The Quest for the Ghost Tarot Event
“Wizardry II” on the Famicom and the Misunderstandings of the Old Media Era
More than twenty years ago, I stumbled upon a highly unusual listing on Yahoo! Auctions. It was a bundle containing a Famicom copy of Wizardry II: The Legacy of Llylgamyn packaged together with a real-life deck of fortune-telling tarot cards.
Normally, anyone would look at that and ask: “Why on earth would a video game be bundled with a deck of tarot cards?”
But I understood the connection instantly, thanks to a decades-old memory of a personal computer magazine article I had read nearly forty years prior.
According to that article, the original PC version of The Legacy of Llylgamyn featured a specific event where the player could not progress unless they identified various tarot cards. In other words, you literally could not beat the game unless you had a physical deck of tarot cards sitting next to your computer. That bizarre mechanic had left a massive impression on me.
While I had played the first Wizardry, the second title was still uncharted territory for me. Plus, the auction’s starting price was incredibly low. Despite the inherent risk of a dead internal save battery—a classic hazard of vintage Famicom cartridges—I beat the auction without a second thought.
When the game arrived and I booted it up, I was relieved to find that the previous owner’s save data was still intact. Even so, I wiped their characters from the system, rolled out a fresh party of my own, and descended into the maze. My goal wasn’t even to beat the game; I just wanted to experience this mythical tarot card event.
Where would it appear? What kind of riddle would it throw at me? With a quiet hum of excitement, I began mapping the labyrinth.
Yet, no matter how deep I went, the event never triggered. I pushed further and further, but still, nothing.
“Maybe it’s hidden in the late-game floors,” I told myself as I pressed on.
And then, suddenly, I reached the ending. Or rather, I was forced to reach it. From the first floor to the final boss, there wasn’t a single encounter that required a deck of tarot cards.
I was utterly bewildered. Had I missed a branching path? Was it a secret quest triggered only by hyper-specific criteria? Back then, the internet as we know it didn’t exist, and there was no easy way to troubleshoot. In the end, the mystery remained unsolved.
Several years later, the internet finally matured. Game wikis and fan forums were starting to pop up everywhere. It was on one of those early Wizardry fan sites that I finally stumbled upon the truth.
The site laid out the facts plainly:
Yes, the original PC version did indeed feature an event that required the player to consult a physical deck of tarot cards. However, when porting the game to the Famicom, the developers completely deleted the event to adjust the difficulty and streamline the console experience.
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The legendary event I had spent hours searching for literally did not exist on the cartridge I owned.
Today, a simple web search would resolve this mystery in a matter of seconds. But in the pre-internet era, things were different. You had to trust what you read in a magazine, buy the physical game, and verify it with your own two eyes.
Looking back now, one other question lingers: why did that seller on Yahoo! Auctions choose to bundle the tarot cards with the game in the first place?
Perhaps they had read the exact same magazine article I had, and spent years fruitlessly searching for the event themselves. Or perhaps they were a PC-era veteran who wanted to pass down the “complete” experience. I will never know.
Even so, I still vividly remember the thrill of seeing that auction listing, and the nostalgic magic of that old rumor from the PC magazine.
Today, misinformation is flagged and corrected almost instantly online. But back in the era of old media, rumors had room to breathe. Wandering through a digital dungeon in search of a ghost event that didn’t exist—looking back, perhaps that, too, was a beautiful way to experience a game.
I had to beat the game to finally discover that the tarot cards were useless. But the previous owner who put that bundle together on Yahoo! Auctions might have given up before ever finding that out.
When I think of it that way, those tarot cards weren’t a practical gameplay item. They were a physical relic of a mystery that someone else had spent years chasing, before finally leaving it behind for me to find.
Written by Keida | Translated by Jacob
[Market Reality Note] The artifacts featured in our reports are live, highly volatile listings sourced directly from the Japanese domestic secondary market. Due to the underground nature of these collector ecosystems, items may sell out or be removed by the seller at any given moment. Consider each report a real-time window into a vanishing opportunity.
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