Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls Coming to U.S. PSN

In this age of fast-paced action games and far too many gamers with a short attention span, it’s good to know that there is still a market for old school RPGs with their slow pace, stats, and steep learning curve. Games like the Etrian Odyssey series and Dark Spire have seen a lot of success on the Nintendo DS, but what about on other platforms?

Acquire has been trying to license Wizardry: Labyrinth of the Lost Souls since late last year. Now it appears they have found a North American publisher, Xseed, to bring this PSN dungeon crawler to the U.S. The ESRB leaked the news with a description of one of the quests, which contains alcohol. The ESRB rating system requires that every instance of offensive or inappropriate content be detailed on their website. This has led to a number of games being discovered before they were officially announced. Wizardry: Labyrinth of the Lost Souls was originally released in Japan in 2009. A sequel just recently hit Japan PSN as well, along with a Blu-ray version that contains both games.

Xseed is a publisher that mainly deals with releasing Japanese games to the North American market. They were founded by former members of Square Enix USA. Wizardry: Labyrinth of the Lost Souls will be their first PlayStation 3 release but they are no stranger to the PlayStation platform, mainly the PSP, where they have published three Ys games, Wild Arms XF, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony and their most recent, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.

Wizardry is a first person RPG and dungeon crawler. You control a party of 6 members and there are different races and classes to choose from. It is one of the few old-school RPGs that has not seen drastic changes over the years. There is still a lot of stats, equipment, and the turn based combat has remained the same.

The series originally got its start in the United States by Sir-Tech, but has seen a lot of success in Japan with as many spin-off titles in Japan as there has been in the U.S. One of the most popular Wizardry console titles is Wizardry: The Forsaken Land for the PlayStation 2. The last United States Wizardry title was Wizardry 8, released in 2001.

Source: Siliconera