Truly unfortunate that the dos conversions are here. From the inevitable timing issues that dosbox cannot resolve, to the unfortunate visuals, these are simply inferior versions of the early SSI games.
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.
