Released: Dec 31, 1986
Version played: The Bard’s Tale Trilogy (2018)

I do not have much to say about The Bard’s Tale II.

The Destiny Knight is not a bad game, but it is a much worse game than its predecessor, despite key steps forward in basically every area. There are more dungeons, there are more towns, more puzzles and more story. By which I mean there’s like three lines of story. But one of them is a plot twist! That ain’t nothing in 1986.

And it’s a game that feels like it never ends. Not just because it is much longer, but because every battle is harder and more involved. There’s no push and pull, no difficulty spikes and cliffs, the tightening of the balance between your party and the enemies has somewhat unintuitively made the game much worse.

How much slack should you give your players is a question that can never be resolved, for every player is different. Some want to grind and overpower the whole game, some want to be challenged in every fight. I tend to prefer a mix of both, with a leaning towards easier individual fights when the challenge is dungeon exploration and resource management, and tough mechanical puzzles of skill and knowledge in boss fights. I am a simply raised by Final Fantasy, I am who I am. The Destiny Knight instead greatly expands the enemies options while not really giving you many more tools to deal with them. There is a final Archmage class, and it’s helpful, but its tools are nowhere near enough to walk over the mobs here, spread out as they are among 90’ sized battlefields. This means every fight you have to be at the top of your game, and these dungeons go on forever. If Dragon Quest is no mechanics and all pacing, the language of the genre repurposed to punctuate and heighten moments along a simple hero’s journey then The Destiny Knight is the exact opposite, a gruelling monotomous slog.

The dungeon design is actually greatly improved, with the increased number of dungeons meaning each can be designed around its own mechanical gimmick. There are some really fucking terrible dungeons in here, but they are identifiably terrible, in a Zeldaesque way. No one likes the one where you can’t use magic. But at the same time, there’s a dungeon where you can’t use magic.

Each dungeon culminates in a Trial, which is one of those 80s sequel ideas that people call experimental when trying to be nice. These are part riddle-solving, part exploration, part combat and sometimes part plain old luck. The riddles are so much more obtuse than in the first game that in this modern age you will simply be looking these up 80% of the time, but even that can’t help much when a Trial requires you to complete a series of steps seven times in a row with no feedback that it’s working til the entire process is complete. I like to think of myself as open hearted when it comes to playing old games, and I think I certainly am, but sometimes you have to summon your inner Angry Video Game Nerd. What, indeed, were they thinking?

I did not finish this one, though not for lack of trying. The wonderful PC Engine version, with a full soundtrack and beautiful spritework finally got a fan translation recently so I made it my version of choice, but the further I got into the game the more and more it just would not stop crashing. And it broke my heart, because this game is really damn good.

It does not make a particularly strong first impression. The choice to make the entire world, essentially, one contiguous dungeon initially felt offputting to me. Ultima may have shallow dungeon crawling and kind of crappy combat but the one thing it had, the thing that Dragon Quest knew to steal almost 1 for 1, is the abstracted overworld. Dungeon Crawling isn’t so much an activity done inside a dungeon so much as it is a gameplay style that evokes a certain tone and mood. Wizardry’s first person perspective, the inability to see what is mere steps away, create an ever present anxiety and tension that is not present in that game when you’re going shopping. In Might and Magic, you have to individually map out every single town and even inside their walls aren’t safe from random encounters. There’s towns, dungeons and castles – all connected by a massive overworld, and every moment takes place from the perspective of the desperate first person crawl.

It leads to a game that is slow and deliberate – some might say tedious – but I started to be won over after I gained my first few levels and visited the tavern to listen to the local rumours.

The Bard’s Tale had puzzles, but its hints were cryptic riddles, that feel like they encourage a more collective style puzzle solving that persists through the genre to this day. Might of Magic is far more direct; the game is the antithesis of Dragon Quest in every way and yet the one thing it shares is the clarity of communication when it comes to what to do next. You are rewarded very directly for talking to everyone, exploring the towns to their fullest. The overworld is littered with signs pointing you on your way. If you pay attention, Fast Travel isn’t just convenient and easy but neccessary for avoiding the dangerous monsters that lurk in the wilds. Once you get used to its rhythms, Might and Magic is ultimately not a Dungeon Crawler in the literal sense – when everything is a dungeon, nothing is – you aren’t descending through a linear progression you’re crisscrossing your way through a vast and open world with your smarts and inginuity as much as you are with your sword.

Not to say your sword isn’t important. Combat has far more in battle complexity than anything I’ve played so far, and while the game allows for tons of freedom in party composition (even dynamic multi-party playthroughs are supported, as you can rest different characters in different inns all over the game world), it is clearly intended and balanced for six characters of the six classes avaliable. Battles are tough from the start and you are immediately out-numbered and out-classed by the foes the game send your way. There is no easing you in. Yet you gain power relatively quickly, and with a couple of levels and a few good equipement slots you can hold your own and make progress through encounters that seem completely unwinnable at first blush. It’s certainly time consuming but incredibly satisfying, which is really a summation of the entire game.

Which brings us back to the start and the tragic reality of these old western RPGs. Ultima is owned by EA, and Might and Magic owned by Ubisoft. These companies are absolutely never going to give a fuck enough to port them to modern storefronts beyond letting GOG host DOS roms, let alone to preserve all the various versions from the wild west years before PC development simply meant Windows. I couldn’t have known when I started, but the fanpatch I used was ultimately too unstable and eventually was crashing every ten minutes. The translation was pretty poor throughout and there were definitely occasional moments of garbled characters and unclear text. These games are important, I’m going back and playing them because I believe that in my heart, and it is wild to me how little respect for the history of these things there is. The Bard’s Tale trilogy is a great exception, but it only exists because of a kickstarter. The situation is a little better with JRPGs but only with the flagship franchises of companies that still exist. I tried to get Xanadu working as it is unquestionably a pivotal moment in the development of pre-Dragon Quest RPGs and simply could not do it.

We’re not exactly talking rarities here. These are some of the most successful games of one of the most popular genres in the the medium’s short history. It’s a crying shame. I imagine we will continue to run into these roadblocks all the way through the 2000s as I make this journey. But shout out to all the unpaid volunteers who develop emulators, fanpatches, romhacks and the like and actually keep this history alive. You the real heroes here.

One final note: if your twist is that your fantasy story is secretly sci fi I will be ultimately sad that I had to play the game with kings and thees and thous when I could have been on a fuckin spaceship the whole time. No need to play coy with me.

Released: Dec 31, 1985
Version played: The Bard’s Tale Trilogy (2018)

I fell into The Bard’s Tale like a black hole. Twenty hours on the first game alone. When I closed my eyes I could see the grids of Skara Brae. When I sat in silence I could hear the spell sound effect clipping over itself as it activated 96 times in a row. I made a party. It wasn’t right. I subbed in some new guys and benched some old. I class changed my Mages through the perfect sequence of the four magical classes, and for my foresight was rewarded with three death dealing Wizards on the back row. We mapped the town, we solved the riddles (I had to google less than I thought, honestly!), and we freed Skara Brae from its icy confinement; yet honestly I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

The Bards Tale takes Wizardry and expands it to bursting like it was a balloon. It’s a very modern feeling successor. By which I mean the processes of streamlining rough edges while expanding scope and featureset was as much a part of video games in the 80s as it is today. We didn’t just forget about the Purity of Design overnight and decide to make Assassin’s Creed 23; this is how we got there. This is the path we were always on. Wizardry is, as I said when I played it, a perfect game. Not in that it’s the greatest game ever made but that it is elemental in its design. Nothing could be removed, nothing taken away. It was born whole.

So here comes The Bards Tale to cram, as I understand it, pretty much the entire rest of D&D in here. The class list is significantly larger, and the variance between each even greater. There are more status effects, more spells, more synergies, more enemies and more dungeon. You’re not descending down into the depths, you’re exploring the cellars and catacombs and castles and keeps of Skara Brae, and as such for how similar it is (the core really is identical) it could not feel more different. This is a game where you are free to adventure, explore, experiment with builds and party composition, find the most efficent grinding spots and just generally break it over your knee. The cost and risk of resurrection has been significantly reduced. Death is a timesink, but not a catastrophe. It is a minor offset. And hey you’ll get some more levels getting that money back.

This is not a mistake. The game is not “unbalanced,” it is invitingly uneven. It has weaknesses, and it wants you to exploit them; discovering them is half of the fun. It is not a game of min-maxing so much as it is a game that delights in the discovery of what the boundaries of min and max truly are. Frustrated with my damage output, I take my useless goddamn rogue out of my party and replace him with a brand new level 1 conjourer. She starts out useless but I’m fairly sure if I keep her alive long enough she’ll catch up… before you know it I can cast three group destroying spells in a single turn. It’s fucking over for those 99 skeletons.

The same applies in reverse. This is the joy of the RPG, what makes it such a compelling framework from the earliest days of the medium til it will one day burns with the rest of us, an RPG is a system that provides a framework for expression and discovery within a certain possibility space. Alright, I destroyed the game with three mages; how would all melee classes do? Can you beat Dark Souls level at 1 when every enemy is Manus? Click now to watch my hardcore nuzlocke stream of Radical Red; whenever a pokemon faints I get kicked in the balls. If it speaks to a flaw in our nature that what we largely do with these systems as participants of art is find the path of least resistance then it speaks to the opposite that the challenge run persists, that the drive is there forty years ago in The Bard’s Tale as it is today in Elden Ring.

I certainly won’t be doing anything like that but The Bard’s Tale was like having water thrown on my face, being reminded of what RPGs actually are. As I journey further through this forest of RPGs I will let go of the quest for perfection. Sometimes you need to roll a weird party, worst that can happen is they can’t clear. That’s okay.

The most exciting moment of the whole game was when I unlocked the spell “Phase Door,” and suddenly my entire relationship with the dungeons, with the grid at the heart of the game binding everything together, suddenly and irrevocably changed. I could remove the wall. I could make my own shortcuts. In a single moment, previously impassable obstacles became trivialities and I understood the scope of possibility that The Bard’s Tale was dealing with. A rugpull moment like that can only work once or twice before the entire structure of the game falls out beneath itself, and The Bard’s Tale shows restraint in just how far you can break it, but it’s not afraid to introduce mechanics that completely rewrite fundemental rules of the world; and make experimenting with them its core mode of play. The joy of Dungeons and Dragons now avaliable on your computer.

Released: Sep 01, 1981
Version played: Digital Eclipse Remake (2024)

On the very first floor of the very first Wizardry game, in a corridor shrouded in mystical darkness, there is a small room that is impossible to see from the outside. In that room is a grumpy Wizard, and he does not want to be interrupted. He demands you begone, and instantly teleports you back to town. In mechanical terms, this is a simple shortcut that lets you warp out near the elevator rather than journey the now unthreatening first floor. It could have been a simple warp point, the game has tons of them after all. But instead it’s a man. You can’t talk to him and find out what he’s doing down here. He always sends you away.

Wizardry is basically perfect. The RPG emerges in digital form essentially fully formed, they are still making games that are just fucking Wizardry. But even beyond that, the amount of games and genres that share the core loop of tense exploration leading to difficult combat with the release of returning safely to town to upgrade and do it all over again are so numerous that it is not inaccurate to claim that Wizardry is video games. The sense of atmosphere as you take every step is overbearing and purely mechnical; it’s no wonder this game was such a sensation with wireframe graphics and no music whatsoever. And yet it is the Wizard in the cupboard that is the standout moment. It’s never dwelled on, never explained, but it is the seed that will flourish into something unimaginable at the time. Wizardry’s gameplay loop may be the bones of the genre, but that strange man is the heart; anything could be down here.

This is Shin Megami Tensei, this is Dungeon Meshi, this is Earthbound, this is Pokemon and this is Dark Souls. This is Planescape Torment, this is Binding of Isaac and this is Morrowind. This is why people play Dungeons and Dragons in real life, this is the worth of a good Dungeon Master, a moment of pure authorship that takes the experience beyond the mechanical. After this moment, you never know what could be on the next tile, and you’re never sure where the boundaries are.

Unfortunately, Wizardry reserves these moments for its early floors. The first half of the game is somewhat of a test from Trebor, as you explore every crevice to find keys and statues that ultimately unlock the keys to the elevator that takes you down to Werdna’s lair. It is immensely satisfying to put the pieces together, to map out the dungeon physically and understand how information in one place grants you access to somewhere new on an entirely different floor. Wizardry is also Resident Evil, by the way, it really is every video game.

After recieving the Blue Ribbon and delving down towards the endgame there is disappointingly little to discover. There are no more key items, and if you already know where to go then the spot where you unlock the Blue Ribbon is around 20 or so tiles from the final Boss Rush. The only thing to discover are dead ends, the only thing to do is fight, and the only rewards come from random drops. It is a disappointingly weak second half from a game that starts out so incredibly strong and satisfying, but I can forgive it since they were inventing RPGs after all and also the second half being full of reused content and nowhere near as intricate as the first half is a time honored tradition that the genre continues til this very day.

But those first few hours are genuinely a miracle, and this is a game I think everyone should play at least once. To see how complete it already is, how little has changed in over 40 years, and how totally engrossing it can be when you give yourself over to the dungeon.