The Bard's Tale - 20/20 hours

I waited to talk about the story until this post because I was certain that I would reach the end of the game before the 20 hours came up. The Bard's Tale just seems like that sort of game, and if it were made today, it likely would have been 10 hours long and super easy. But it was made in 2004, and you couldn't trim the fat from a game back then. People would riot.

If I were playing purely for pleasure, I think I'd like The Bard's Tale's length. There's a lot of padding - unnecessary backtracking through dungeons, maps that have useless empty space, and gimmick missions (like when you're trapped on an ice floe) that start out fun, but wear out their welcome by dragging on and on - but in a certain sense, padding is the game. You're hacking through monsters, exploring caves, and managing your summoned creatures. That's the stuff you want to be doing.

Or, at least, that's ordinarily the case. The best part of The Bard's Tale is the cutscenes, and given the length of the dungeons, it sometimes feels like the good stuff is being carefully rationed, like I'm not allowed to enjoy dessert before I finish all my vegetables.

Because The Bard's Tale can be very funny. Like there's this runner throughout the whole game about "Chosen Ones," people who have seen the chaos in the world and risen to the occasion to act heroically . . . only to fail miserably (and often fatally) because they don't have The Bard's worldliness and unique skills. And that's funny enough in a cynical way (The Bard always vigorously denies being a "Chosen One" himself), but then sometime these goblin creatures will pop up and sing an Oompa Loompa-style song about how the Chosen Ones have failed and The Bard is doomed to follow in their footsteps. And they have never failed to crack me up.

Where the story becomes tricky is in the character of The Bard himself. The game is always very explicit that The Bard is a contemptible anti-hero, only in this for money, fame, and the promise of sex with the princess, and, indeed, NPCs and plot points will heap degradation and scorn on him as a constant reminder that just about everybody thinks he's a twerp. He even has a delightfully antagonistic relationship with The Narrator, breaking the fourth wall to trade barbs with the disembodied voice that describes his actions (and which gives as well as it gets, often with withering sarcasm). Indeed, I'd say that the relationship between the Bard and the Narrator is the emotional core of the game. It doesn't hurt that the two characters each have stellar voice acting that really sells their fucked-up chemistry.

However, if we're looking at the arc of the plot as a whole, then it looks poised to give The Bard everything he wants. And that's kind of gross. I mean, he explicitly says that the only reason he's trying to save the princess is because she promised to have sex with him, and now he's really close to saving the princess and nothing about the game suggests his motivation has changed. There's probably some big plot twist coming that will pull the rug out from under him, but it's coming late enough in the game that I'm starting to have my doubts about the sharpness of the satire. For all his complaining and general scumminess, The Bard never actually refuses the call to adventure, and thus it sometimes feels like I'm seeing a thin coating of anti-hero over an otherwise bog standard rpg protagonist.

I suppose that could be the satire. That your typical rpg hero could easily be framed as a lecherous amoral mercenary with only a little effort. But I think a more likely explanation is that parody tends to be an example of the thing its parodying, and the writers didn't give as much attention to the plot and setting as they did to The Bard's between mission banter.

Because you've got to have those long, time-wasting dungeons somehow, and a plot parody might accidentally force you to try something novel with the gameplay.

That being said, I really enjoyed my time with The Bard's Tale. Doing 20 hours in 3 days was only about 25% me trying to free room up in my schedule to drag my feet on Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It is exactly the sort of game I used to play obsessively on my days off, before I started the blog.

I'm almost tempted to keep playing the game until I get to the end. I'm on chapter 12 (out of 13), but I hesitate because I'm pretty sure those last two chapters will take 5-8 hours, and I'm pretty eager to start Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes so I can get to procrastinating as soon as possible.

It's very likely that I will one day return to The Bard's Tale, after all this blog business is done. I'll probably start a fresh save file, so I can use a guide and get all the treasure chests and secret dungeons I missed, but that won't be a hardship. Excessive padding is only a problem when you have other things to do.