DESCRIPTION

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight is a classic role-playing game originally written for Amiga, PC, Apple, and Commodore 64. In this game, the party learns from the wizard Saradon about the Destiny Wand. It is a magical wand that symbolizes peace and prosperity in the world. Attempting world domination, the archmage Lagoth Zanta brokethe wand into seven parts, all hidden away deep in dungeons full of monsters and riddles. Your goal is to find the seven pieces and reforge the wand, and ultimately defeat Lagoth Zanta.

To start, you must create your party of up to seven people, from a multitude of different classes and races. You build up their levels and strengths through items and experience, and you can even have monsters in the party in place of characters. When spell-casting classes advance to a certain point, classes such as wizard, sorceror, and archmage become available. From there, the game is very open-ended and progresses in whatever manner the party likes. The graphics consist of a pseudo-3D screen in the top left where you see buildings and monsters in front of you, as in Might and Magic, a text scroll on the top right where information such as treasure found, combat, and spells cast are found; the entire bottom half of the screen consists of character information such as current hit points, magic points, and armor class. Selecting a character in the party brings up that character's own screen with more detailed information such as current experience and equipment.

The party progresses through mazelike dungeons, six towns, and the wilderness, in grids of 22 x 22 "rooms." There are puzzles to be solved to progress deeper into dungeons, keys to be found to get into new dungeons, and of course monsters to be fought in each. Towns normally consist of such things as banks, healing temples, taverns where one can gather information, item shops, and a review board where characters are assessed for level-gaining. Certain dungeons have a real-time "snare" puzzle, which, if solved, rewards the party with a segment of the destiny wand. ~ David Borowski, All Game Guide