Dive at 2:00 a.m. - September 18,2025

[Posted： 2025/09/18]

It's 2AM,I'm wired on caffeine and delirium,and here's the raw brain vomit that just crawled out of Kazuhiro Tanaka's head. No shame. No filter. Just chaos.

Tonight's 2AM delusion (September 18,2025): Let's talk about... *Wizardry.*

The classic 3D dungeon-crawling RPG Wizardry was one of the formative pillars of my gaming life.

If you've never heard of it?first of all,shame on you?but okay,here's the pitch:

You wander through a first-person dungeon,fight monsters,loot treasure,and work your way down ten floors of death to confront an evil wizard named Werdna.

Sounds like Dark Souls,right?

WRONG.

This was the early computer game era. The “3D” was fake?it was 2D pretending real hard.

And the combat? Not real-time action. It was turn-based,baby. You selected commands. You waited. You hoped you didn't get party-wiped by some pixelated snake with a funny name.

And yet… it was GLORIOUS.

Even today,it holds up. The mechanics were clean. Addictive. Cruelly elegant.

That's why the Wizardry lineage still survives like a cockroach in the JRPG vault.

But here's what my 2AM brain asked:

What if Wizardry wasn't fiction? What if it actually happened?

Okay okay,I know?dragons aren't real,magic doesn't exist,demons are just bad Tinder dates.

BUT… what if people thought those things were real?

I mean,myths don't just pop out of nowhere,right?

Like the Japanese “Red Oni” folklore.

Some historians think that wasn't a demon?it was just a really sunburned white guy who shipwrecked on the coast.

He couldn't speak the language,was taller than the average peasant,and if he got roasted by the sun,his skin was all red and peeling.

Boom: Oni.

Poor dude just needed sunscreen and a dictionary.

So what if Wizardry follows the same pattern?

No magic?but maybe weird rituals.

No dragons?but maybe big lizards like Komodo dragons or crocodiles.

No demons?but maybe religious outsiders in freaky costumes,hopped up on mushrooms.

Maybe that labyrinth wasn't a fantasy dungeon…

Maybe it was just a giant underground mining complex or military bunker taken over by a cult.

A cult that the Kingdom really wanted gone,so they hired mercenaries (a.k.a. your party) to go in and clean house.

I mean,think about it:

The dungeon is square. That's not nature. That's architecture.

It's inside the Kingdom.

It's ten floors deep.

And it's crawling with rival adventurers,monsters,and traps.

You telling me some underground heretic religion built that thing with no permits?

No way.

It was probably an abandoned fortress or mine. Then a bunch of lunatic cultists moved in with their exotic pets,ritual knives,and questionable hygiene.

The Kingdom was like,“Yeah,we're not sending knights into that madness.

Let's just hire some desperate randos with swords and see what happens.”

So yeah… Wizardry wasn't fantasy.

It was just a low-budget kingdom outsourcing dungeon extermination to murder hobos.

...probably.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy hallucinating game lore at 2AM.