Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story

As an ex League of Legends player, Bandle Tale looked like a cozy foray into the world of yordles, those fuzzy little magic fellas that have been around as long as LoL has. It does offer some small exploration elements and it's neat to interact with the characters that appear in the game's source material as well as those that are new to this spinoff, but otherwise this really wasn't what I was expecting. I came in looking for something like Animal Crossing, while this is much more of a craftathon.

What struck me right away is that the game looks great. The pixel art is detailed and character animations have a lot of personality to them. The art team totally nailed it, even if Bandle City itself struck me as a bit more overly whimsical than I would have imagined. Most characters are constantly cracking jokes and only rarely take anything seriously, which I don't think is a bad thing at all here. I was surprised to find quite a few characters who are new to the world of Runeterra as of this game (as far as I know) that were pretty fun to talk to. They strike a nice balance of screen time between these new characters and the ones League players probably already know.

I really appreciate what the writers did with the player character as well! I named him Trinket, so I'll refer to him as such from here on. Trinket had all the potential in the world to be a bland silent yordle that just serves as the player's conduit to the game but he was much more than that. He had a pretty fleshed out personality and a character arc that works in parallel to the game's main story in which he learns to respect his own self-worth as well as the bonds that he forges with others. He's also physically disabled and I felt like that was handled very well. It's an important part of him but never felt like his sole defining trait, if you get what I mean. It's rarely even focused on, but there are some cute moments that arise from it. You can also upgrade and swap out his prosthetic which is a neat ludonarrative element reminiscent of Sekiro, if less fleshed out.

I think when you dig just a little past these positives I've mentioned so far though, things get a bit messy. The intro to the game pretty quickly betrayed a certain lack of polish that unfortunately reared its head throughout my playthrough. Some early scenes were missing music entirely. The little voice acting there was in cutscenes was mostly drowned out by the SFX and music. Several areas of the game block you from entry with zero justification other than presumably that you'll get to go there later. Like at some points they didn't even bother coming up with an actual roadblock, you just can't walk into an open cave or across a fully intact bridge because reasons. It made the game feel unfinished in spite of its pretty visuals.

You'll be spending most of your time in Bandle City collecting resources from around the various islands which comprise it and crafting those into a variety of new forms. Mainly these are advanced crafting materials and devices you'll utilize to craft more stuff. This aspect of the game is a lot like Minecraft's crafting system. If you want to craft a spool of thread, you'll need to first build a Spooling Bench which you'll then use to turn yarn into that thread. Except here, the complexity of recipes you craft is almost always increasing and the game continues to introduce new types of "crafting benches" and resources all the way up to just before the finale of its ~30 hour story. Early on there are only a few benches but the count quickly stacks up into the dozens.

It's because the game keeps introducing these new elements all the time that things can get very overwhelming quickly. I found myself struggling to mentally walk through the steps necessary to complete quests because oftentimes crafting one seemingly simple object is a deeply layered process. It's not uncommon that you'll need to make several new crafting bench types, travel to multiple zones of the city (each has unique "auras" which open up new item crafts), and complete subquests just to finally arrive at the item you needed. I was constantly forgetting what I was doing because it was all a bit difficult to keep track of.

I'm sure the convoluted recipes can be a big selling point for fans of crafting games that want to dig into a system such as this. The game doesn't hold your hand much at all, though it provides a some pretty useful info in the menus that can help you stay on track. It's not what I'd call intuitive, but there's a surprising amount of flexibility to these menus, such as being able to view all the locations of a quest resource on the map and the current location of NPCs from the quest page. These features can be buggy sometimes though, which speaks to the lack of polish I mentioned earlier.

The tedium of stumbling through unwieldy crafting recipes again and again really dragged down the experience for me. While I did find an odd satisfaction to completing them, it often felt like work in a bad way. The charming setting and characters were enough to make the story passable, but I felt unable to establish a sense of drive or a reason for continuing save for being able to say I finished the game. Still, I had a decent time, so there's that.

Given the publisher Riot Forge closed shop just prior to the release of the game, I suspect that Bandle Tale was maybe pushed out the door a bit fast when it would have greatly benefited from some more playtesting, which is a shame. I really wanted to give it a higher rating because I think there was love put into it, but the glaring issues are impossible for me to ignore.