The Bard's Tale

"Save the world? Coin and cleavage? We'll take the latter."

The Bard's Tale is a game that makes fun of the entire adventure-RPG genre. At the same time, it offers witty humor and an all-around good experience. Playing as the Bard, your out for your own skin; keep yourself alive and earn some profits. I mean, why bother risking your neck to save other people? There's a reward involved? You have my attention now.

Gameplay: 9/10
It's a pretty good system; You can control the Bard via point and click to get him from place to place, hold down your movement key on the mouse and use it to guide him, or use a gamepad. I personally found that using the hold-movement worked best, and was surprisingly easy to use. WSAD moves the camera around, which unfortunately is stuck in a constant overhead angle, which extremely narrows your field of vision. As you level the Bard, you get to put attribute points into Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, Charisma, Rhythm, and Luck. Every few levels, you get to learn a new "talent" which includes combat training, combat attacks, and assorted skills that increase the amount of money you get, critical hit rates, dog-training, etc.

Combat:7/10
The combat is slightly lacking in this field. It's pretty fun to begin with, but after a while it begins to get boring and repetitious, like most of your standard hackn'slash games. There's a pseudo party system involved in the game, which is your summoning ability. By playing your musical instrument, you can summon various units to assist in combat. You've got 4 basic types: healing/protection, assistance, fighters, and elementals. Any in the healing type either heal you/party or defend against certain attacks and such. The assistance includes your rat (good for getting easy rewards in bars), a guy that finds traps and sets them off before you get to 'em, and other useful guys. Fighters contain, well, your fighters; archer, knight, mercenary, etc. Elementals contain elemental units which are used for getting through environmental troubles and AoE combat.

You only control the Bard in combat. You can choose to use a bow, flail, 2-handed sword, 1-handed sword and shield, and dual-wield. Each one has it's own balance, so they're all pretty even, it's all a matter of personal choice which one you use. The bow is perhaps the worst to use simply because the camera angle makes it difficult to shoot anything more than 15 feet away from the Bard. The combat is real-time, so you control each attack and can use various special attacks you learn as you level up. Again, it's really fun once you start, but after a while gets to be very monotonous.

Graphics: 8/10
They're all pretty clean and nice. The starting town, Houton, is very nice. However, I ran into a pretty common lag problem which was extremely annoying. Anything someone spoke to someone through a distance-communicator the game would bog down and the conversation would take extra time to finish, since the person would talk, and the sprite would still be working on moving his/her mouth for the sentence. This also happened if there was ever alot of special effects on screen, topped with plenty of monsters. Certain things like magic barriers had this effect, making any gameplay in this area a major pain. Visually speaking, though, the graphics are very nice. The lag is the only reason this gets an 8.

Humor: 11/10
This has to be the most I've ever laughed in any game. This game pokes fun at the standard adventure-RPG stereotypes, such as having to go on 6 side-quests to get an item from a guy, having to go out of your way to get a key for something right in front of you, trade-sequences, treasure-chest traps, etc. And the great thing is the Bard is already aware of all of these things. A great example, he's in the mountains and finds a chest on a small peninsula. "Hmm... a treasure chest all by itself... couldn't possibly be a trap. ... ... ... Oh what the hell."

Even when it's not poking fun at the genre, there're plenty of funny lines in the game and awesome moments. Within the first 5 minutes of gameplay, you can listen to some drunks sing a really awesome song about beer. The narrator also plays a major role in the humor, as he doesn't care much for the Bard.

Overall: 8/10
The combat may not be the best experience, but you'll tough through it for the humor. The game is insanely funny, and is by far worth the monotonous combat. I've had people over who just want to watch me play Bard's Tale just for the hilarious moments. The game is over-all pretty good, with a few sketchy spots like combat and the occasional lag, but the humor more than makes up for it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/01/05