Thirty five years after booting up a floppy disk and embarking on a journey through frozen streets, seedy taverns, and complex mazes of catacombs and castles, my party of six adventurers and one monster have defeated the evil mage Mangar atop his tower, freeing Skara Brae from his wintry curse.
So for the record, my first run on this game in 1986 put my party only one and a half levels away from this victory. I had no idea back then that I was close, and the cantankerous old Commodore 64 floppy disk version probably discouraged me from finishing more than the distraction of new games as mentioned in my previous blog entries, I have concluded.
The old version only allowed for saving at the adventurer's guild back in town. In the remaster, one can save anywhere, which ends the frustration of making a little progress for a few minutes before heading back through the dungeon and back to town to save.
Especially in those last few levels of Mangar's Tower, there are enemies which can insta-kill a party member by turning them to stone, which, while being reversable by a magic spell, still results in a corpse. So why did the designers add a spell to un-stone a character when it only removes that effect and leaves a corpse anyway? Just to save the expense when you drag their corpse back to the healers in town, I guess. Those helpful but expensive monks will charge for both services while chanting the same thing the monks in Monty Python's Holy Grail.
Everything in the remaster is sleeker, faster, and streamlined to remove the hardware-based difficulty and frustration of the original, distilling the difficulty back to its core elements - cautious exploring, meticulous mapping, lore-based puzzles, and enjoyable strategy-intense turn-based combat. The pacing is perfect - if one explores each and every dungeon level rather than rushing through to the stairs to the next level, the party will level up to the challenges of the current area.
The automap saves one a lot of legwork in cracking this classic beast of an RPG. It has shown me that most of my old maps had missing or misunderstood parts to them, but for the most part those maps and accompanying notes were good to go as a helpful tool through most of this campaign. The automap was not present in the original version, and in the remaster serves not only to map the game, but to allow the use of the magic spells right through the map rather than having to close it and then cast the spell one needs.
If the party is teleported unexpectedly, for example, one can cast the Scry Site spell right in the map to see where they were teleported to. The best part of this is the party teleport spell working within the automap, saving the player the work of plotting out on graph paper maps the x,y,z destination coordinates. Here, one just scrolls through the levels and moves a cursor before pressing Y to use the spell to get there. Of course, there are areas and even whole levels where these spells do not work, by design.
Also useful was the decades of game experience I've had since then. Thirty five years ago I was a less experienced gamer and these dungeons were intimidating and their mechanics sometimes obtuse. Since then, I've played many more RPGs and learned how one's party of adventurers can encounter weird effects when dungeon crawling, and to use all of the game's resources to their fullest. I did not know that the late-game master key, which saves a lot of time toward the end of the game, also prevents the party from getting turned around when they step on a spinner square trap. A trip to Roscoe's to get it analyzed revealed that helpful tip.
The final battle against Mangar was epic and took a few tries, as he summons more Demon Lords. Finally, I figured out a way to take him out with only losing a few party members. After the victory, I returned to that last level to map out everything I had missed, only to discover an additional item that might have been helpful for that final battle. Oh well, a win is a win.
I cannot thank inXile entertainment and their team enough for this remastered version. If their goal was to craft a lovingly faithful yet modernized and accessible version of the classic that would reach one old gamer like me and recreate the joy of playing the original, then mission accomplished. At the end, back at the Adventurer's Guild, the menu now offers a launching point to start The Bard's Tale 2: The Destiny Knight, and I have no doubt that I will return for a rematch on that one later in life.
And finally, thanks to Barry Ledbetter and Andy Kiss, hopefully out there somewhere, for their assistance in the first campaign all those years ago. The maps and notes were an unbelievable help in getting through the whole thing this time. When I create my great assembly of game maps, their assistance will be noted as well.
The Bard's Tale Trilogy Remastered is the quintessential Bard's Tale, and I will never be that much of a purist to where I feel my accomplishment in beating the first game is diminished somehow by its streamlined mechanics. It is still fun, challenging, and stands as a shining example of how to bring old games to modern times.
