YMMV / The Bard's Tale Trilogy

• Anti-Climax Boss: Mangar will rarely pose a threat to a party strong enough to reach him, unless they've been severely weakened along the way. Sure he and his cohorts throw one-hit kills at you, but they're all vulnerable to one-hit kills themselves. Averted in the 2018 remaster, however. Not only is Mangar much more resistant to magic, but the addition of range means you'll have a very hard time hitting him with anything, since he'll be well out of your reach, making him a genuine threat.
• Arc Fatigue: Bard's Tale II is significantly longer than the first game, and its plot is considerably more repetitive: go into dungeon, grind through to last level, kill (usually rather generic) boss monster, solve Snare, pick up Plot Coupon, get told what dungeon to go to next. Rinse and repeat.^note In the first game, each dungeon followed logically from the clues you picked up and the progression of the plot as a whole, and major encounters actually felt meaningful. This all starts to blur together after a while, and some people feel the whole game, good as it may be, just drags on for too long. It arguably reaches its nadir in the fourth dungeon, Dargoth's Tower: five interminable levels packed full of gratuitously annoying dungeon features (identical-room labyrinths, mazes of one-way walls, teleporter spam, large darkness-and-antimagic zones full of traps and spinners, etc.) which contribute nothing meaningful to the plot but only serve to make exploration and mapping as difficult and frustrating as possible. The Grey Crypt is a close second; it's made up entirely of a single giant anti-magic zone, so you have to fight through your encounters with your melee characters, rather than your spellcasters. It's not that you can't, it's just that it's incredibly slow doing it this way.
• Fridge Brilliance: At first it may seem that, in the second game, Lagoth Zanta was attempting a MacGuffin Delivery Service with the party, only for it to backfire on him spectacularly, but this falls apart when you remember he was the one who broke the wand up and hid it in the first place. More likely, he was hoping the Snares would do in any adventurers who would embark on the quest. When your group manages to score the final piece in the Destiny Stone, he makes a last-ditch attempt to make your party act in haste by subtly implying a threat to the Sage who's been helping you.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Wither Fist was cast by typing WIFI.
• Porting Disaster
  • The 16-bit (Amiga and MS-DOS) version of Thief of Fate was notoriously terrible, with a slow and clumsy interface seemingly implemented by someone who never actually played any of the games. This was compounded by rampant bugs, magic items that didn't work, broken spell effects, crippled combat bard songs, monsters with ineffectual attacks, and a massively increased random encounter frequency that many people just found impossible to play through. (There is a fan-made patch available for the MS-DOS version which fixes many of the problems with it.) The portraits also looked quite hideous, which is probably why the remastered Trilogy went with the 8-bit portraits for this game, rather than the 16-bit portraits the other two games used.
  • The NES version of the first game was extremely dumbed down and a lot was lost to the port. Dungeons are much less complex, only two of the four spellcaster classes were available, and the combat was far more akin to a jRPG than to the original game. The fact that the game also suffered from censorship, as was standard for NES games^note Wine became grape juice, just as an example didn't help matters. Given that the NES port of Wizardry was near perfect, and even the NES port of Pool of Radiance was mostly faithful, this is especially jarring.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The Destiny Knight was famously much, much harder than the first game, with its timed death puzzles, cryptic clues, and vastly more powerful monsters.
• That One Boss: Lagoth Zanta in II. He himself isn't that tough, but he summons sixty(!) Balder Guards to assist him. These are the most powerful enemies in the game aside from Lagoth Zanta himself. They instant kill anything they hit, they have very powerful breath attacks that can hit for 300+ damage a pop, and they can tank multiple Mangar's Mallets. The only upside is that the character you select as the Destiny Knight will lose spell points if he takes a hit that would kill him, rather than dying. Hope he has a lot of spell points!
• That One Level: The Grey Crypt in Bard's Tale II, where the entire dungeon is an anti-magic zone. It's especially bad because the game's combat system heavily favors magic over physical attacks, and most of the time your fighters are just there to be meat shield protection for the casters.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Bard's Tale III was the only installment not written by Michael Cranford, and had a number of stylistic differences. Besides being more heavily plot-driven, some of the game mechanics as well as the look and feel were subtly changed. This was especially true in the 16-bit version, whose interface looked superficially similar to that of the previous games, but functioned differently in awkward and arbitrary ways. The graphical style was also somewhat different, and had fewer variations for characters, monsters, buildings, and dungeon interiors.
  • On the other hand, there are those who feel that Bard's Tale II was monotonous and frustrating, and that III was (in spirit at least) something of a return to form.