The Bard's Tale
- November 17, 2004 00:00 AM PST
The Bard's Tale takes a humorous jab at age-old RPG cliches, but is it funny enough?
A wise monthly tome of easily digestible articles and anecdotes once suggested that laughter is the best medicine, and that's definitely the case with The Bard's Tale--it's a fairly generic action/RPG that gets a big dose of help from its snide sense of humor.Ratslayer
Anyone who's played a few RPGs in their lifetime is bound to find something to laugh at in The Bard's Tale, inXile's bitter homage to every clich� in the book--Chosen Ones, trapped princesses, magic swords, and haughty narrators are all dutifully skewered by the game's grown-up, knowing wit. The voice-acting is top-notch, and Cary Elwes (a.k.a. the loveable Wesley from The Princess Bride) is a natural fit in his role as The Bard.
Slightly less lovable is the game that's wrapped inside the funny package--a fairly standard, repetitive, and sometimes frustrating action/RPG in the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance vein. The camera's too inflexible to show off the game's graphics, the level designs and enemies aren't nearly as clever as the writing (wolves and goblins and soldiers in forests and snow�boring!), and The Bard is often subjected to the very forces of gameplay he's satirizing (randomly imposed time limits, etc). As a result, the game winds up feeling inconsistent or maybe just unwilling to fully trust its own sense of humor. Imagine Excalibur as the gameplay and Monty Python and the Holy Grail as the cut-scenes, and you've kind of got the picture.
The gameplay does benefit from a unique summoning system, which lets the Bard call a good variety of healers, fireball-hurling elementals, trap detectors, and other fantasy archetypes to fight by his side--it's a lot of fun to find the right balance of party members. The game's also got a nicely tuned character-development system that accommodates several different fighting styles, though magic-happy types will be upset that The Bard doesn't have any fireballs or lightning bolts of his own.
Halfway to Python
While The Bard's Tale isn't consistent enough to be The Princess Bride of gaming, it definitely has plenty of hilarious moments that role-players will love--and in the end, it's worth going through the hacking and slashing to get to all the winking and nodding.
