Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story Review (Flexipop)
{final review}
⭐️ 5/10 ⭐️
Surprisingly disappointed with the end to this game. I completed all of the achievements with the main story and honestly... the end felt SO rushed. There are still side things I never explored, people with requests, incomplete badges, nodes I never unlocked, crafts I never made. Of course I could do all of that on my own but for the game to suddenly complete without forcing you to do most of those higher level crafts is, to me, bizarre. It's also weird that the end game has no save file where Bandle City is back to normal, it just forces you to replay your last save file before the finale.
For a large portion of the game I avoided going to bed to force crafts to complete. But after needing so many of certain things and having certain items take 5+ minutes to craft it kind of became necessary to sleep over and over again which felt like cheating. It feels weird having no punishment for dreaming repeatedly.
I still recommend playing it because it did have moments of fun and unique cozy crafting. But, dang, I wish the game wanted me to play more instead of seemingly rushing me out.
{mid-playthrough review}
⭐️ 6.5/10 ⭐️
I have yet to finish this but what a SLOW build this game is. I found the beginning incredibly frustrating with not enough explanation given on how parties and cooking worked, ended up wasting a lot of resources learning while doing. But, it's also fun to not have your hand held so tightly and messing up felt kinda part of the game - it just felt unintentional. After 7-10 hours I finally felt like I got the hang of auras and filling my emotion orbs quickly, that's when it became really fun. I actually equate the crafting to those "merge" games where a lot of items building upon smaller building blocks to more complex things.
Before being able to craft a hefty pile of Portal Yarn and project auras, walking everywhere and remembering which towns had which auras was long drab. My biggest advice to new players is to not skimp on your Portal Yarn, make your life easier and USE IT - a lot of the festivals give it to you as a reward. Also, using your quest log is a huge help to see where people are or what talent node is needed (blue text is clickable!)
As others have mentioned, the inventory management is a hot mess. We really need: larger chests, a "sort" option, a "store all" option that matches your items and puts them in chests. I did love how crafting grabs items from your chests; a really big convenience that not many cozy crafting games allow. Though, turn-in quests don't tell you when you have the required items if your chests.