The Bard’s Tale II: Destiny Knight continues the story of the first game. This time, however, your enemy is not the evil Mangar but the arch-mage, Lagoth Zanta. It seems that the evil arch-mage has taken a powerful artifact, the Destiny Wand, and divided it into seven sections. How it can be so powerful an artifact that it can be divided like that, I don’t know. The Destiny Wand had previously been responsible for peace and prosperity in the Realm for the past 700 years.
(Impressive.) Anyway, each piece of the wand has been placed inside one of seven different locations, ranging from towers to dungeons. Your job is to command a party of six adventurers whose goal is to find the seven pieces of the wand, reassemble it, and then defeat Lagoth.
Bard’s Tale II differs from the first game in a few ways. First of all you are not confined to one city as in the first game. You can explore a total of six different cities, each with its own dungeon or tower; a wilderness area; a fort; a crypt; and several other locations. Also added to the game is a new class: the arch-mage. You do have the typical places from the first game: the Roscoe’s Energy
Emporium, the Adventurer’s Guild, Garth’s Shoppe, the Review Board, and, of course, the many temples and taverns. But added to these are a Bank and Casino. Unfortunately Lagoth’s men carried off all the gold to the Casinos, so they are closed.
One of the more interesting changes is found in the dungeon levels. When you come to an area where you find a piece of the wand you enter into a “Snare.” The snare consists of a puzzle or riddle that must be solved within a time limit or else the whole party will perish. If successful you will obtain a wand piece and be one step closer to victory.
If you are familiar with the first Bard’s Tale you will immediately recognize the 1st person view of the town (or dungeon, etc.) and the list of characters. Nothing much has changed there, except for the character pictures. Another familiar aspect is the battle system. One of my favorite parts of the battle system, though, is typing in the four letter abbreviations for the spells. That beats Wizardry where you have to type in the WHOLE name of the spell. The spells have been updated, useless ones removed and some new ones inserted. Also the Bard songs have been updated.
One of my favorite aspects of this series of games is the ability to import characters from previous games. If you have not played the first game you can create your own party or use the pre-made party. If you have played through the first Bard’s Tale you can import your party right into this game. Not only that, you can even bring in a party from Ultima III or Wizardry. For me that adds to the familiarity and atmosphere as I use characters that I already know.
Although the graphics and sound are not groundbreaking (the only sound being at the beginning of the game) The Bard’s Tale is a fun RPG series that should not be overlooked. If you enjoy spending hours tromping, through dungeons, mapping out places, and killing hordes of monsters, this are a must!
