souls of defeated monsters, however, which gives them a battle form.

These souls have multiple characteristics to consider. Some enemies are far more skilled in physical attacks than in magical powers. Each has an element that they are associated with, which matters in this game where you have to remember at all times that water bests fire, fire is strong against wind, wind beats earth, and earth trumps water. Some of that might not make as much immediate sense as, say, Pokémon-type weaknesses can, but the logic matters less than the fact that those are the alignments you have to remember if you have any hope of beating a single boss in Wizman’s World.

Standard battles are a simple affair, almost overly so. You can get through the vast, vast majority of them without using any special skills whatsoever, just smacking enemies around with standard attacks until you’ve pummeled them into submission. It can actually make battles a bit tedious after awhile, but if you skip over fighting or avoid leveling up, you won’t defeat the bosses, which require you to not only have mastered how the battles work, but also to be able to buff your characters with Claus’ offensive and defensive spells, to have a homunculi able to heal at a moment’s notice, and to be aligned, elementally speaking, in opposition to whatever the guardian of a dungeon is. If the guardian is weak to wind and you are not only lacking in wind-powered monsters but also have water-based monsters in your party? You are probably going to die.

You also need to fight in order to earn money to power up your fusions with monster souls. Buying some equipment for your characters is important and costly, as well, but you do this far less often, since equipment only refreshes after a dungeon is completed, and Claus is the only one that requires a weapon and armor to go along with accessories — and the accessories update less regularly, with many of them found out in the wild, anyway. Those fusions, though, get pricey: base fusions are free so long as you have the monster soul you want — which again, you get from fighting monsters — but you can also combine the soul with various items you have found or purchased along the way, to enhance the stats of the resulting creation. Have a physically-minded monster you want to make even stronger? If you have an item that further boosts attack, then you can! It just will also cost you thousands in the game’s currency to do so, especially as you get deeper into the game and the items that cost double-digits are an inefficient waste as far as upgrades go.

The combo system will consume a considerable amount of your thought as you play. Not just what, but when. The more you fuse monster souls with your homunculi, the more experience you gain to increase your fusion level, which makes future fusions more powerful. You need to fuse with new souls to get the most experience, however, but each fusion wipes the items you paid to fuse with from the record, too, meaning you are starting fresh each time in that regard. So, you might have a more powerful soul to fuse with, but maybe the base stats are lower than the powered soul you had already fused with. However, you won’t gain access to new skills to utilize, and more powerful monsters you face as the game progress leave behind more powerful souls. Tricky!

There is a workaround to continue to grow, at least for a time, while not giving up on a fusion you like, though. If you fuse with the soul of the monster you are already fused with, your stats all get a boost — just don’t fuse with items while you do this, too, since every fusion only includes the items attached to that one, specifically. So, if you have five of one soul, for instance, fuse four times with it and then on the fifth pay to use those items you have for the best possible version of that monster fusion you can perform at the time. This is especially helpful when setting up for a boss when you have a pretty good idea of what element they are going to be thanks to their location.

You will find yourself experimenting with alignments — that you have three homunculi but four elements to work with makes for some puzzles to solve, in this regard. However, you can carry over two skills from your previous fusion whenever you fuse again, meaning, you can have a water monster with fire spells, letting you figure out ways to account for the lack of a particular element if you are trying to stay balanced. In addition, Claus has his own slate of elemental spells, as well as non-elemental magic that does less damage at its peak than spells that attack a weakness, but more damage than spells and skills enemies are elementally resistant to would.

The battles themselves can get tedious due to a lack of challenge — there is a quantity over quality aspect to standard fights — but there are a couple of bits that can help them stay engaging. Combos are a key to success, especially against bosses, as each successive attack performed by your party extends a chain that gives you bonuses. Your attack power and agility can increase, and you can begin to recover SP — magic points, to be more generic here — with longer chains. That last bit is especially useful since Claus has his hit points and SP recover after every battle, but the homunculi’s SP only restores when they gain a level or have returned to Wizarest to rest. This can lead to not wanting to have the homunculi spend their SP on skills, which is what makes the battles a little too same-y and tedious on occasion, since you’re just doing basic attacks, but if you can string together a lengthy chain you do at least get the excitement of feeling like you’re putting something together there.

Another way to cut down on the sheer volume of fights is to stack battles. If multiple enemies on the map notice you and chase you down, you have the potential to fight them at once. You would finish the first battle and then transition immediately into the second without a chance to recover your HP or SP, but as a reward you gain more experience points. The more battles within a battle, the higher that bonus rate, as well — try to avoid fighting a single battle when you can, and stack two or three or four foes at a time. It makes the battles more difficult, but Wizman’s World’s battles need that difficulty to keep everything feeling engaging. Stacking battles together also allows for some massive chains, too, so if you can time things right — use the visible turn layout to prioritize foes attacking next to defeat them and keep the chain going, then when you transition to the next battle you get a few turns to start the whole process over, only with an enhanced attack power and agility already aiding you.

Each dungeon has the same basic setup: you enter, you get sent back to the beginning a few times as collapse is threatened, you eventually find the magical stones that let you setup the mid-dungeon warp points that allow you to go back to town for items, healing, and fusion without having to restart the entire dungeon upon your return, and then you get to the guardian of the area. Each guardian, when defeated, will have left behind a near-death citizen of Wizarest that you have already met in your travels. Here is where one of the game’s promotional bullet points occurs: you can either save this character with the energy released by the dead guardian of the dungeon, or use that energy to restore some balance to the dungeon itself. The game does not chastise you for your choice, and neither is presented as “correct” either before or after you make the call, but the game’s story is altered depending on which route you take. After all, the characters get to live or they get to die, and as they interact with you and often have some seeming importance to the story or to someone within the story, that will mean something to those hoping for their return. And, you know. The dungeons are collapsing and all, so giving them energy to slow or stop that process, or saying hey whatever let them fall, has its own consequences.

The story is only so engaging as you play, though. The real star of the show, as mentioned, is the monster fusion. That there are homunculi-specific versions of each monster in the game is a lovely touch — that required a ton of sprite work, and oftentimes the homunculi version of a monster looks better than the original, because it can’t “just” be this grotesque figure or creature, but has to be a true fusion of these purposefully attractive fairy-like characters and a literal monster. Even outside of the look, though, adding your own touches of customization to create some real heavy hitters you’ll find yourself attached to is a nifty reward and reason to keep at it. If you enjoy monster fusion in games like Dragon Quest Monsters or Shin Megami Tensei, there are enough similarities here to, as said before, scratch a particular itch.

There a couple of features exclusive to the revised Wizman’s World, which is the WiZman’s World Re;Try release that came out on February 18, 2026, developed by Clear River Games and Gravity. The soundtrack has been completely reworked by soLi, as it is both rearranged and includes songs that were not in the original 2009 edition of the game. The music is a standout, as well, and not just when some very clear Falcom influences make themselves heard. The game has also been reworked graphically, with new sprites, enhanced 2D graphics, everything setup to work on one screen instead of two, and of course, the game is now localized, as well. Whereas the original was a Japanese exclusive, the Clear River Games release also includes English, Korean, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese.

Wizman’s World is very much a systems RPG. If you are looking for an engrossing story or deep dives into character and backstory, this is not the game that will give you that. If you want to play around with customization, though, and attempt to master a battle system, and hear some guitars riffing while you do all of that, then Wizman’s World can give you a few dozen hours of those very things. Just be sure to engage with the game in the way that it is optimized for, or else it might feel a little tedious: if you have the patience to focus on exploring fusions, and working to build up both chains and long stacks of enemies to fight in lengthier battles, however, this will all feel more rewarding than if you just try to ram through.

A Nintendo Switch review copy was provided by Clear River Games, and played on Nintendo Switch 2.

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