The Bard's Tale Review
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What was meant to be a searing hot stab of fun into the genre carried by a lighthearted tone quickly turns into a formulaic adventure at best and a mediocre action RPG at worst, with a character who is quick to recognize the genre's cliches but slow to overcome them. The game had many reasons to succeed, with an original premise and the production values to pull it off. One only needs to look at games like Grim Fandango, Discworld and Anachronox as excellent examples of actual intelligent humor handled by competent developers. But this simply isn't the case here. There's not a whole lot that saves the game from being a rather generic and shallow action romp, and even with three different endings and unlockable content you're still looking at a 10 hour main quest that only has simplistic combat to offer as its main gameplay draw. But perhaps worse than having erratic character development, convoluted design decisions, wonky interface, and drab and repetitive combat, it's assuming that it actually has good humor and assuming players will think the same.
In the end, the only punchline that The Bard's Tale ever manages to get right is that derivative design and boring gameplay can't be forgiven by intentions to improve the genre or puerile humor.
