Solid old school CRPG action that will make you smile.
The story is engaging enough, there's certainly more there than there was in Wizardry 1 or Ultima 1. The plot is slowly revealed, mostly through monologue text with the other character. Still, the plot is interesting enough. The only beefs that I have here is that the other characters are not animated, nor do they have voices. There's simply sprite pictures and text, unfortunately some of which is laughably translated. Still, it's easy enough to figure out, and there's only a few rough spots.
The graphics are gorgeous. The enemies are very well done and well animated. I especially liked that you could see them all in a gallery once you had beaten them. It's rather disappointing that you don't get to see your own characters, but not that big of a deal. The movement is step based, which means you progress at solid increments, usually measured as 10 feet. This wasn't a problem for me, but for newer gamers not used to it, it could be an issue.
Combat is fairly straightforward for a turn based game. The enemies do appear outside of combat as gray smoke forms that generally indicate the type of the strongest enemy you'll be facing. Once combat is formed, they appear in front of you as a group. During attacks, marks such as slashes or explosions appear over the enemies' pictures, but your party members are never visible. One last thing to make the combat more interesting, the allied actions. This is new to the Wizardry series, but I must say that I do like it. The moves depend on the configuration of the party and how you have the characters arranged. All the chars in a huge super attack, and you can pull out some serious whoop ass with these moves.
The gameplay, like so much else in this game, is solid old school. Fighting your way down a dungeon, and kicking the rear of a bunch of big baddies. All in all, it's a lousy console RPG, but a great computer RPG. If you want to see an updated version of Wizardry 1, this is about as close as you're going to get.