Four Fat Chicks -- The Bard's Tale Review

Review by Jen
January 2005

Prior to playing, I had heard only a little about The Bard's Tale: that it was to be a comedy RPG and that it was being made by Brian Fargo's new company, inXile. Brian Fargo was the founder of the company Interplay and was one of the driving forces behind classic games like Fallout and Fallout 2; he has had a hand in the development of over 50 games and is a past president of the IGDA.

The Bard's Tale is actually number four in a series that began in 1985 with Tales of the Unknown, Volume I: The Bard's Tale, which was followed up by the 1987 release of The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight (what happened to the "Tales of the Unknown" remains an unknown tale). The series was wrapped up in 1988 with The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, and a complete trilogy was published in 1990 by Electronic Arts.

So here, some 15 years later, we have a fourth installment called, simply, The Bard's Tale, released at the end of October 2004 for the Xbox, Playstation 2, and regular old Playstation; a PC release is slated for never. Which is appropriate; this is one game that would likely suffer if not played on a console. It was built using Interplay's Dark Alliance engine from circa 2001; the older engine can mean only one thing: the graphics are no great shakes. I had originally thought the poor graphics might've been accounted for by the simultaneous release of The Bard's Tale for regular old Playstation 1, but later research proved this not to be the case (thanks, Davo!). So now there is really no excuse! There is an option for HDTV, at least on the Xbox version, which made the game look a whole lot better on my big-screen TV than in these screenshots.

The Bard's Tale

The Bard comes armed with a lute and a magic tune that summons up a common rat. He uses the rat to frighten busty barmaids, who then are filled with (the Bard hopes) amorous gratitude when the Bard magically lutes (yeah, I know that's not a verb) away the pesky rodent.

I had a hard time identifying with the Bard. He drinks too much beer and thinks with his dick, two things that I don't (or can't) do, nor would I particularly want to. In fact, the übergoal of the game is freeing a rich, hot princess from imprisonment on the promise of a trip to the orgasmic heaven only she can provide. (Not in so many words, of course—the game is rated "T.") Needless to say, this gives rise (get it?) to a lot of double entendre.

Things I Have Learned from Video Games #37

"Heinous" rhymes with "anus."

How it Works

Your musical instrument is capable of summoning creatures by playing magic tunes. You start the game with the rat and can learn up to 16 tunes in total (I only learned 15). These summoned beings are your party members. If they get killed, you just make a new one. Or not; you don't have to be accompanied if you don't want to. You begin with the ability to have one companion at a time (besides your faithful, ever-present li'l doggie) and work your way up to four. Each of these has different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and they are all useful at one point or another. You have a limited amount of summoning power, represented by a "mana"–type gauge on the screen. Every once in a while, you get an upgraded version of a tune, which increases the abilities of an already-summonable being.

Both your mana and health levels refill automatically and pretty quickly. There is almost always enough mana for whatever summons you might contemplate and are capable of doing, but health is another story. The Bard gets killed, often, but mostly in the early part of the game. After five or six experience levels, at least on the "easy" setting, the Bard becomes immune to just about everything except swarming hordes of enemies, which is a semi-regular thing. I only rarely (twice) lost a boss fight—those are more a matter of surviving long enough to puzzle out how to kill said boss and then just killing it.

In addition to the magic tunes, the Bard collects tokens, which increase certain of the Bard's attributes by 1 to 3 points. The Bard's characteristics are the usual D&D-type categories like luck, stamina, charisma, etc. There are 25 tokens in the game; I only managed to find 17, I think, and I felt like I covered every square inch of the terrain and took all there was for the taking. So perhaps it is possible to locate all 25, and perhaps not.

He also collects "artifacts" and crystals that are spent in powering the artifacts. There are four possible artifacts; the Bard gets one at the beginning that refills health and possibly grants immunity or partial immunity from damage for a short time. The mere health refill costs one crystal; the full immunity plus health refill costs three. The crystals are not very plentiful, though, so sometimes it is better to just go ahead and die and reload after formulating a different strategy. (The Bard also has a summon that refills his health, but she is relatively useless in the heat of battle because she gets killed in no time flat.)

There is no inventory. You do get all kinds of weird spoils from battle, goofy items such as "Frozen Dinner" and "Old Bones," in addition to the more ordinary weapons and pelts—and they are automatically converted to money. There is not much buying and no selling; The Bard's Tale is action-RPG-lite.

The Bard gets better weapons and armor from time to time, usually from chests scattered throughout the areas and sometimes as spoils of the real-time combat. The best weapon is automatically equipped and the value of the previous weapon converted to coin. As well, the Bard must find weapon types and learn the associated skills before he can use them; these include the ability to wield a bow, dual-wield a sword and a dirk, and, later in the game, a couple of special weapons. I played mostly as a ranger since I could pick off enemies from a distance, before they spotted weenie me, and usually I was accompanied by a melee summon to do the up-close-and-personal fighting and keep the foes off me.

I was disappointed that The Bard's Tale did not take advantage of the technical capabilities of the Xbox. Besides the dated graphics, there were only five save slots, which I am led to surmise is the exact amount of data needed to fill up one Playstation memory card. On Xbox, there is no earthly reason to disallow unlimited saves. And so it is that all of my screenshots are either from the very beginning or very end of the game—I was constantly overwriting my too-paltry save files in the course of this 35-hour game. Also, you can save only at "save points," but these are pretty plentiful and there is almost always one right before any possible situation that might lead to the demise of the Bard.

The game is very linear. Once the Bard gets to a certain point about a quarter of the way through the game, he is unable to revisit old locations. (Well, he does get to go back eventually, but not until near the end when it doesn't much matter anymore.) Basically, the Bard proceeds from one goal to the next, each accomplished in a discrete area. Once all enemies in an area have been killed, they usually don't respawn, at least until you leave the area and come back to it, in which case all of the same enemies are back in all of the same places. (There are a couple of spots where the streams of new baddies are endless by design; the best thing to do in these few situations is run like hell. Enemies don't follow very far, so running is actually a pretty smart tactic when you find yourself overwhelmed.)

Things I Have Learned from Video Games #2

Knights Templar were closely involved with the Holy Grail. (That lesson was not, however, reinforced by The Bard's Tale, which is completely Templar- and Grail-free.)

LOL, Sometimes

What makes The Bard's Tale is the humor. The Bard and the narrator lack mutual respect for each other, and this leads to a lot of snarky interplay between the two. For that matter, the Bard is snarky with everyone he meets. In some situations, the Bard has to choose between two responses, "comedy" or "tragedy," as represented by the classic duo of theater masks; they really mean "less snarky" and "more snarky." These choices supposedly can result in a different outcome of the game; I only ran across this once, early in the game, where a "more snarky" response caused a fellow to trick me into jumping into a well from which there was no exit.

Also, there are several opportunities for the Bard to be a bard, e.g.: "Press X to jam with the drunks." These are always worth doing; not only are the lyrics funny as all getout, sometimes the result is a boost in experience. Other times, game characters spontaneously burst into song, also amusing. There is one recurring ditty that is now sung regularly by all of the members of my household: "Oh, it's bad luck to be you ... diddly doo."

And Your Little Dog Too

There is fairly good variety and creativity in the level design, although not so much variety within each level; voice acting is, on the whole, very good; and the nearly nonexistent plot, and a trite one at that, as revealed almost entirely via occasional cutscenes, is more than made up for by the plentiful snappy dialogues—and my cute little doggie, the only canine ever to win my dog-hardened heart.

If you like dungeon-crawling and giggling, play The Bard's Tale. While the repetitive combat and dated graphics keep me from awarding it the FFC Gold Star, I got a lot of mileage out of it on my own personal Fun-O-Meter.