The Bard's Tale Trilogy

This is one of the few reviews that comes from someone who has not played the original games "back in the day". I've never owned an Amiga or a C64, although I did own a DOS computer back in the mid 90's, so I'm still a semi-old fart. I'm playing with some of the modern niceties offered by this update turned on. So I'm allowing myself to save whenever I want, instead of just at the guild, which was how it originally worked. I also have the automatic journal turned on. It's very cool that you can enable and disable these features - so you can have it exactly as you like it. One thing I don't like is that the game does not distinguish between the 3 different games when it comes to autosaves. This means that if you wanna check out another game in the anthology while having a game going in legacy mode (only Guild autosaves) - wave goodbye to all progress in that game. Very stupid programming decision, frankly. So I recommend enabling manual saves and the just restricting yourself to guild-only saves by shere force of will, if that's how you wanna play. While these games are fundamentally old and crusty as far as the game design goes, there is a real charm to it. I love the mean dungeon designs and the sometimes ridiculous giant piles of high level monsters that assault you if you have a bit of bad luck. The combat system is good, and random encounters are rare enough that it doesn't become mindnumbing. Monst encounters are triggered by special squares on the map, rather than just random chance. There's a good amount of choice in how you make your 7 character team. Although the game suggests you leave a slot open, since you sometimes get to have a monster join your team. I chose to play with 7 characters of my own so far. A warrior, a paladin, a monk, a hunter, a bard, and one of each of the two starting wizard classes. The magic users get to change class throughout the game though, and learn spells from a multitude of different magic schools. Old, but it holds up.

TL;DR Old RPG, you will spend 100 of hours just killing monsters and not much else. The Bard's Tale Trilogy, a remaster of a very old RPG, though I would argue there is not that much RPG in the game, it is for the most part a monster grinder. And that is why it is hard for me to recomend this game to new players. I played it the first time back in the 80's on my Amiga 500, so I have a lot of nostalgia for the game, and the remaster is very well done, so to me it's 5 star game. But the game is very very old school. How ever if you do like older RPGs then give it a go. And on a final note, this game was the reason I got in to playing Dungeons and Dragons, so I owe this game and the original team behind a big thank you, and a thank you to the team behind the remaster.

There is always room for improvement, like larger scenery view, hotkeys or quickbuttons for common spells/tunes, auto-equip better gear, ... but hey, this is a remaster, not a remake, and for a remake we already have plenty of improvements: detailed automap, gear-comparison, mouse support, mouse context help, ... and you can still play it the old way: keyboard only: very nice.

To be honest, I don't know how they did it. What this absolutely, positively, *isn't* is a remaster of the original Bard's Tale series as it existed in the 80's. Instead, what they have somehow done is remastered the games as they exist in my memory. If I Google up images of the 1985 Bard's Tale, the images that come up are not the game I remember. This. This is the game I remember. How is that possible? I don't know. Even my wife is in on it. "Oh, those sounds, they take me back." But the original, it didn't have these sounds. And yet she's right; that's how I remember it too. They have, if I'm honest, polished a couple of the rough spots and added some nice features from later games that even my rose-tinted memory admits were never in the first episode (like an automap). I'm way too many hours in already and, forget Mangar, I've got an appointment with 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers, and 99 berserkers! Really fantastic work, and I can't wait for the whole trilogy to be available!

Very nice remaster of this old gem. The Automap is a blast ! Only thing i am missing is the original Manual, because it is important to know all the mage spells to plan your mages progress. But Internet helps here. At frist i wanted to play in old-school legacy mode but it is not working yet, will updated later. But it doesn't matter. Playing with this qualitiy of life features is very fun. Thank you for this Game.