Instead of a structured review, let me share my story with the Bard's Tale remasters.
When Inxile announced Bard's Tale IV, I was really excited - one of my all-time favourites gets a follow-up nearly 30 years later! The kickstarter deal was made even sweater with the promise of the remasters - I hadn't played Bard's Tale III since the 90s, and never really played the first two; and one sorry attempt in the early 2010s convinced me that I possibly never would, time not being kind on my patience.
Now, everyone knows the difficulties with the remaster, I don't want to go there - the important thing is they finally saw the light in 2019. I started playing BT1: Tales of the Unknown - and I was clobbered to all kinds of hell in minutes. I mean, I was aware that level 1 characters were supposed to die often, but then BT1 was something different. I soon gave up, and the years went by - I thought of the game like every 3 months, decided that right then I didn't have the patience to die every 30 seconds, and moved on. And now, after mere 6-7 years, I finally dug deep, and decided to give the game a more determined try. I still kind of recalled all the grinding I did in BT3, and decided that I'll need DRBR for the one Magician and SHSP for the two Conjurers before doing anything serious about the quest - and that proved to be a good decision. Having achieved level 9 with the mages and similar with the other characters, greatly helped by the reduced XP requirements for spellcasters in the remaster, I could move on with the game without any further need for XP farming, and was able to fight most battles the game threw my way without serious issues. And with those battles, by the end, all my mages were level 13 in all four classes.
Being able to concentrate on the game itself instead of woes of constantly dying, I was initially shocked how bland Tales of the Unknown is / was. Having seen all the drama and atmosphere in The Thief of Fate, it was almost weird that BT1 just told me that this Mangar guy is kind of an a-hole, would I kindly kick his buttocks, than you so much. And that was it. It also took a while until the dungeon crawling really got going, but eventually it became quite enjoyable - there was a lot of creativity channelled into some of the mazes, and the remasters quality of life options protected my poor undernourished patience from the meaner twists of the formula. Here from 41 years of distance, I salute the creators of Tales of the Unknown - the core values of the gameplay still hold up rather well.
Onto The Destiny Knight. With the success of the first game, apparently the creators of Bard's Tale II wanted to do some bigger and better - just as the manual says right at the beginning. No doubt the second game is bigger - but better it most certainly isn't, unless you have a taste for getting extremely lost very easily, and want to spend your time fighting trivial battles after like every 10 secs of crawling. I like the idea of moving from the central city into a more expanded wilderness, with every city having a specific dungeon - but the endless progression of near-indistinguishable 22x22 dungeon maps got old even without the constant fights. And what's the point of those fights? You can run away from most of them if you have Speedboots or play the Traveller's Tune with your bard, and if you fight only the ones where your first escape attempt fails, you still get ample progression. Having transferred my characters at the end of BT1, I had a party that could handily win every fight even in late game, but on the other hand the enemies had so much health that I'd need to recharge the mages like 4 times per dungeon level. Total waste of time, especially with the huge variety of monsters - I think I met like a hundred or more types that I never actually got around fighting. I guess balancing wasn't a thing in 1986, but still, this amount of easily avoidable combat simply lacks common sense.
And, to cap off all the "fun", the navigational nightmare death snare challenges - for which you usually have to have a free slot in the party, but for one of them you have to have three... Some parts of the game felt as if the creators were saying: "Oh, you're playing this game? Then SUFFER, b**ch!" Bard's Tale II was sort of a forgotten sibling between the groundbreaking first game and the very memorable third - and I have to say its status is well deserved. Still, for one playthrough, with all the omissions, it was fun.
And now the biggest question - how does one of the most formative games of my highschool years, The Thief of Fate, feel 30+ years later? Much to my pleasant surprise, it's fantastic, actually. That sparse yet very dramatic intro still generates some goosebumps, the peaceful-looking wilderness is especially pleasant with the remaster's graphical improvements, and Skara Brae is just... sad and moody. So a great start. Due to importing the characters from BT2, I could go straight for Brilhasti, and then received a shock (two of them, actually) - the remaster works differently from the C64 version (and probably also the MS-DOS version) in two important aspects. First, you cannot create a Chronomancer before Brilhasti - so you'll start Arboria with a Level 1 Chrono instead of Level 35. Also, while Level 1 Archmages were upgraded to Level 35 on the C64, here they are capped at Level 5 - so my Level 10 Archmages from BT2 didn't get anything. Boo-hoo :( Anyway, the party was reasonably OK to continue the adventure even so, and similarly to BT2, I could easily skip most of the fights, and as I was progressing through the game, the old enchantment came back stronger and stronger. The unique atmosphere of the different dimensions, the gradually building story from small fragments, the clever, remarkable but not overbearing dungeons (finally they vary by size), and the rare but stingy bossfights all contributed - as I moved forward, it was more and more difficult to take a break from the game, and have some sleep, for instance :) Capping off the fun, I loved the interconnected Tarmitia locations just as much as I did back in the day, and even more happily, with the help of the remaster's powerful automap, I quite enjoyed the dungeon puzzle in Malefia as well. As I avoided 95% of the fights in the game, my party was not very strong at the end, and I had to sweat some to conquer the final 4 fights - to be honest, it made much more sense and it was much more fun than spending hours upon hours to do the random encounters, then just cheese through the bossfights. Bard's Tale 3 has always been in my top 10 list of video games, and this playthrough with the remastered version only confirmed that. Huge, huge, respect to the creators - original and new!
A few words on the remaster itself. It comes with a massive cartload of quality of life features, which are very welcome - the unlimited saving and the automapping is especially something that was very much needed, without them the games would have been a pain in the a** (yes, BT3 had an automap of sorts, but... of very rudimentary sorts). The upgraded visuals work well for the environments, but I didn't like some of the monster portraits that much - many monsters ended up somehow pretty cheerful (instead of grimly funny), and also the better definition doesn't always help the atmosphere. But this is a minor issue.
All in all, I'm very grateful for InXile and Krome that they not only brought back these games from near-obscurity, but also modernized them to be playable with a 2020s mindset - I had an absolutely wonderful time with the remastered trilogy (especially the third game), and I can wholeheartedly recommend this heart-and-soul remaster to anyone who's interested in why so many people sunk so many hours in these proto-RPGs back in the 1980s.
