"A very nice introduction for a series that ended too soon"

Bard's Tale ias a nice game, but all the same I'm glad I had a solution when I went through it. The monsters are a good deal harder than necessary although building up your characters honestly is not as tough as the nightmare that was Wizardry I. Outside of fighting and building up your characters there was a lot that was attractive. In the game you are asked to rescue the city, Skara Brae, from the evil wizard Mangar who lives in a secluded tower which is behind locked gates. You cannot leave the city as it is too snowy outside, a more effective explanation than ''not enough disk space,'' so there are places you must visit to find the items and clues you need to overthrow Mangar. The game, an RPG, features sixteen levels of 22 by 22 dungeons, some of which contain excruciatingly many one-way doors, dark zones, traps, spinners(turn your direction around,) clues to use in some way, secret doors, or even squares combining these. There are also anti-magic zones at the most inconvenient times. Bard's Tale throws everything at you and although there is one place you can relatively rapidly improve your characters, it is slow going until you get there, and you'll have a lot of level 1 characters dying. In fact, they don't even start off with any gold or items, so you can't cheat them up to being good. Sigh.

As to the character details: the game develops some interesting classes. You roll dice for characters and will probably screen a lot out(nothing new there.) But magic users have four different classes and can switch(but not switch back) after progressing a certain number of spell levels(3 or 4, meaning character level 5 or 7.) Their levels are reset and they can learn spells from one of the other class. You can start as magician or conjurer, but you can change to sorcerer and wizard as well. Of course the best spells are the level 6 and 7 ones, so it's worth it to wait until level seven to switch classes. Although the game is called Bard's Tale it's manipulating your magic users that really gets you a good party. Other classes are rogue(opens chests without magic), hunter(critical hit ability at later levels), monk(loses 1 AC point per level), paladin, warrior(good to start with, gets weaker) and of course the bard. Your bard, if he has an instrument, gets endless songs(this is contradictory to the manual and was fixed in BT2) from a choice of six which can regenerate hit points, lower armor class, or create light. So anti-magic zones lose some of their sting. But only one bard may play a song in one party at a time. There is also an option to summon a monster or, if you are lucky or have the right spells, you can get a monster you encounter to join you. You can't save the monster to the roster as in future Bard's Tale installments and you can't control it, but looking back from BT2 it is interesting to note how they improved that.

Controls are done by the keyboard(I=forward, K=kick door, J/L=left/right.) You can also caset a spell and for ascending/descending portals there is the strange E/D. This is not the major problem I have with it, though. It's too hard to save the game. In fact, you must quit the game entirely to save it, unless you want to manually remove all members and add them again. However when it comes to graphics the game is very impressively laid out. The bottom half of the screen is dedicated to your characters' statistics: class, armor class, maximum/current hit/spell points. The upper right has textual information(trap ahead), the center has cool icons for which spells are active(carpet for levitate, fire for a light spell) and the left has a 3-d perspective view of where you're going, and it shows you the NPC's you meet, combat or otherwise, as well. The general 3-d view is a bit deceptive and although some of the backgrounds are neat you will frequently turn to find a wall where you believe there isn't one. You don't have enough peripheral vision. However, it has one of the most entertaining death notifications when your party has had it. The only sound in the game is really quite nice; at the beginning when you load the game there's a tune, and the six different bard songs are all pretty catchy when you want to listen to them.

Although Bard's Tale is overall done attractively I found several nuisances that would pop up. First was that the spells or bard song would go away too quickly, and even time viewing characters or casting a spell would count against it, which seemed pointless as you could always start it up again. The teleport spell, which could saved time going through a place you'd already been, also asked you to verify your location by typing N and to cancel with Y. This directly opposed the confirmation after you completed each battle round(''Use these options?'') The final slip might have been that you were not notified when you'd found a special item and your characters had no room for it. I also hated getting kicked out from Garth's weapon shop or the review board because they closed at night-time, but that may have been a pet peeve as it was easy enough to go back to the Adventurers' Guild and make it morning again.

I also found a few bugs while going through this game. Sometimes it just crashed after I played for an extended time. There were also bugs about when your characters were aged(all statistics dropped to one) by a monster. If you advanced a level before healing at the temple, your statistics would be stuck at 2-1-1-1-1. A more amusing one(also favorable to your characters) was that if you were knocked down to zero hit points when old, you didn't die in some cases. So you could walk around with one old character with zero hit points but if you healed him, he could die. There were other minor bugs that cropped up in the game. An interesting one was that if your spellcaster changed class, he'd be able to use some new items, but the item would be listed as unusable until he traded it back and forth. And not necessarily a bug but a puzzle with a clever cheat was that, when you found a mysterious item, Garth's Weapon Shop would charge the selling price to ID it, so you would know what it was by the price.

Seeing Bard's Tale II first there are some obvious improvements the sequel makes. However, the original is quite good and BT2 borrows a good deal from it, including dungeon layout, monster pictures, items, town locations, and class advancement(I also think BT2 could have re-used some monsters in more than one dungeon, since I feel it's fair to look for failed augmentations.) In addition I feel the original is the hardest of the series because its monsters are toughest in proportion to your characters, and you must work your way through considerably more secret doors and traps. In fact one thing largely missing from the sequels are interesting side quests that get you a nice item.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/15/00, Updated 12/15/00