Haven't read all the comments, but wanted to give a comments about the "Not a Review" anyways.
I think The Bard's Tale 4 is actually one of the games which you'd need to finish to be able to fully judge. Your conclusion wouldn't change (it's still a puzzle game) but lots of the mechanics turn to the worse.
The combat for example: First I want to mention that calling it card game mechanics might be partially true, but this usually associates the mechanics to random factors as in "drawing random cards", which for the Bard's Tale is not true.
But back to my point: The balance of the combat breaks horribly after half of the game.
And with that the balance of the character system also breaks horribly at that point. So "your choices are important" is only true for the first half of the game. After that you are pretty much overkill anyways. Your choices will not really matter at all.
Also you get much more XP than the character system can handle. At some point (and at that point you are already OP for quite a while) you will just take "something" which doesn't sound like total garbage.
It's also true for the gold/money system. Money is rare and important…in the beginning. After about half of the game you are swimming in gold. And then you also get a rogue ability that you can "buy" everything for free. So gold becomes completely and utterly pointless. At the same time, most of the rewards you get for solving puzzles switch to gold…which damages the satisfaction of solving these puzzles as well.
The Crafting System: Absolutely pointless. You can craft grappling hooks. And if you do everything you can craft 2 or 3 elven weapons. Basically everything else is maybe usefull at the beginning, but even then I'd say it's rather pointless. You dont need food as you heal on saving (or consuming the stone), and the next/previous stone is always closeby. You also don't need potions or similar in the fight - these are taking up a slot you could use for other stuff. Also the combats are becoming extremely easy anyways. I didn't even use any potions during the whole game as I used the slot for permanent stat boosts and I don't remember ever thinking like "If I just had a potion now".
Another thing are quests: You might think in the beginning "Wow! You really get a lot of sidequests here!" But thats not the case. Quests are heavily front loaded. You get several quests you will not be able to solve until dozens of hours into the game and then oftentimes the ending is not even satisfying. But it's not like you would get new sidequests again and again during the rest of the game.
So…I wouldn't say that you would need to finish the game in order to be able to judge whether or not you like this game. But lots of the mechanics in it unfortunately get much worse after half of it due to horrible balancing, changing the perspective drastically.
What is actually keeping this game somewhat decent is the one thing which cannot be fully destroyed by bad balancing: The puzzles. So if you are already not liking the puzzles in the beginning, you will also hate the second part of the game, when basically everything else breaks, and only the puzzles remain.