The Bard's Tale

"A mediocre RPG that is easily forgotten"

Role Playing Games (RPGs) are today's biggest video game genre. Zelda and Final Fantasy, the two biggest selling RPGs, and possibly two of the best selling series of all time, both exemplify the directions that an RPG can take. One focuses on battling and XP, while the other focuses on real-time fighting and the use of items to make your way around the game.

However, they both share something in common- they revolutionized the RPG industry by transforming the perspective of the RPG into overhead view, something that had never been tried before.

Videogame RPGs had always been from the first-person view before. Those of you who saw Big will remember the heavily text-based game that RPGs used to be, and how the perspectives were. While Zelda and Final Fantasy have been immortalized, these other RPGs are all but forgotten. I suppose it's because they just weren't very good games in comparison.

Bard's Tale on the Xbox is relatively well received, and is certainly a game title that most people have heard (especially around here- lots of ads upon the game's release.) However, few know that it wasn't the original. Fewer still know anything about the original game.

Frankly, those who know nothing aren't missing out on much. Bard's Tale holds nothing special in its bowels that should compel anyone to play it.

Gameplay

You start in a guild, and you create your own party off the bat. There is no backstory to any of your characters, as you just create them all from scratch.

Pick whomever you want, but you'll find it very irritating that all of the magical classes are easily picked off. In the same way that more recent games make mages a bit weaker, this game goes far overboard with mages who are taken out in one hit. I suppose it introduces a new level of challenge. Obviously the mages are the best class if you get them powered up enough, but doing so is an amazing chore. In a sense, you get real pride in having a strong mage.

As I've said before, it's a first-person view, and you walk along the corridors of this town, going from building to building. Slowly but surely, you'll learn what's going on in the story, and you'll come across stores in which you can buy stuff.

The battle system is a menu based battle system. Pick your commands out of the menu, and you and the enemy take turns attacking. Simplistic enough, and just like all of the games before it.

Story
Weak for an RPG. A wizard has taken control of the town, and you must go into his tower and stop him. That's all there is to it. Now, it's not bad for an early RPG, but again, there's NOTHING good about it. Certainly nothing that should make you want to play Bard's Tale, anyway.

Graphics and Sound

Typical NES stuff- 8-bit, and therefore pretty bad. However, they weren't bad for the NES, nor were they bad for the year that this game was made. It reminds me of the windows maze screensaver, really.

It's not really a BAD game, per se- it's just that there's nothing good about it. In comparison to old RPGS, it's perfectly fine, but old RPGs when compared to Final Fantasy and Zelda are pure garbage..

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/05