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The Bard’s Tale

Score: 98%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: VU Games
Developer: inXile Entertainment
Media: DVD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Action/ Adventure/ RPG


Graphics & Sound:

The camera angle in The Bard’s Tale is an Olde School top-down view, which may seem strange these days, but stays true to the Bard’s Tale games of old. Even so, I would have appreciated the ability to move the camera in a bit more and play over the Bard’s shoulder, if you will.

Still, the graphics are nice and the special effects used for magic, water, and weather effects look pretty good. The sound effects do what they’re supposed to, helping to reinforce the feeling of “being there” without standing out too much. The music in The Bard’s Tale takes the form of menu background music, magical tunes, and various songs such as drunken songs sung by, well, drunks in a tavern and a recurring taunting song sung by three trow minstrels. These songs are amusing and can be accessed and listened to again from the menu once you’ve gotten to them and saved your progress.


Gameplay:

The Bard’s Tale is not your standard hack-and-slash; you’ll have to develop a bit of strategy in your battles. You aren’t left to fend for yourself, however, because you’ll collect magical tunes as you progress on your adventure. These tunes will summon various assistants to aid you on your quest. You are limited as to how many of these summoned assistants you can use at once by your musical instrument. As you upgrade your instrument, you’ll be able to support more assistants at the same time and with these, you’ll need to select which tunes you’ll want to use together. Mind you, every one has its purpose, and at certain times, only one will do what you need it to. But in general, the combination of assistants you summon is up to you and your favorite manner of attack.

One interesting twist that The Bard’s Tale brings to the RPG genre is that when you loot your enemies, whatever you find is identified as the items they are (trinkets, jewels, coin, family photos, etc.) and then are instantly translated into a “cash” equivalent. The entire act of selling your goods is removed from the game. When you purchase something from a shop, the merchant says he has a return policy, “If you buy it, don’t bring it back.” So, effectively, all you have to worry about is how you want to spend your earnings, not whether you’re getting a good price on them. This may be a detractor for “tweaker” gamers who like micro-management, but allows the gameplay to flow quicker and more smoothly.

There is a “radar”-like map that can either be turned off or shown as a small circle in the upper right corner or a larger map over the middle of the screen. This map gains detail as you explore your areas and indicates where the Bard, doors, enemies, allies, and save points are. I found that once I had purchased a bow, I played the game more and more from the “radar.” It seems that your arrows will continue further than you can see, allowing you to attack even when enemies are off-screen and distant enough that they aren’t attacking you. You’d be surprised at how good you can get at aiming at enemies in your radar.

One of the more delightfully entertaining aspects of The Bard’s Tale’s presentation is the antagonistic and interactive relationship between the Bard and the narrator. It is more than evident that the narrator has the greatest of disdain for the Bard and they tend to bicker back and forth throughout the game.


Difficulty:

I started this game on “Olde School,” the hardest difficulty setting it offers. At one point, I feared that I hadn’t “leveled-up” enough and the enemies were too strong; I considered restarting the game with an easier difficulty level. However, after stepping away from it for a bit, then approaching it with a fresh outlook and developing new strategies, I found that I was able to progress again. (NOTE: The bow attacks mentioned in Gameplay above also helped quite a bit.)

There are two other difficulty levels for those of you who may, in fact, not be “Olde School:” “Easy” and “Normal.” The main thing is to carefully pick your fights, carefully choose your team members, and save often. The Bard’s Tale doesn’t require “creep-and-save” tactics, per se, but you’ll want to save often to avoid having to replay large sections over. The main thing to watch for is the Bard’s health meter. Your assistants can be injured, but in a worst case scenario, you have to summon them again. Collect the crystals needed to cast your healing spells and watch your health meter carefully and ensure you heal in time; be warned that casting the healing spell takes a little bit of time. It’s better to act a little too early than to try to act too late.


Game Mechanics:

I hate to have to report things like this, but I locked The Bard’s Tale up once. I’ve no idea why it locked up, but I was forced to restart the game to continue. This in and of itself is not horrible, especially with it only happening that once. But it does point out a piece of advice I wanted to impart:

Save often.

There are other things that can come up unexpectedly (such as losing that last bit of health a little bit faster than you expected or stepping into a new area that prevents you from returning to a previous save-point and doesn’t have a new one in sight) that will make you wish you’d saved a while back. For one thing, when you’re saving your game, you’ll get to see how long you’ve been playing The Bard’s Tale. This is cool when you get more than 24 hours; this is, however, unsettling when you think about all the times you died and lost all of your progress -- and the time wasn’t even factored into this amount. This stung me most when I played for a solid hour and managed to save 20 minutes of progress.

The Bard’s Tale is a game I will be playing again just for fun. As a game reviewer (who always has a new game to be played), this is possibly the best compliment I could hope to give to a game. All-in-all, The Bard’s Tale is an excellent title that lives up to its predecessor’s legacy.


-Geck0, GameVortex Communications
AKA Robert Perkins

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