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.
