The Bard's Tale Trilogy

Although I love that someone bothered to do a refresh of the original bard's tale. I am somewhat disappointed with this one for the following reasons. First off the shared inventory drives me crazy because its hard to figure out what items belong to what character and what is trash that can be sold. While they do fix this issue under the legacy mode, unfortunately though its not available at this time. Also for a refresh and for 15 dollars I wish they would have done a better job with the sound and pictures.

Written about 3 hours in.. While I went into this expecting to be really unimpressed with the visual art, it works fine in the game. Sure, the originals look better, but these work okay in play. Less impressive are the animation frames. The original 16 bit art had smoother animations than this by a long shot. They seem to have dropped around half the frames in a lot of spots. It's not a little bit worse, it's a lot worse. The audio work is decent. At first I thought I'd really hate the combat sounds and it may turn out after the whole game length that I will, but at least they added noises specific to the enemies, so I'm enjoying that so far. Quicksaving changes the flavor of the challenge. The opening game in Bard's Tale 1 is still fairly brutal (though you find equipment everywhere, so that's nice), but you can just load to an autosave or manual save usually. Unless you get wiped out in which case the autosave will save that. The game should really be more consistent in its saving nature there. But all in all you can ramp up an initial party very easily by reloading on problems, as compared to the original game. The worst part though, is that this game comes with all-new bugs. Bard songs aren't accounted for correctly in combat. The stats you get on initial character creation are wrong (dwarves can only get 17 con max for some dumb reason, for example). Worse, the level-up results are kind of screwed up. It's common get one hit point as a mage, which isn't at all correct from the originals. Hunter critical strike skill goes up randomly and sometimes not at all (???). The saving throw for running away isn't implemented correctly. And so on. It seems like this remaster was built by people who really had no idea how the game works in any detail, and well.. that's exactly what it is, looking at the names of the people involved. Such a missed opportunity.

Advertised as a trilogy, but only the first game comes with this. Hopefully, now that I've paid for it, they will come out with the other parts. Very grindy type game. Everything tries to kill you on every screen, even if you just sit there things come and find you, even right outside the starting tavern.

"There is no physical game manual! That means many of the information you found in the manual and had to keep referring to on your computer desk is now available in the game - find hints and tips throughout the game to help you start out." I wish I'd read this before spending $13.49 on this thing. Part of the appeal of old computer games are the manuals they came. If you buy the 2005 Bard's Tale on here, which contains the original Bard's Tale games, the manuals are included in PDF forms. Is editing a PDF beyond the skill of these devs, or are they just too cheap to buy an Adobe Acrobat license?

Turns out to be this game is just frustrating. Night time is a pain in the neck, you simply can't skip it and all the stores are closed while your characters fail to renew energy. At the same time the monsters get harder, causing you to spend all your money healing at the temple. Second, while leveling up there is no way to reroll your level up, so if you get crappy hit points and a useless stat for your character get ready to waste time reloading. Did I mention you have to reload a bunch of times for each of your 6 characters? Or that you will level up loads of times in this game? I like old school CRPGs but I guess I should not have wasted my money on this. I wish I could return it and I never say that of games.