One of the earliest CRPGs, this game is a classic. By today’s standards, the graphics are horribly outdated but it certainly established the scrolling combat and 3D dungeon crawling genre back in the 80s for CRPGs. It’s also one of those games that every hardcore old school CRPG gamer probably tried at one time.
I was a little late to the Bard’s Tale series in starting with 2 before this one. In fact, I might’ve even finished 2 before this one. That said, this game provided lots of late nights of grinding.
You start off in the Adventure’s Guild and can use a pre-made party of 6 adventurers. Pretty much if you decide to create your own party, you’ll find yourself having a bit of difficulty starting out just because gold initially is very scarce, making equipment tough to come back. Also, you’ll start from level 1 as opposed to the pre-made party which is equipped and starts at level 2. One of the most important aspects of the pre-made party is that El Cid the bard possesses a magic Flame Horn, which is quite necessary early for dealing with large packs of monsters as well as giving you a boost in gold if you decide to sell it. One trick was to pool all the gold to one party member, delete pre-made party, then do it all again until you have an ample amount of starting gold and Flame Horns to topple a few encounters.
At low levels, you’ll struggle quite a bit because the game is pretty merciless in handing the occasional large pack of monsters that will overwhelm you. The hint book even states that you should save often, especially once you hit level 3. The only way I found to survive is to employ the pre-made party with a large number of Flame Horns at my disposal and kick in the doors of houses back and forth until I managed to gain enough experience for level 3. Also, there’s a samurai statue that you can fight that blocks you from hitting a special tavern for one of your key quests. Killing that statue grants you a reasonable amount of experience for low levels so that you can get that precious 1-2 initial levels for a bit of survivability.
In reality, you can avoid the “starter” dungeon (aka the Wine Cellar) and the lower sewer level because the game does not have really have the concept of save points. That means, as long as you have answers to riddles or special quest items, you can bypass any area. Truthfully, the Wine Cellar is decent for some starter experience while the sewer system is used to access another area of the game once you’ve collected the correct clues.
But your real goal is to continue grinding for experience so you can survive the tougher dungeons. Like one technique I used was hitting the Mad God’s temple. Just with your Flame Horn and with the right encounter, you could decimate rows of undead, gather precious experience points and a few magic items to help boost your armor and weapons. You might have to go back and forth repeatedly and frequently until you hit enough levels to survive some of the more difficult encounters. Yet that pretty much is how this game is run.
Grinding experience in this game actually is easy once you manage to acquire the sorcerer’s Mind Blade spell, an AoE damaging spell that hits all enemies. Given a pair of spellcasters with this spell, you can take out large numbers of enemies. In particular though, there’s an area in Harkyn’s Castle where you can slaughter a ton of berserkers. Pretty much that area singlehandedly is the best grinding zone in the game and I spent countless hours casting Mind Blades while waiting for the remaining berserkers to finish their turns.
The thing about the original Bard’s Tale compared to later ones is that the power creep wasn’t as ridiculous. Bard’s Tale 2 made the game into a completely spell dependent game and only certain weapons could even have any effect against your foes. Bard’s Tale 3 balanced things a bit more since you could hit monsters (and they could hit you back), but the numbers were truly skewed by this point. In this version, the monsters did not have the insane numbers and lower level spells and items still were useful.
The worst two parts of the game are starting off and the maps. As I mentioned before, trying to survive at the beginning stages of the game can be a daunting task for a new player and with bad luck, you’ll find yourself more often dead after combat. The maps themselves aren’t terrible but mapping can be tedious. You might as well just have a clue book to save your sanity of having to draw out each one.
Overall, I’d recommend picking up this game if you’ve never played it just to see a piece of game history. As someone who has completed it, I don’t feel the grind as fun as say Bard’s Tale 3 (minus the stupid copyright protection code wheel). But it’s great seeing how some of the roots of the CRPG genre and where we’ve evolved from.
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