The Bard's Tale ARPG: Remastered and Resnarkled

Despite it's age, this game gets somehow better with time. It's a rare breed of parody-RPG made by the titans of Interplay with genuinely good puns and terrific songs. Plus it's also spots industry legends like Tony Jay (his last work) as a narrator and Tommy Tallarico as a songwriter. The game itself is not that brilliant (it's just OK arpg with cool summon gimmicks) but oh my good is it funny, refreshing and full of clever puns and truly insightful jokes. It's a Steam Hidden Gem and I really think you should at least try it on sale.

I understand that this is a remaster of a game that was originally made almost 25 years ago, but it feels like it was made by someone who had only heard about computer games before and was still learning how to code. It has a glacial pace, both in terms of story and literal walking speed. Load screens are preposterously long given the low quality of the programming. The combat system is laughably bad, with no sense that there is any relationship between a click of a button and a swing of the sword.

[h1] Review[/h1] I've been wanting to play this game for a long time, but I lost interest very quickly after only a few hours. The game has a really unique concept as an action-adventure with some RPG elements, acting as a parody of the genre. Unfortunately, it fails to be much more than that. [u]Gameplay[/u] You can create your own character, but the choices you make barely matter. You can choose to focus on either bows or melee combat. Investing in health, luck (for more money), and rhythm (for summons) is practically mandatory in every playthrough. You can also choose a difficulty setting, but this simply leaves your character underleveled by giving you fewer starting stat points. Combat revolves entirely around your weapon choice and the summons you decide to use. As you progress, you unlock new summons that make up your party. If a summon dies, you're forced to sit through a lengthy summoning animation to bring it back. If multiple summons die during a large fight, you're often better off reloading a checkpoint, as your magic regenerates very slowly and you'll spend a long time running around waiting for enough mana to resummon them. In addition to summons, there are consumable crystals that grant temporary magic spells. You'll eventually have more of these than you'll ever need, but using them is tedious because each one has a 20–30 second animation. The opening quests are incredibly engaging because they're spot-on parodies of common RPG tropes. Bump into too many NPCs? They get angry and refuse to apologize anymore. A simple fetch quest turns into tracking down four or five identical-looking twins who keep sending you on more errands just to mess with the protagonist, while the narrator constantly makes snarky remarks. It's genuinely funny and creative. Unfortunately, this creativity almost completely disappears after the first village. Beyond that, there's only one more city with a single memorable quest in the same style. You'll occasionally stumble across another funny joke or bizarre event, but they're few and far between, usually after hours of dungeon crawling. And yes, this game is mostly a dungeon crawler. You have to climb three towers, defeat their bosses, and collect key items from various dungeons just to gain access to them. None of the towers feature interesting quests, and each one takes roughly 30–50 minutes to complete. If combat is supposed to be the game's main focus, you'd expect it to be polished. It isn't. The combat simply doesn't work for two main reasons. First, enemies block constantly, and you have no reliable way to counter them other than blocking yourself, which accomplishes very little. The most effective strategy is to use bows or focus on dual-wielding, as the faster attacks can stunlock enemies before they have a chance to block again. Second, many enemies, especially druids, can repeatedly knock you and your party to the ground with spells, damaging you again while you're still stuck in the recovery animation. It's one of the clunkiest, slowest, and most frustrating combat systems I've experienced. Since combat makes up well over two-thirds of the game, it ultimately drags the entire experience down. [u]Story[/u] The story isn't particularly noteworthy beyond serving as a parody of the action-adventure genre. There's a decent twist near the end and three different endings, although they're all determined by a single choice in the finale. It wraps up in a satisfying way, but there's simply not enough story or worldbuilding to carry such a long game. Outside of the first village and one city, there's very little storytelling or humor to break up the endless dungeon crawling. [u]Sound[/u] The game features surprisingly solid voice acting. The narrator, protagonist, and supporting characters all deliver enjoyable performances, complete with various Scottish accents. The soundtrack also includes fully voiced songs that fit the game's comedic tone perfectly. [u]Conclusion/TL;DR[/u] As a complete package, the game is disappointing. Its clunky combat system and lengthy, repetitive dungeons overshadow the genuinely funny parody and strong opening hours. While the concept is excellent, the developers failed to build enough interesting content around it, instead relying on a combat system that quickly becomes frustrating. The charm wears off after the first few hours, leaving behind a fairly generic and mediocre action-adventure.

Unfortunately the Bard is not aging well. With its outdated and slow gameplay, the game quickly becomes boring. On the positive side - funny jokes and catchy songs to sing in the pub is enough for me to recommend. EZ to 100%.

this has got to be the funniest RPG I've ever played. I've beat it multiple times and am fixing to reload and play it again

This game, is intolerably frustrating to play. The combat relies on the animation of your swings and the timing of your blocks, but the input is sticky and unresponsive. The summons are expected to do a lot of work, but the later you get the slow manna recharge means you have to just Sit for a long while so you can fill your squad, or charge ahead and be understrength. Mechanics of the missions are varied, but often rely on indeterminably long bits filled with frustrating set pieces, Example: an NPC escort mission through a field of respawning enemies, that the respawn time is instantaneous, and the NPC movement speed is like 1/4 your walk speed, where the NPC stops every 4 feet to throw an annoying line out and until they get through that line, they wont start walking again. And then, the distance you have to be from the NPC to make them walk is basically pressed Against the NPC. It's nostalgic to hear Tony Jay, but Wow does Cary Elweys sound Bored. Not that I blame him, the jokes are all extremely dull. There's one part of this that's kind of Offputting where you have a tone and art that are so at odds that it's hard to tell whether I love it for evoking a feeling like a Sam Raimi movie, or if I hate it for How at Odds it is. I am going to finish this game, but at this point it's out of Spite. All of this, and the bugs or oversights are also horrid. Your bow will Often not fire or you can't get it to acknowledge that it should fire, or lock you into it's draw and freezing you in place. The cursor can't be too far to the top left or you activate your inventory screen mid combat. The enemies all have Random HP so you can have 2 enemies of different varieties, 1 that is ostensibly a lower tier and 1 that is a higher tier with better equipment; and which one takes longer to kill is entirely a toss up. You can kill the higher tier enemy in 1 hit and then wail on the other lower tier enemy for like 30 seconds before they go down; and because the lower tier enemy is just packing inferior equipment and skills, it's just the equivalent of chopping down a really pathetic tree. I've had missions break, achievements not trigger, CTDs, get frozen, have summons spawn places that can't be reached, had bosses get stuck in animation loops, had enemies AI die mid fight, and had Boss AI die mid fight. 0/10, would not recommend at All. Go play Dark Alliance if you want a good ARPG from this era or find some bargain bin indie ARPG with controls that aren't fighting you more than the enemies. I'll revise this score if the story absolutely blows me away, but I'm 99% sure I know the twist in the story Now, at chapter 10/13 (And have known since chapter 2/13). Addendum: Okay finished it. Called it.

Should you play Bard's Tale? If you are curious about one of many Diablo clones of early 2000s with a self-aware humor twist that plays like your usual repetitive jankslop? Well, yeah, you may give Bard's Tale a shot but other than that... I don't see why one would bother. I bet I would've loved it as a kid though. It has those early 2000s comfy video game vibes that we all know and love. So, nostalgia googles required.