Wizard's Crown

The Good
The best aspect of Wizard's Crown was its incredible attention to detail in character development and combat. Wizards and priests did not have a huge selection of spells, but the spells they did have were a lot of fun to use and always had a strategic impact on the battle beyond just doing damage to enemies. Weapons were varied in their abilities and strengths: swords would do lots of damage in some situations but almost no damage to certain types of armor or creatures. The wide variety of combat tactics in the game really made you think about how you would approach a battle.

One of the best features of the game which unfortunately has not been implemented in more recent RPG's was the option to turn on "Quick Combat" which saved tons of time when you were fighting easy opponents and made the combat a lot less repetitive.

Finally, character development was a dream. You built your party completely from scratch with a point-based system. As long as you had a high enough intelligence, you could choose as many character classes as you wanted with the price that your overall skill and attribute advancement for that character would be slower compared to a more specialized character.

The Bad
The plot was fairly standard: find the evil wizard and retrieve what he stole. The graphics were not that great either.

The Bottom Line
Wizard's Crown was an innovative game because of its incredible attention to detail in character development and its combat system. The plot was simplistic: kill the evil wizard and recover the crown, but the fun gameplay and character development made up for it.

The Good
The tactical combat adds a lot of enjoyment to the game. I also like the way you can improve magical items and weapons -- very nice, and gives you something to work towards.

The Bad
Would have been nice to have a bigger world. I'm not really sure why, but SSI chose to keep you in the small map. The text, "The wizard's spell prevents you from going any further in this direction" gets old and is rather unimaginative.

The Bottom Line
If you like RPGs, you'll probably like this game. If you're new to RPGs, look elsewhere first.