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[firstfrost]

I'm playing The Bard's Tale on PS2, and it's adorable! It's snide, sarcastic, mocks the genre... and does it well. One of the big temptations when putting a choice between nice dialogue (which in this case is "sarcastic but vaguely amenable") and snarky dialogue in a game is that it's easy to make the nice choice always the right one. Not the case here - sometimes you want to browbeat NPCs into dropping their prices, or they'll think you're a wuss if you're too nice, or whatever.

Some of my favorite bits:

• You're essentially in a running argument with the narrator (who is sort of hoping that you'll lose, because he thinks you're a jerk. Which you are.). You loot the chest in a house, and the narrator is appalled - you explain to him that nobody cares, and they just leave stuff around in chests all the time. You kill a wolf and all sorts of treasure falls out - the narrator decides that makes no sense, he's going to skip those paragraphs in the future, and thereafter all you get are wolf pelts (and the occasional picnic basket).
• As you go along, you run across the mangled corpses of (or arrive just in time to see get killed) the Chosen One(s) who have been pursuing your quest. Each time, you happily loot the bodies of their valuables, and then three goblins arrive and start the song-and-dance number "It's bad luck to be you" about the hapless victim. They sing for a while, and then run off.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that the monsters all regenerate, yeah. But I find the combat about my level of tactical competence, so it's not too annoying yet. :)