Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story Review (Switch eShop)

Last month, Riot Games announced a substantial number of layoffs within the company, and one of the casualties was the Riot Forge publishing arm. Over the last few years, Riot Forge partnered with various indie developers to produce a diverse lineup of single-player games set in the world of Runeterra, and these games all proved to be pretty good while being completely different from each other. Presumably, whatever projects it had in the works for the rest of this year have all been cancelled, making the latest release—a cozy RPG called Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story—the last hurrah of Riot Forge. Bandle Tale offers a decent, enjoyable take on a Stardew Valley-esque life sim, and though it has its issues, it feels like a good send-off for one of Riot’s most interesting initiatives.

Bandle Tale is set in the mystical realm of Bandle City, which is linked to the expansive land of Runeterra via magical portals. You play the role of a humble yordle living with their grandpa in the quiet region of Yarnville, which is mostly disconnected from other yordle settlements. Events kick off when you sneak out with your best friend to attend a party, where you inadvertently cause an enormous magical incident with a nearby portal that destroys the entire portal network and throws the entirety of Bandle City into disarray. Luckily, your character has been training for the past century in a magical form of knitting, so they set out to repair the damage done to the portal network and explore the other yordle settlements that they never got to see.

It's a simple story made a little more digestible by each yordle island having its own arc that you have to resolve. For example, when you get to Bandle Center—home to a prestigious university—you need to help calm a brewing war between the arts and science departments while fulfilling various quests to get them to accept you as a student. Each arc is filled with memorable, larger-than-life characters, and fans of League of Legends will be glad to see the presence of characters like Veigar, Tristana, and Yuumi here—though we’ll add that players who know nothing about League won’t feel like they’re missing out on any context here.

The real strength of the story is in the excellent writing found throughout. Despite the somewhat dire stakes, Bandle Tale barely ever takes itself seriously and there are jokes all over that remind us quite a bit of the early Mario & Luigi games. There are often entire quests dedicated to a central gag, like a memorable early encounter where you attempt to help a married rock crab couple resolve a lovers’ quarrel. Suffice it to say, the goofy writing goes a long way in making Bandle Tale such an engaging experience; it’s the kind of game that makes you want to keep playing just to see what kind of absurd things will happen next.

Bandle Tale's gameplay can be most closely likened to that of a life sim, although here the focus is rather unique compared to its genre peers. Sure, you’ll spend a lot of your time farming materials, foraging, fishing, cooking, and crafting, but the overall structure of it is less about socializing or expanding your empire by making money and more about expanding your skill tree and thus, your available list of materials that you can build or farm to fulfill quests.

Crafting is the primary means of progression, as you gain a little bit of Inspiration from each thing you create. New items will grant you way more Inspiration points than things your yordle is already familiar with, and you can only collect so many Inspiration points at a time before you’re capped and need to go to sleep so the Inspiration can turn into usable skill points. It’s a cute and thoughtfully designed way of measuring progress, given that it pushes the player to continually pursue new projects and recipes to acquire more skill points.

Once you’ve built up a decent bank of skill points, you can invest them in a few skill trees. Each tree specializes in a different area, such as 'engineering' or 'nature', and each node you unlock grants you things like a few new items you can make or a new crafting bench on which to make them. To keep you from having too many potential crafting materials and recipes to juggle at once, more advanced nodes are typically gated by badges that can only be bypassed by completing certain story and side quests. We appreciated this as even with the badges, it was often kind of overwhelming having so many interconnected crafting options at once, particularly given that Bandle Tale rarely tells you how to accomplish the various goals set before you.

Quests are the bread and butter of progressing through this 40+ hour epic; these are usually as simple as talking to the right people and delivering something they need in exchange for some progress on a badge and skill points. However, the quest design may turn out to be the most divisive element of Bandle Tale—in practical terms, you’re essentially completing the world’s longest chain of fetch quests for a few dozen hours. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s indisputable that the steps you have to take to finish even the most basic requests often take a lot more thought and planning than you’d expect.

For example, an early quest requires you to cook and deliver a dish containing a plant called yolkbud. To obtain a yolkbud, you have to grow some in your garden, but your seed maker can only produce the seeds if you have ground salt. Even if you have the skill unlocked that lets you turn rock salt into ground salt, you still need to have built a crusher workbench, which also can’t be built unless you’ve unlocked its node on the skill tree. Once you’ve unlocked the crusher workbench node, you then need stone and wood to build it, which you can only obtain once you’ve unlocked another node that lets you build a junk upcycler so you can convert junk into the necessary materials.

As you can see, even an objective as simple as cooking a basic dish often sends you down a long rabbit hole of having to complete several errands and properly plan out all the steps you need to get your original goal fulfilled. Sometimes it can feel like a bit much when you’re having to go through a string of increasingly tangential steps just to get a singular simple resource made, but it’s really enjoyable to untangle the almost puzzle-like process of figuring out everything you need to do. Plus, you’ll often find that progress you’re making toward the final product of one quest is also partially helping you along in a handful of other quests, too. This gives you some alternatives to pursue after you’re done or if you want to distract yourself with another task instead.

Beyond fulfilling quests, you can participate in other social activities such as cooking meals or throwing parties. Meals kick off an Overcooked-esque minigame where you’re tasked with filling orders as locals come up to the counter, sending you into a constant scramble to make deliveries on top and get food out before it spoils or burns. Parties are similar, where you’re first tasked with setting up an environment with the right vibes, and then spend the rest of the party rushing around between groups of guests collecting “Party Yarn” from them before it spoils. Events like these clearly aren’t the central focus of the gameplay loop, but we appreciated how they offer a nice break from the nonstop crafting and collecting by offering up a different experience.

Bandle Tale certainly has a lot going for it, but the biggest issue with its gameplay is that it sometimes feels a little too complicated for its own good. It can be frustrating when you forget which of the dozen workbenches in your house lets you craft a certain material, which leads you to check each one only to discover that the material requires another workbench that you haven’t built yet. Also, there comes a point where you’ve spent fifteen to twenty minutes going through all the hoops just to get a basic material and can’t help but wonder why everything has to be so padded. Bandle Tale is a wonderfully cozy experience, but it’s also the kind of game that feels like it could’ve easily been half as long and been a much tighter and more enjoyable experience for it.

Related to this abundance of tedium, Bandle Tale feels rather inconsistent in how it uses quality-of-life features and how it guides the player. Your yordle’s house can be packed up in a backpack and carried around with you to clearings where you can unravel it, which theoretically cuts down all the trekking back to your base every time you want to craft something else. However, it can be very easy to forget the house if you place it on the other side of an island while you’re caught up in various errands, and you can’t use a fast travel portal without the backpack on you, meaning that you have to run back on foot to retrieve it.

Similarly, the game will tell you if a quest needs you to unlock a specific skill to accomplish its task, but it won’t tell you if you first need to complete another quest or two before you can even do that. This makes Bandle Tale feel like a very uneven experience, as it’s sometimes very helpful in streamlining its gameplay, while other times it feels like your time isn’t being respected at all as you’re forced to go about things in what feels like an intentionally roundabout way.

Luckily, one area in which Bandle Tale certainly does not stumble is in its presentation. The bizarre, dreamlike worlds of Bandle City are a sight to behold, with each of the five main islands having a unique motif to differentiate it from the next. Gadgeton has a much more industrial vibe to it, while Greensprout is as verdant as you’d expect with all its flora. The spritework is the real star of the show here, as all characters and environments are packed with a thrilling amount of quirky detail that does a great job of highlighting the strengths of a hi-bit art style.

This is equally matched by a soundtrack that captures a very playful and whimsical vibe, perfectly matching the easygoing yordle lifestyle. Sometimes the music can feel a little bit one-note in its portrayal of this cozy atmosphere, but it’s tough to argue that it doesn’t masterfully fit the energy and tone that the developers were going for with Bandle Tale