Of all the Bard’s Tale series, Bard’s Tale 3 Thief of Fate is my absolute favorite. It no longer had Michael Cranford writing the series, which meant that the story felt less religious and slightly less potent. But the game play was more balanced and tight overall.
I will admit that when I started this game, I had a slight advantage where I imported my Bard’s Tale 2 team in. Already, I had been in my 100-200 level range with thousands of hit points and decent, high end gear. That meant the starter dungeon was fairly trivial and allowed me to progress far quicker than if I had started from scratch. However, even with my uber powerful party, I quickly found a few major problems, namely that leveling was a lot tougher and not having attributes in the now capped 30 level meant monsters would gain initiative over me.
Still, those deficiencies weren’t that horrible of a handicap. It just meant that I would be forced to grind harder and longer. But the grinding mechanics in the game felt a lot smoother than in previous games. I still had decent gear and my hit point and spell pools allowed me to overcome most adversaries. Even with perfect gear, attributes and high enough levels, you still would be threatened in the last domain but never to the point where the game became hopeless.
Obviously, combat plays the largest role in this game and you’ll face legions of monsters. You can gain a few big bonus quest XP boosts but those only come from completing each of the 6 zones and starting dungeon en route to fighting the big baddie. So you have to rely on waves of encounters to get enough levels to power through each zone as well as acquiring more powerful gear.
The game added two new classes in the geomancer and chronomancer, where one employed earth spells and could wear heavy armor while the other would consume your archmage but gain powers of time. The chronomancer is one of the absolutely necessary classes to advance into the end game so NEVER leave home with him.
On top of that, they improved upon the bard and turned the rogue into the star of the show next to the chronomancer. The biggest thing with the rogue was adding the critical hit capability after hiding in the shadows. Enemies in the distance would be decimated by a powerful rogue who could advance every round.
One thing I enjoyed was minimal in game puzzles compared to the stupid Snare of Death puzzles in Bard’s Tale 2. Although the hack-n-slash aspect was more enjoyable at the end compared to previous versions, you could eventually grow frustrated by the sheer monotony and volume of encounters. The worst part is when you want to leave the dungeon or are focused on solving the puzzle/boss encounter but get assaulted endlessly at every turn. You still have the option to run but it gets old fast.
I do miss having Garth’s Emporium and the spell regeneration stores. Down the line you’ll find a ton of equipment and maybe forced to create mules. While you do have some increased storage space on your characters, it’s just far easier to use a shop to hold your items. Also, gold in this game is practically meaningless beyond level advancement, healing and spell acquisition.
Spell regeneration is still a mega pain but the compensation is Harmonic Gems. Depending on the area, you can find these or Crystal Gems, which has a similar function except with charges. Otherwise, you’d have to rely on a Conjurer Staff for spell regeneration. After a few nuke spells, you’ll easily find yourself spell point starved.
I do like the fact that this game never imposes on you the need to use NPCs. Bard’s Tale 2 had a few sections that required empty party slots. Even though you could fill up your empty slots with summoned creatures, this method guarantees that certain party members would be missing on key experience. With Bard’s Tale 3, there is only one NPC that you can interact with and there’s no quest requirement to pick him up.
Unfortunately, my real fondness of this game was in the end game grind in Malefia where I could take my main characters and gain a ridiculous amount of experience. In some cases, I could power level a character from zero to hero. The game had no concept of minimal level requirements for gear which is great for twinking.
Beyond these elements though, the only parts I really hated about this game were the stupid copyright protection which involved a silly code wheel and dealing with maps. The copyright protection part still remains the worst and most annoying thing I’ve ever seen in a game just because losing the window or misreading the code means recasting an expensive teleport spell and then performing another lookup. And maps are just a pain to deal with in any game. Knowing where a key teleport or trap square are located means you need a separate screen or hint book open at all times to avoid screwing up and blowing your characters up or getting lost.
I really miss this style of game play. Sure, it’s mindless grinding but sometimes that’s all your really want to do at the end of the day.