The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut

i love the bard's tale remastered, funny entertaining and worth the coins. this is not! (got it on sale and still feel i was robbed). the game is buggy, the fighting is not intuitive and well it's a chore. i love old school RPG's this is a puzzle game desguised in a labyrith map of boring fights and annoying puzzles. your skills don't matter, your equipment doesn't matter and pretty much anything else doesn't matter. the music is good... i was looking for an old school RPG, not whatever this is pretending to be. Not for me, no thanks.

I'm not exactly someone who plays tons of classic dungeon crawlers. This is one of the first ones I'm trying out. That said, I think this game is really cool. First off you can play it with 3d movement instead of the blocky movement normal for dungeon crawlers. Maybe thats good for you or not but you can choose which way to play. The world is really quite stunning, although the graphics are somewhat dated they just look great. The voice acting in this game is also really good. What I like most is that this is just a good old fashioned high fantasy story. Combat is engaging, though the skills and masteries do take some getting used to. The enemies have various abilities for you to consider, and the grid based combat does keep the battles interesting as well. You get a party of adventurers and you can actually hire others and keep a bench roster and swap them out depending on what you need for a given quest. As I understand it, the story here is really quite long and I'm looking forward to it. I actually really recommend this one to anyone interested in this style of game.

I couldn't believe I hadn't written a review for this when I played it all those years ago, so here I am. I think I had this and the trilogy for a couple years before I finally saw that this 4th game was a modern version for the game (I hadn't wanted to play the older stuff and think I only had them because they cost a $1 or something and I talked myself into buying them then lol). Anyways, the game is absolutely beautiful and still looks good to this day, 7 years after release! Paired with the top notch soundtrack and sound effects, the ambiance/atmosphere for TB4 stands shoulder to shoulder with the best RPGs out there. Being pretty to look at and listen to is one thing but the real meat and potatoes of the game is everything else. The gameplay itself -exploration, combat, story, secrets- are all marvelously done and chock full of content in each aspect. I found myself exploring every nook and cranny and fighting every fight I could to find whatever secrets and equipment I could as well as trying out different combinations of party members and gear. There were so many things to discover that I never had a moment where there wasn't something new to find. I'm not sure how the en…

Sounds like music to my ears. I did not rightly know what awaited me when I started out with this game. Having watched CohhCarnage play this back on release I did not really remember much of anything of the story or the world. I mostly remembered scenes and a bit of the combat. So when I bought the game the title very much put me in the mood of a poppy, light hearted adventure like the bards like to tell it. Colour me surprised when the story starts with a religious riot and what amounts to a lynching. Now don´t get me wrong, Bard´s Tale 4 is by no means a grimdark story of misery and woe but it also does not pull its punches when it comes to the plot. The world is very much typical medieval fantasy but with some good twists to the formula and a nice seasoning of Irish folklore to set it apart from a lot of the other games in its genre. And one major part of its style is of course the music. Everywhere you music will be your companion, may it be raucous battle themes with chanting warriors or women and children singng together. This gives it a very alive feeling and encourages you to just sit a minute and listen. The game is not especially pretty but offers some lovely scens …

A flawed masterpiece. There's so much to love here and it's very, very obvious that it was created with a LOT of love. It makes me sad that only about 25% of the players have made it past the first boss, there's so, so much more after that. So much beautiful art and so much beautiful music that it's a shame that more people haven't seen it. However, this game has it's issues. It is an INCREDIBLY slow burn. The story really doesn't get going until quite a while in. It's a dungeon crawler at it's heart and feels very much like the slog that the original Bard's Tale games were. Also, I have to ding it a bit for the combat. I dislike games that give you a bazillion options in your skill tree, but then only allow you to utilize a slight handful. It kills experimenting and flexibility. I found a working combination and pretty much stayed with it for almost the entire game. I'm also a fan of open world-type games, but the level size on this is insane. It felt like it would take forever to get to the next waypoint for the story. 90 hours in and I still skipped a couple of optional quests. So, to sum up. Awesome artwork, decent story line (specially if you're familiar with the series)…

Firmly "okay". Weirdly, the standard edition was much more to my liking. While the Director's Cut improved a handful of things, the standard edition had far more combat challenge potential at higher difficulties. The Director's Cut also seems to have cut a number of plot delivery points and chatter among the party NPCs, which is baffling to have done. Or maybe they just broke them. This version is also WILDLY more unstable than the original. I had to save every fight and every time I zoned in this version or risk losing all my progress. Just grab the standard edition, it's better.