By the time you get to grips with what's good and what isn't, you'll be halfway through the game. If you misclick, that's it - you're stuck with it forever. There's also no confirmation when picking a skill. For some reason, it's impossible to refund skill points you've picked. There are four classes to choose from: Fighter, Rogue, Bard, and Practitioner, which is a spellcaster. For example, dwarves can't move in combat. In character creation, you pick between a number of races which each has their own passive ability. This is again hobbled by technical issues, such as voice lines cutting out when overlapping, or all sound in cut-scenes disappearing - cut-scenes that you can't skip. Even the player character has a collection of completely different lines for the banter, which is based on what voice you chose in character creation. It's funny and it reveals things about the world around you in a more natural way. The banter between companions is the best part of the writing, in my opinion. The Bard gains spell points by drinking themselves silly. The game is like a slow, rattling, screws-falling-off Disneyland ride with the shiny plastic faces of chattering puppets all around you. After the first fourteen hours, the game does acquire its own personality, but it's not a personality you want to spend fifty hours with. In my first impressions, I said that The Bard's Tale IV has a personality crisis. If you could just get on with it without thinking about the setting, I wouldn't mind, but you're constantly halted by bloated descriptions and exposition. The world feels like it was constructed around the player, making it static and boring. There's nothing to invest you in the story, besides "or else evil wins". With quite a few eccentric characters inhabiting the world, I don't understand why Rabbie must be so bland. The player is mostly driven through the story by Rabbie, a bard in the adventurer's guild. Huge walls of text plague the dialogue, which often comes across as something you'd hear at a renaissance fair. You won't see someone just walking, except for patrolling enemies. The NPCs have animations but never move from their spot. The narrative design feels dated, but not in a nostalgic way. The dwarves, elves, and humans all have the same Scottish accents and sing the same kind of songs. These supposedly separate and distinctive cultures all melt together into a big homogeneous blob. It's like plonking a big shiny basket of delicious fruit on top of that filthy table I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, rather than elevate the experience, they feel apart from the game itself. Authentic Gaelic songs sprinkle the world, haunting, beautiful, and joyous. When the game finally releases you into the world, it opens up, but only a little.Ĭlever cookies, hiding from the UI under the annoying red liquid.Īs you explore, you'll discover that the music of The Bard's Tale IV is nothing short of amazing. Ironically, I think this is exactly the kind of thing the 2004 version of The Bard's Tale would poke fun at, being a bit of a spoof of traditional RPGs at the time. It essentially amounts to the infamous sewer level of every old-school RPG. The beginning of the game is a chore to get through, due to the eternity I spent in a large and dreary cavern. In fact, I didn't trust most of the numbers the game gave me, resorting instead to going by feeling. By the end of the game, I didn't trust that indicator one bit. When you hover your mouse over an enemy with an attack, it shows how much health they will lose from that attack. It's completely haphazard whether the UI shows this change or not. Sometimes a skill will alter the effects of an ability or the damage of a spell. The tooltips are wrong so often that I'm not sure whether I've just misunderstood how they work. Farmer Killop is passionate about cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and travel.
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