The Bard's Tale Trilogy Reviews

Addicting old style RPG. I grew up on this. I'm still coming back to play it.

This is a great game. I'm glad I got it on sale. A very good remake of the 80's game The Bard's Tale Trilogy. If you like level grinding, dungeon crawling, old-school RPG - this is for you! I played this as part of another collection decades ago, but there were bugs in the game and you couldn't recover spell points fast enough, so I gave up. In this re-make all the bugs have been fixed, all the Bard song's work, the thieving skills work, and you regenerate spell points fast. It has a map in the game so you don't get lost as often. If you don't like what's new, there's something called Legacy Mode for more of a challenge. I plan on beating this series for the fun of it. Well done!

If you like "you kick down a door" dungeon crawls, this might be a game for you. It doesn't have any intricate quests. It is definitely not story-rich. It won't feel like you're "getting to know" any NPC or joining a community. But if you just want to pretend you've hooked up with several other adventurers in a tavern so that you can go off and eventually save your world, then you'll probably enjoy this game. The classes all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and most have some relatively unique ability. Very few are ever essential (there's a place where you simply must have a bard in part 1, and you need a thief for an achievement in part 3, for example), so you can experiment with different party combinations or even go solo. Even in those places were you do need a certain character, if you don't like playing with that class in your party, you can leave him parked in the tavern until you need him. I had fun figuring out which combo of spells or abilities mixed with which bard songs and such in order to best take on this or that mob. I enjoyed collecting the mostly-useful (there are some places where I'd seriously change the loot tables) loot. I ended up rolling in gold I couldn't find anything to spend it on. The blackjack in part 2 was fun and I missed having a casino in part 3. The game got a little grindy in part 3, but I leveled up just about all of my party members (and an extra or two) just messing around and doing a full exploration of the dungeons. My only "this isn't fun anymore" complaint is that a couple of the dungeon floors in one tower of part 2 sometimes cross the line from "difficult" to "tedious" for traps and teleports that hinder you. If you are a map-nut like myself, you want to mark every single square ... but that one left me logging out to do something else just to clear my head. I put this game series thus far (I haven't played part 4, and I'm cheap so I won't get to it anytime soon) as being a weird mix of just above and just below Elder Scrolls Arena/Daggerfall. In fact, it's easy to see how this was probably inspiration for Elder Scrolls: Arena. The final ending of the series at part 3 was . . . underwhelming . . . but I had probably way over-leveled because I'd spend so much time messing around and just spanking mobs to spank mobs. Leave it to me to be dissatisfied with ascending to godhood.... ;) I got over 300 hours of amusement out of it (you can probably actually complete the game series in like 30 hours, but I like to be silly and make/remake different characters and such), and I definitely feel it was money well spent.

Loving this game!! Very faithful to original, but with small improvements, like auto pooling of gold and unused items. Little things like that make added up and really make the game much more enjoyable. Great game!!

Fun time for those that played late 80s computer games. This go around had no interest in drawing my own maps on graph paper, so just looked them up.