Bard’s Tale 3: A Re-Re-Review

With Diablo 4’s expansion coming up, I decided to take a break from that grind and look into another game. I did give Ultima 6 another shot but found myself getting frustrated with an abomination of an interface (yes, I’m getting old) and decided to look for something else to temporarily absorb my attention. Since I haven’t touched Bard’s Tale 3 in a while and wanted a grind, I decided to pull out that game from my Gog.com library and give a try on my newer gaming laptop.

Since I haven’t touched this game in a very long time, I could not remember what I had done. I ended up using a saved game, which I guess was on the Gog.com cloud. It contained the default party from the updated Bard’s Tale remastered series (from the Apple II version). What makes this setup nice is that they already have completed the entire game, although oddly they’re sitting right after the defeat of Tarjan. So you need to step a few feet ahead to get teleported back to the starting zone. Anyway, this party also has a lot of good starting gear as well as all the artifacts needed for the various zone quests.

In all likelihood, most people probably will want to create their own party, which is what I had done. I was about to create a whole new group but I discovered that I had some of my own characters from the last time I had played. Sifting through that bunch, it looked like I was slowly grinding things out in the starter dungeons. However, I had plucked off a lot of the default party’s gear to give myself a minor boost. The party hovered around level 9, which isn’t a bad level but you can’t go too deep into the Brilhasti dungeon since you’ll probably get clobbered, even with the twink gear. Another thing I found out was that I had a third mage that looked like an accidental creation.

I decided to salvage what I could and try grinding out a level or two along with creating a new character to fix the accidental one. Eventually, I hit a wall where the amount of experience to level up was becoming super annoying compared to where I wanted to be. So I used the old INWO trick from the Apple II “bug/cheat” that allows a party to gain 600k XP when they have another character who already had completed the starter dungeon. This helped get me a nice push as I wanted to get my mages to a top Archmage level with all spells and eventually convert one into a Chronomancer with a few levels as a head start.

The problem is that once you get into the first zone, you’ll probably struggle a bit if you aren’t at least level 35 per character. There’s a lot of nasty encounters early on where you need tons of high damaging spells and AoE and only Archmages with Mangar’s Mallet can really dish out enough punishment to make those fights go faster. Even then, you need high level Archmages to be able to counter monsters’ spell resistances. So you need a bit of an advantage early on, especially if you didn’t grind enough in the starter dungeon to get all the gear.

The thing with my initial experience ages ago was that I had very high level characters that I imported with top notch gear. The only things they were missing were higher level attributes because of the pre-Bard’s Tale 3’s cap of 18 per. So at least, my spells didn’t encounter as much resistance and my damage was either good or with critical hits. Here, I was getting pummeled from being low level and missing out on key pieces of gear.

That issue really became apparent in the Gelidia zone. I tried to boost my Chronomancer to level 13 to acquire Fatal Fist (FAFI) but her level was too low to really belt out enough damage at times. The most frustrating fight ended up being the Grey Wizards in the Grey Tower. I managed to beat them after a few tries but it was really annoying and I did have several characters die. Along the way, I got really annoyed with all the constant encounters that ate up my spells. After acquiring the lens from the Grey Tower, I took a small break and came back later in the evening with a different strategy.

That strategy was to use the pre-made party’s Chronomancer and take my party (minus my Chronomancer) into Tenebrosia to acquire the NUKE spell and Minstrel’s Shield song. I was a little skeptical initially because I wasn’t certain how effective I could be at that low of a level and lacking gear. Luckily, the Chronomancer already had the NUKE spell so it was a matter of rushing to the Wizard’s Guild to buy that spell and grind a little bit to gain some levels and higher level gear. Most of the time, I relied on my higher level Archmage to nuke everything down. What’s nice about Tenebrosia is that you’ll find the bulk of your end game gear here as well as tons of Harmonic Gems and Crystals. And once you have an Archmage that can reliably nuke large pacts of monsters, you should be able to gain a good number of levels.

I did go back to Lucencia to pick up the Divine Intervention spell (DIVE) and Kiel’s Overture song as well as make an attempt to find any key pieces of gear that I was missing. Unfortunately, I think the bulk of the good stuff are in the dungeons, so I couldn’t find a lot so far. But at this stage, I’m in much better shape than I was before.

That said, I was thinking just how much of a pain in the ass that Gelidia zone was along with certain areas like in Arboria where you’d get tortured by stupid shit like darkness zones, anti-magic spots, silence, etc. The worst parts are slogging through long dungeons with endless encounters and not being able to just get the fuck out of the place easily. It just felt really tedious and soul crushing at times.

Probably, the worst offender in all of this is that stupid copy protection code wheel. It’s such a real pain in the ass to deal with. It was garbage when it first came out and should have been removed with the re-mastered version. I don’t get how this managed to stay in because it seems buggy at times and the only code wheels that I found working are the ones that had some sort of svg version. Then you have all the disk swapping. Why? I get that the game managed to do some sort of emulation layer to give you the original flavor of the game but it’s such a pain in the ass. Couldn’t they have figured out by this stage of technology how to hack around these things?

Honestly, if it weren’t for the pre-made party and INWO cheat, I would’ve flat out quit. I never forgot what a nightmare it was dealing with the mapping and all the issues with the various traps and endless encounters. But there’s a lot of really poor guides out there that don’t really provide much value. The old official cluebook has to be one of the worst things ever written. They provided maps and hints but the way a lot of it was written was through a worthless, boring story with terrible characters and dialog you had to wade through just to figure out what you needed to do. I remember during one play through, I got seriously jammed and had to call up their hint hotline because the clue book was garbage.

But why am I doing this to myself? Why go backwards to ancient games when there’s supposedly better on the market? Well, to be frank, I don’t think games are really that much better. Maybe the graphics are better but one thing I’ve come to realize is that game makers really enjoy making your life a pain in the ass. But it’s interesting looking at older stuff and comparing it to contemporary games and seeing how equally bad things were back then. And this was considered one of my favorite games at one point!

I suppose though to answer the original question I have to admit that I miss the simple grind. The stuff I enjoy are the mindless “A-A-B-4-H-D-C-NUKE-D” actions then seeing 10k+ XP pop up along with a few key items.

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