Wizard 101

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

En Magus nos Fides

Wizard 101 is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game that is targeted towards children and preteens, an Allegedly Free Game to play up to a point. The student is introduced via a cutscene that says he or she is a new student at the Ravenwood School of Magical Arts. There you take a test to determine your Personality Powers-based subject (or you can skip it and just choose from a list), and then off you are to fufill quests and advance your spells. The combat system has very simple roots similar to action-based RPG games, and relies on cards that show spells and magic points that you collect each turn to use the cards with. The cards work in a Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors power arrangement with the game's seven magic categories: fire, ice, storm, life, death, myth, and balance.

Despite moderate graphics and some rather tedious quests, the game is mostly easy and fun to play. The main alignment of your character's magic does affect the plot and the spells to which you have access, though you are able to learn spells from other schools as well (though most likely there will only be one other school that does it with you because of the skill-building effect). The game has released Celestia, which is a land of increased difficulty, some cheating bosses, three new schools of magic, new school spells, lush backgrounds, and the start of a whole new storyline.

A new world, Wintertusk, has been released. It continues the story of Grizzleheim and features Bartleby's sister Lady Nightstar.

Wizard 101 can be played here.

Tropes used in Wizard 101 include:
  • Affectionate Parody: The entire game is one of many fantasy books and games, including Harry Potter, and the worlds in themselves are parodies of both real life and mythical locations.
    • Wysteria is a lighthearted play on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
  • After the End: By the time the player reaches Dragonspyre, it has been destroyed by the dragon titan and only some of his army is still alive. Only two of the original residents are still alive, and one of them is the guy that summoned the dragon titan.
    • Celestia is another case based on Atlantis, when the Celestians tried to ally with the Storm Titan to stop Morganthe, the titan betrayed them and flooded their world for the hell of it.
  • Allegedly Free Game: At about level 10, unless you fork over some cash, no other streets will be available, and half of your current quests will all be moot. The only real gameplay left will be free PvP, simple games and Level Grinding with no real hope of further advancing the plot.
  • Always Night / Weird Moon: In Marleybone.
  • And I Must Scream: Dragonspyre's knowledge crystals absorb and store souls. It is not outright stated, but many of the souls seem quite aware that a long time has passed while they were stored.
    • However, the horror aspect is removed since most are fine with being in the crystals and teaching students.
  • Bodyguard Betrayal: After you defeat him, Krokhotep (now a ghost) agrees to help you enter the Temple of Storms and take down Krokopatra, the only remaining obstacle standing between you and the Krokonomicon, which you're trying to retrieve from her before Malistaire does. You fail to do so, of course, which leads you into the next world to continue the pursuit.
  • Bonus Boss: They pop up occasionally; some of them are just standing around, while others require effort on the player's part to reach them before they can be engaged in battle.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing / Demonic Spiders: The optional instances are notoriously difficult because of these, especially Kensington Park. It's all too easy to go in unprepared and have your rear end handed to you within the first ten minutes. Some of the later worlds (namely, Dragonspyre and Celestia) also have them roaming about, which can make certain quests anywhere from annoying to downright painful to complete.
  • British Accent: Interestingly, the voice acting uses multiple British accents.
  • Call Back: In Wizard City one of the sidequests is to retrieve a sword, the Spirit of the Samoorai, from one of the skeletons for a collector. In Mooshu, Rikugun tells the player about how he had lost his sword and that a collector from Wizard City returned it to him.
  • Cats Are Mean: The O'Leary gang, Marleybone's resident band of thieving felines--which, oddly enough, also includes rats in its ranks. Inverted with Baxter, a member of the gang who uses his inside information to help you try and stop gang leader Pops O'Leary's plan to bust Meowiarty, Marleybone's Big Bad, out of prison.
  • Color-Coded Wizardry: Ice wizards are white/blue, the fire school has red/orange/pink, storm has purple/yellow, balance is maroon/tan, life is green/brown, death is black/white, and myth is blue/yellow.
    • Subverted, however, by the fact that players don't necessarily have to follow the color codes of their respective schools. For a price, players can dye their clothes into different colors, allowing Ice wizard to wear Death-colored gear, a Life wizard to make Storm-colored robes, etc.
  • Class and Level System: Naturally, but with a more streamlined and simplified approach for younger gamers.
  • Clockwork Creature: Many of the creatures in Marleybone, beginning with Chelsea Court.
  • Convenient Questing
  • Darker and Edgier: Although not to the same levels as most other cases of this trope, Dragonspyre has much less humorous dialogue and a much darker story than the rest of the worlds of the spiral. It didn't help that almost every NPC was already a ghost by the time you get there.
  • Death or Glory Attack: The storm school-exclusive spell Wildbolt. Originally it had a base chance of hitting of only 10% (equipment and spells could boost it, however) but it could do 1000 base damage (again, this could be boosted even more) at the cost of only two mana and pips. It was recently changed to a 70% chance of hitting but it only had a 33% chance of 1000 damage; the rest of the time it does only 100 or even a meager 10 damage and uses up any boosts.
    • Cranked Up to Eleven with Insane Bolt, which can do 1125 damage to the target... or it has a 20% chance of 10000 damage to the caster. Only non-school-specific spells' boost/resist affects the damage, and thus the spell usually kills the caster if it backfires.
  • Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: When you or your team is defeated, you're warped back to the world hub with one Hit Point and however much Mana you had left. If you flee, your health remains intact at the cost of losing all of your mana.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: Sooner or later, everyone gets a quest from Cyrus Drake. Other NPCs are guilty of this as well.
    • Most are actually very thankful. When an NPC isn't thankful, it often means you have to fight them.
  • Did Not Do the Research: Two examples are voice-overs constantly pronouncing the word Golem as "Gollum" than the correct "GO-lem", and the Balance spell Ra calling forth a falcon-headed figure more commonly associated with Horus.
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: A spell will only do minor damage against monsters of the same affinity, but will do massive damage to a creature of the opposite affinity: storm >< myth, fire >< ice, life >< death. Balance is the odd one out, doing and taking slightly more damage to and from myth, life, and death.
    • In worlds and areas released since Celestia each enemy affinity developed a weakness to an additional two schools of magic.
    • Played with for celestial school enemies since they usually do have weaknesses to different schools but it varies from enemy to enemy.
  • Elemental Powers
  • Elite Mooks: Literally identified as such by their rank, and they've also sometimes been palette swapped.
  • Everything's Worse with Bears: Both inverted and played straight: while the majority of Grizzleheim's bear population is friendly towards you--albeit wary, you being an outsider and all--sooner or later you run into the Red Claw, a faction of rogue bears hell-bent on waging war against you and anyone else who gets in their way.
  • Evil Brit: Besides the enemies in Marleybone, for some reason the the jackal Mooks in Zafaria have an upper class British accent.
  • Expy: There are a few, but most obviously is the teacher of the myth school as a certain irritable potions master.
  • Extreme Omnivore: Gobblers. Sure, they eat normal food (just look around inside Gobblestone Castle--crates of chickens/pies/ice cream sundaes and piles of jellybeans are everywhere), but it isn't long before one starts to notice the lampposts and houses with sizable chunks bitten out of them... not to mention King Gobblestone himself, who has apparently developed a taste for stone towers since moving in.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • Fartillery: The Gobblers again.
  • Fetch Quest: There are numerous quests that require a player to go locate an item and bring it back, only to find out that they need to get something else. The myth school in particular is notorious for doing this, as Cyrus Drake, teacher for the school of myth, would rather send the students away than interact with them. The myth quests could even be labeled Snipe Hunt, except Ivan, the tree of myth, helps the students complete the quests to Cyrus Drake's surprise.
  • Final Boss: Malistaire, obviously, but each world before that (along with Grizzleheim and Celestia) has a final boss of its own to contend with first.
    • Now that the Malistaire Arc is over Morganthe is expected to eventually take this position.
  • Fire, Ice, Lightning: The fire, ice, and storm schools, with fire and ice having both an advantage and disadvantage with each other, while storm takes on myth in the same way.
  • Furry Confusion: One of the dog like Marleybonians has a pet dog. We don't get to see it however.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: Players with text chat (can use any words from a large list of words) used to use capital letters to get swears around the limitations. (ex. Hello)
    • Thanks to a recent update capital letters can no longer be used.
    • It's possible for wizards to have the last name "Wildpants."
    • In many cases it's as simple as changing a letter. This troper has come across quite a few players saying "crop".
    • In Grizzlehiem there is a sidequest where you have to find the answer to the question, "Do bears sit in the woods?"
    • Players are not allowed to say "I hate you," yet "I hate ya" get's passed the censor just fine.
  • Glass Cannon: The storm school. Their spells have the highest damage output of all the schools (at the cost of having the lowest accuracy), but storm wizards have the lowest starting health of all the classes.
  • Gradual Grinder: The fire school, whose accuracy and starting health is only one step above storm, mainly uses attacks that damage over time.
  • Green Thumb: The life school.
    • The new gardening skill allows everyone to have one.
  • Gullible Lemmings: While this game probably has a few, an honorable mention has to go to Crab Alley which not only is populated by complete morons who can not figure out their current king is an imposter due to his lack of resembling them, but also are being controlled because of this and they to top it off they ask you, a stranger, to check in on the king because he is acting strange and you can spot how he isn't their king immediately and yet when you talk to the idiots that helped you to get into the castle they assume you are as dumb as them for despite you noticing the imposter doesn't have the same overall body structure as them within two seconds of your arrival. They go above and beyond with this trope when it comes to being gullible.
    • Even worse is some people got the chance to see what the king looked like when Crab Alley opened the first time.
  • Infernal Retaliation: The fire school-only spell Backfire. It slightly damages the caster and does a large amount of damage to the target.
  • Irrelevant Sidequest: The game is full of them. While some sidequests have legitimate purposes, like showing players other parts of the worlds that are not touched in the main quests, there are quite a few that have no impact on the storyline or gameplay at all other than granting some experience and trinkets to sell.
  • Jack of All Stats: The balance school is stated to be this.
  • Life Drain: The main specialty of the Death school. Interestingly, they can do it in reverse to heal themselves or others.
    • Pyromancers learn a couple of these as well.
  • Love Makes You Evil: Malistare Drake's (the first Big Bad) purpose in turning evil is to get enough power to bring back his dead wife Sylvia
  • Luke Nounverber: For the sake of keeping things PG-rated, the game forces names to be chosen from a list in this fashion.
    • "Luke Skywalker" is actually a valid name arrangement, and you can imagine how many are running around.
    • As is "Taylor Swift" which, given the game's target demographic, in a strange twist is not nearly as common as the above example.
  • Mana
  • Meaningful Name: You can give yourself one, and there's quite a few in-game.
  • Mini Game: Eight of them, and there's a "faireground" in each world with sigils that the player uses to access them. Playing them fully restores your mana and refills your potion bottles for absolutely free, and also rewards you with gold and items if you can score high enough, so they're definitely worth the effort. There's also a ninth minigame, Shock-A-Lock, which is only accessible via silver chests and which you have to play (and win) if you want what's in the chest.
    • Though at the higher levels, the sheer amount of time needed to play minigames for potion refills exceeds the time it would take to beat up something for the cash instead.
  • Nature Hero: Life wizards, who are also the healing class.
  • Never Learned to Read: You, it seems sometimes; many Irrelevant Sidequests could be averted entirely if the player simply read what they were being asked to deliver, particularly where Cyrus Drake is involved.
    • Even worse for the Orthrus spell quest for Myth wizards. They literally write an essay about Orthrus but still need Cyrus to tell them what the two items needed to summon Orthrus the first time are.
  • One-Winged Angel: Lord Katsumori and two ninja pig warlords do this by turning into Oni when you defeat them. But the big surprise is when The Emperor of Mooshu does one because he was possessed by the Jade Oni.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Averted. Most accents are done by people that naturally have the accent. Word of God is that Texans imitating East-European accents starts to sound like "Dracula with a Southern Draw after a few sentences."
  • Overly-Long Fighting Animation: Most spells, though some of them do look pretty awesome the first ten times or so.
  • Personality Powers: Unless, of course, you skip the little quiz and choose from the list.
  • Petting Zoo People: Almost all NPC's and enemies that aren't from Wizard City or Dragonspyre (and in the latter's case it's still a 50/50 chance).
  • Playing with Fire: Fire wizards.
  • Punny Name: Quite a few. For example, the ice tree is called Kelvin.
    • Lampshaded with the Earth school teacher at Wysteria is named "Chester Droors" (say it out loud).
  • Puzzle Boss: many of the rulebreaking bosses have to be fought a specific way or they can punish the player if they don't fight the boss the right way.
  • Quest Giver: Like a lot of MMORPGs, they're all identified by a floating exclamation mark.
  • Rainbow Pimp Gear: Averted. Yes, when you first get a dropped item it may clash, but you can go to a shop in the main shopping district and dye it to match whatever else you have on, if you have the gold (by the second world, you always will). This is good because it's almost always better to use drops instead of buying shop items (except in the case of decks and sometimes wands).
    • Though some hat and robe combos might look a bit odd regardless.
  • Robe and Wizard Hat: Duh.
  • Shattered World: Each "world" consists of one or more island rocks floating through space with its own unique theme. The worlds are connected by a set of stargate-like doors, while access to the other worlds is granted by obtaining the correct "spiral key" for the other doors. The Backstory was that fighting between the three ancient races tore the planet apart into the fragment worlds. Bartleby, the Grandfather Tree, and his sister, the Raven, weaved a spell that created the Spiral, which holds the remnants near each other and allows movement between them using the spiral doors.
  • Serial Numbers Filed Off: In-universe, where Pigswick Academy in Wysteria has the same schools as Ravenwood, except they have different names: Tempest, Ember, Frost, Nature, Spirit, Chaos, and Equilbirum for Storm, Fire, Ice, Life, Death, Myth, and Balance, respectively. Naturally, their teacher insist that they are of course doing things differently, and that they're doing it right.
  • Shout-Out: Way too many to even begin to list.
    • Some of the more obvious ones occur early on in the game: Two quests on Unicorn Way involve you helping a girl named Dorothy Gale and a Wizard City guard named Private O'Ryan. On a larger scale, the world of Marleybone is arguably one giant shout-out to the Sherlock Holmes novels.
    • Wisteria has Pigswick Academy
  • Snipe Hunt: Professor Drake sends new myth students on these all the time. He does it to weed out the ones that aren't dedicated enough. The sound of his voice when you bring him "truffula leaves" makes the quest Worth It.
  • Speaking Simlish: Any magic creature you can summon that supposedly has the capacity to speak does this.
    • This is only when creatures are summoned for spells. When actual dialog occurs they are given full voice acting.
  • Stone Wall: The ice school. They have the highest health and defense of all the schools, but their spells don't do a whole lot of damage and their accuracy is average. Makes sense, since they're supposed to be the tanking class.
  • Summon Magic: Technically, 90% of all spells involve summoning a creature, though only for a single attack. Closer to this trope: while every class gets at least one minion spell, the myth school is built around it.
  • Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors: The three elemental schools,
  • Teleporters and Transporters: The spiral doors that connect the worlds in the game function like the Stargate wormholes. As long as the player possesses the correct spiral key, they can access that world from any spiral door.
    • There are also portals as housing item
  • Twenty Bear Asses: Oh yeah.
  • Two Lines, No Waiting: There is the primary story with the Malistire and Morganthe arcs and the Grizzleheim arc. Thus far, there has been no interaction between the two of them. The has also been Wysteria serving as a Breather Episode (Although it was far from a Breather Level).
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Averted by other player during summoning a minion for a spell quest, anytime someone does this the game automatically turns all players not in battle toward the summoning.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: There are quite a few quests that have no conclusion other than "good job", despite the quest itself setting the stage for further elaboration. Dragonspyre, in particular, contains multiple Egregious examples of this, such as an evil wizard escaping, a boss that acts like he has been possessed, and whatever happened to the Krokonomicon that was used to attempt to wake up the Dragon Titan.
  • When Trees Attack: Nature's Wrath, a life class attack spell that summons a treant. Different varieties of treant also appear as enemies in Mooshu, Dragonspyre, and Grizzleheim.
    • The floating island in Celestia has some treants based on palm trees.
    • Wintertusk has some pine tree based treants
  • Winged Humanoid: Seraphs, the Judgement spell, or you if you're wearing a wing mount.
  • Wizard Beard: Headmaster Ambrose.
  • Wizarding School
  • Vampire Vords: Although not in the writing, many of the voice actors for Dragon Spire have this due to their East European accents.
  • Victory Pose: You do a happy dance whenever you win a duel.
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