The Bard's Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled

 PlayStation 4
User Score
7.1

Mixed or average reviews- based on 16 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 16
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 16
  3. Negative: 3 out of 16

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  1. tomvs123
    May 4, 2020
    7
    A great parody of old-school (80's/90's) western RPGs while being a decent game mechanically. If that sounds interesting to you and you're up for some well-done crude and witty humor, then you'll have some fun with this one.

    You control The Bard, who's all about women, wine, and song, in that order. The Bard's main skill is that he can summon a variety of creatures and other beings,    A great parody of old-school (80's/90's) western RPGs while being a decent game mechanically. If that sounds interesting to you and you're up for some well-done crude and witty humor, then you'll have some fun with this one.

    You control The Bard, who's all about women, wine, and song, in that order. The Bard's main skill is that he can summon a variety of creatures and other beings, primarily to help fight. And to introduce our protagonist, the first thing we see him do is secretly summon a rat to scare a local barmaid, so that he can swoop in and remove it to get some female affection.

    The Bard is a smart guy, but frequently thinks with the wrong head or makes other not-so obvious mistakes that lands him (or others) in hot water later. Eerly on, he learns of a trapped princess and somewhat begrudgingly agrees to help free her, constantly weighing the pros of the promised riches and pleasures against the effort required to obtain these rewards.

    From there, you're off on your journey to save the princess, meeting many funny characters and encountering silly circumstances along the way.

    By far, the best part about this game is its comedic writing, and how it takes standard RPG tropes and scenarios and makes fun of them or turns them into something silly. And it does this while mostly remaining serious. It never gets to the level of nonsensical comedy for comedy's sake.

    The game mechanics are decent, but not deep at all. The most interesting mechanic is the summons, with you being able to eventually summon 16 differnt minions. Each has different abilities and strengths, such as having high health, ranged attacks, multi-enemy attacks, heals, etc. It was decent fun trying to find which set of summons worked best for situations. And you'll definietely need to think about each situation differently since the game difficulty is average by old-school standards, which means hard by today's standards.

    There's a small varity of weapons to choose from that also keeps the Bard's combat somewhat interesting. Shields and armor exist, but do very little. There's no inventory management in the game; it simply equips the best equipment automatically and auto-sells what you previously had on (keeping all of your weapon types separate). And every sellable-item you pick up is automatically sold. There are no equipment upgrade options: so no blacksmiths, socketed jems, magical enhancements, or anything like that.

    The only real usable item in the game is gems. These seem to be limited, found only in specific locations or as rewards for certain actions. Their primary use is to fully heal you, which I found to be required in certain situations. I was a little worried I'd run out, but ended up with over 100 unused gems by the end of the game.

    So this isn't a great game if you want something mechanically deep. Though if you just want to get to the next dialogue section to hear some more of the funny story and interesting characters, a simple combat system is all you need.    … Expand
  2. Lonit
    Sep 15, 2019
    7
    It's a pitty the camera is stuck in top down view.

    Still a solid RPG with a great soundtrack and funny dialogue

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  1. Hardcore Gamer
    Sep 28, 2017
    60
    With a patch to clean up the technical issues, The Bard’s Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled would be an incredible value. It’s a classic title that too few people played when it was new, cleaned up just enough to be visually acceptable, sold at a reasonable price. The game itself will take around twenty hours to polish off, depending on the difficulty level chosen and the dedication employed for finding the stat boosting tokens. When approaching this title, I was fully expecting to sing its praises for being the unappreciated gem that it is. It this edition’s current state that cannot be done with a clean conscious. Hopefully, InXile will take the time to address the bugs. Should they do so, this would be a title worth recommending to any one with a sense of humor and a desire to play a protagonist that deserves every piece of grief he receives.
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