The Bard's Tale

At the beginning of this game, I found it extremely difficult, but once I started to get use to the summon system and I started leveling up gaining new attacks and weapons, the game just got overly simple. I still died plenty of times, but I never was frustrated by anything since there was always save points around. The game marks your next destination(s) on the map with a yellow marker, so it's always simple to find what to do next if your lost. There was a few sidequests, but not nearly as much as Summoner: A Goddess Reborn had (they're similar styled games, so I'll make the comparison). The map system could of been better, to switch maps you had to start, then go through a list, I wish I could scroll through them while in battle to make, but whatever. I never had any real problem with the controls, but the game was extremely repetitive and overall boring, but it was short so there's not much to complain about. There's really no difference between the first field you fight through and the last one, other than scenario, so the developers didn't put a ton of thought into the game, the whole thing felt rushed.


----------Battle System----------
The Bard's Tale is a generic top-down view dungeon crawler that’s infested on the PC, but rarely hits consoles. Bard is your only controllable character, but early in the game he will befriend a dog that won't die, the dog can distract enemies, but he’s not strong enough to kill them. Bard eventually learns Summons to help out. The Bard starts off with an instrument that can summon 1 rat, but over time he will gain new instruments that can summon up to 4 summons at a time.

There's 16 summons in all, and you can upgrade their abilities atleast once during the game if you find their upgrade chip. Summoning monsters will cost mana, but only a 1 time fee during the initial summon, so whatever the summoned monster does he will not drain your mana. Mana rapidly replenishes, so you should always have a summon out to help you in battle when you can. While summoning (or equipping weapons) the Bard is vulnerable to attacks, but he can still run away dodging attacks.

The Bard will find 4 artifacts over time, one is given to him early in the game. Each artifact has 3 moves either healing you, protecting you or will attack the enemies. Each artifact costs between 1 to 3 crystals to use. You find crystals in chests in the game, they're easily available, and I rarely had to use them.

You gain experience by killing things or completing quests. When you gain a level you get to distribute 2 points to your stats (2 points is not enough) and on the odd levels you get to gain a new skill. Your stats max out at 20 points and your level maxes out at level 21, so you can't max out all your stats unless you distribute them evenly to balance out the Tokens you get in the game. The Tokens permanently add points to your skills, if I had known this early in the game and had known that my stats will max out at 20, I would of did it completely even across the board and had all my stats maxed out at the end of the game, but either way, the game wasn't to difficult.

The skills you learn after leveling up will boost your dogs abilities, or gain the ability to wield new weapon types (Dirk, 2-Handed Sword, Bow, etc) or adds new charge moves to your weapons. It's impossible to gain all skills since you max out at 21, I had about 4 or 5 skills left over at the end, not that I needed them or anything.

The game has no item inventory, so when you find items on the field, they automatically turn into silver (money), there's no real weapon inventory either. Since weapons are either better or worse with no in-between, the old weapon will always be sold for silver for about %10 you paid for it. If you find an old weapon or armor on the field, then it will turn into silver too, or if you go into a shop, they just won't display the weaker weapons. You can however hold 1 sword, 1 dirk, 1 bow, 1 flail and 1 two-handed sword, with 2 special weapons and your fists. You get all those options in battle.


----------Characters / Story----------
Geez where do I start? The game prides itself on being "funny" and making fun of "cliches" in games and rpgs in general. The problem with that is the game was a total cliche and tried to save face by sarcastically making fun of it, which felt oddly out of place since most of the lines Bard spewed out rarely had anything to do with what the other characters say before his lines. The humor just doesn't appeal to me and was obviously directed towards easily impressed teenagers. The dialog is gut-wrenchingly bad that makes me even embarrassed to finish this game.

The Narrator hates the Bard for little reason right from the get go, the Bard is the only one that can hear him (besides yourself, of course) and they argue at times while the other characters don't understand what’s happening. Basically the Bard is trying to meet girls and get rich, and gets caught up in a quest to save a Princess. He must travel to 3 towers to put out a flame, but before he can enter a tower he most get a specific item to enter it. The game follows a pattern that gets really old really quick.


----------Graphics----------
Once you walk into a town or dungeon you'll get an idea what the rest of it will look like. They like to repeat backgrounds, so if there wasn't an easy to read map, you would constantly get lost. The game is UGLY, its hard to look at for to long. Pretty much all the towns look alike. Most of the characters are the same models with different clothes. The Bard even repeats expressions over and over again, so the programmers pretty much just copied and pasted all the cutscenes together. The cutscenes are in game made and look like crap. The characters are all shaky and look like they have Parkinson's disease. Sometimes during cutscenes when they do quick edits to another character the background takes a few seconds to load up. The panning and edits during the cutscenes are annoying, but the initial panning from the battle field to cutscene is seamless and actually kinda impressive. You'll fight the same bunch of enemies hours on end will little let up.

----------Sound----------
The music is pure ambience that you probably won't even notice, it took me a while to even hear it. While the sound effects are decent, ambient music is lazy and boring. The songs in the game are actually pretty catchy, but they're almost rip offs of generic Ye'ol English songs you would hear at a Renaissance Faire or Oompa Loompa / Munchkins. The best song in the game is the "It's Bad Luck to be You", but you end up hearing it like 6 times in the game, give or take. I got sick of it by the 2nd time, all they do is just slightly modify the lyrics and repeat the chorus over and over again. Its still stuck in my head so they must of did something right.

The voice work in this game is TERRIBLE. Cary Elwes plays the Bard and he pretty much mumbles himself through an easy paycheck. I've noticed a ton of problems with the sound difference between some characters, the Bard will often talk really really low to the point where you can hear (or understand) him, then another character will jump in blasting your ear drums. This also happened during some of the songs, most notably the ones with the 3 Trows that sing the "It's Bad Luck to be You" song. When they sing together, you can hear them just fine, but when they have their solos you'll only end up hearing 1 of them. The biggest offence is when they sing it in the jail cell. The narrator is the only one that does a nice constant job.

----------World Map----------
The world is an overhead view map similar to any Final Fantasy game. Only towns you discover through story will show up on the map, there's a couple places that are completely skippable aswell. All dungeons or fields are linked into each town or marker on the world map. There's save points all over the game, since you WILL be dying all over the place (especially early in the game) this is a good thing. At the end of the game you will get to fly on a giant burning Mantaray, but at that point you can only really go into one place, so its pretty pointless.


----------Time to Complete Game (last save before final boss)----------

19:36:06

Not even a 20 hour game, most of that time also includes backtracking you're forced to do in dungeons and I did all the sidequests I unlocked, so there's not alot of content in the game. At the end you get to choose the ending and who you fight, there’s 3 endings in all, and once you defeat the boss, there's about 15 seconds of wrap-up on the game before credits.