Ledgerbound

Came for the saucy romance, stayed for the combat and fun characters. I am genuinely having a blast playing this game. Also, can't wait to get freaky with these freaks.

This game promises so much (a "narrative-first, tactical, dating sim RPG comedy") and it is technically all those things but it doesn't do much with any of them. The tactics are basic, the character progression is very shallow, the narrative choices don't seem to matter and the dateables are not interesting. But I could forgive all those things. I would slog through the basic gameplay and do the on-rails dating sim and all of it if the humor or story was good. Unfortunately, both those fall flat. The recurring bit is that the very attractive and intelligent protagonist, Rayna, is best friends (lovers?) with... a hat rack. Why? Because she's *so* lonely (despite the fact that she seems likeable and well liked (and, as mentioned, attractive and intelligent)). And everywhere you go, there is a reference to the Hat Rack and oh how funny it is this lonely woman is attached to it, for absolutely no reason. The game could bring in a narrative about how you can be lonely in a room full of the wrong people (because the character is surrounded by a bunch of turds) but they never do. Because then they would have to criticize the paper doll companions the protagonist is surrounded by. The only one who has any personality is Jazz and Jazz is legitimately a *terrible person*. And her being terrible isn't a criticism. In a cast of well written characters, she would be an interesting foil. But it sucks that the only character (Reyna included) who feels real is also the worst person in the group. If you like tactical games, dating sims, RPGs, visual novels or comedic games, there are better examples of all out there. If you want a last-minute airport gift shop knockoff Swiss Army knife of a game, get Ledgerbound I guess.

Ledgerbound is a great game, absolutely worth the money. I spent around 23 hours on my first playthrough and i had a great time. The characters are all have super fun personalities, make fun jokes and have silly little subvesions where it makes sense. You unlock them progressivly throughout the game, and it never failed to excite me when i got a new party member, but you also get your last member early enough for you to build a propper connection with them. [h3]Voice Acting[/h3] The voice acting is amazing together with well written dialoge and a voiced narrator makes every conversation fun to be part of. It also makes it painful when you dont have the ability to talk to everyone. [h3]Difficulty[/h3] Difficulty was an awkward one for me. I started out on a higher difficulty (the one over lunar i think, cant remember name of it), but ended up turning it down. The challenge was fun, but the game also forces resource management beween time, burnout and dialog with all the fun characters. The game has a few side objectives hidden until relevant in a combat, and a tendancy to one-shot or crit you which would be fine if it didnt cost more resouces afterwards. I think the higher difficulties are probvably good for a fully run where you dont care about dialog, but if youre exploring the romance (or want to complete side objectives for pretty Shareholder) i think the lunar one is all good. [h3]Iron Man Mode[/h3] Theres also the fact that the game has Iron Man mode style saving, not letting you load back in a game where it would be fun for some of the conversations, this is especially annoying when you've spent 20+ hours on the save and you cant see what the other option for the ending wouldve looked lie (i felt like i chose the bad ending). Im gonna be honest, missing that one shareholder meeting bummed me out. [h3]Music[/h3] Thats the harsh out of the way. Now back to the good stuff. The music in this game is so well done. It reuses the same battletheme for most of game, but the variations still keep it fresh enough, and some of the other pieces are just so cool (im looking at you joy's theme). So good to the point im listening to it in the background while writing this review (and playing deadlock ngl) [h3]The Vibes[/h3] Im gonna be honest. I went into this only having watched a few tictoc ads that showed the cool characters, and the game was significantly more horny than i expected (not necessarily bad thing). What stood out to me is how well done the characers are made into their silly stereotypes, and overly hornyness at times, yet the game balances so well out with alot of genuine moments of kinship. For a game where you can romance a stinky homeless man that stinky homeless man really be jerking your heart. And the same goes for every character. The romances are really fun, and the characters mostly being polyamorous so that you can talk you your favorite babes (that includes the boys too) makes the game alot of fun. My favorite part about it though has to be the way you lock in if you want to be romantic with a character or not early on in the relation, and if you lock platonic, you can still get some really awesome scenes with those characters that differ from the romance ones. [h3]Burnout & Time[/h3] In conjunction with the iron man mode style saving, the burnout and time systems really add a fun resource management to the game that i really enjoyed despite wanting to talk to all my party members, its a really cool idea and its really flavorfully done. [h3]Combat[/h3] Combat looks very simple on the surface, common rock, paper, scissors with the elements, and a bit of Melee vs Ranged vs Magic to spice it up, but with the amount of custumization you get in camp together with the unique abilities the enemies get, you actually have a bit of depth to how you want your characters to play. Also subclasses, but they also feel a bit wierd considering once your locked into a class its locked. No testing and trying to figure out what you like. [h3]Summary[/h3] All in all i really enjoyed the experience, and i would deffinetly recommend the game. Im probably going to replay the game at some point to romance other characters than the ones i did first playthrough. The game has its struggles if your goal is just to experience everything, but the experiences you do get are top level.

I'm having a lot of fun with this game. Many of the reviews mention the funny writing and the voice acting: they are spot on. They are top notch, you're gonna enjoy yourself. Playing on the "Cosmic" difficulty, the battles are challenging to obtain all the stretch objectives in one try. I was skeptical of the "no undo" feature but I'm convinced it improves the game by raising the stakes of each decision. Overall, very fun game and easy to lose yourself in.

Solid 8/10 game! I definitely wouldn't recommend this game to everyone, but I'm glad I played it. It hit all of my particular joys, and the annoyances weren't too bad. I did play through on the "normal" difficulty. That being said, nothing of importance is [i]locked[/i] behind difficulty other than bragging rights, so I'm not too chuffed about it. (I also played after some of the immediate QoL, so that might also help.) The game's a soft mix of other turn-based RPGs and visual novels; honestly, it gave me vibes that fit more modern Fire Emblem, if Fire Emblem went a lot harder into the horny aspects. The game doesn't really fully commit to either genre, and in doing so doesn't entirely capitalize on either of the genres' strengths. What is there though is a fun romp though. Below are some other varied thoughts but TL;DR think about it on sale and/or after some time for them to polish up and/or add some more stuff. + The characters being entirely voiced is amazing. The VAs really bring the writing to life, and most characters have more going on than what's on the surface. + Tactical combat never really felt like a "chore"; the maps being smaller and you having less units meant that missions remained bite sized and easy to digest. The gameplay loop in that sense is pretty satisfying; do well in battle, get equipment, make battles easier by equipping equipment. Most battles feel very controlled; you rarely feel like you got outplayed by something that wasn't fair or unforeseeable. + Some of the gear ("liabilities") opens up some really dynamic gameplay. Most of the flashes of brilliance you see in this game come from granting game changing abilities via these pieces of gear, whether they be repositioning, manipulating the RPS triangle, or even trading battle resources for meta resources. ~ The game has a really, [i]really[/i] aggressive autosave. This actually isn't that bad for the tactical gameplay; on the normal difficulty, this felt pretty fair and the game has a method to claw back extra objectives and missed loot, with even an extra save-scum button if you really needed it done on the first take. I was really OK with missing clears the first time around and coming back later. More on the autosave later though. ~ The chat log is a really welcome addition, but it still feels rather...rudimentary? With all of the amazing VA in this game, it really makes sense to add a way to replay voice lines, but they haven't implemented it yet. It's a noticeable omission. ~ The combat definitely feels like it has a "right answer", in terms of the elemental system really mattering, the smaller maps, and abilities/stats being fixed for units. This means it can really feel like more of a rigid solution rather than a open-ended question. You have some flexibility in tactics, but it sometimes felt to me like the game had an obvious "best choice", which is a bit of a double edged sword. ~ While I really enjoyed the writing, it's true that it's raunchy, smarmy, campy...it's not for everyone. I think it's worth watching the first 1-3 missions and/or all the trailers, and if it clicks then you'll enjoy it. If you cringe away from it, maybe you should give the game a pass. - The aggressive autosave makes it very difficult to go back to story beats without just...replaying the game. That actually really sucks; this game has such varied writing and a lot of different dialogue for various points in the game that it would be really nice to go back and read it all...if not for the fact I'd have to play through another 15 hours and mash through a lot of the same stuff. I realize there are ways around this, but I feel like a rudimentary "skip" button would work wonders. - There's a late game segment that feels really...out of place? Undercooked? It's got the same charm in writing and all, but it feels so different that I wish it had more bones. - You're essentially on rails for the entire game; you don't really make decisions about where to go or what to do for the next segment, which...feels a bit like a missed opportunity. I get why the game doesn't do this, but it'd be cool to get like 2-3 different ways to get to the next town, instead of "just the one". - I don't know if it's worse on the hard difficulty when you fail more and take more burnout, but the burnout/time management gameplay seems to be...too easy? I frequently found myself using the game's "procrastinate" option because the Burnout cost wasn't a problem at all even by early-mid game, and I never felt undergeared because I had too little time. Granted, this is after patches nerfing the difficulty of said management gameplay, but I can't help but feel like the devs overcorrected here. I'm still baffled that there's an option to disable it! - The stat-buff gear ("Swag") feels very samey, with them being "can I get more of a stat stick for you". You're kind of incentivized to use it as little as possible until you're later in the game, which...makes sense, since they don't want to give you super OP stuff at the very beginning, but it did not feel very good to see upgrades from what is essentially a lootbox table. I would've loved to see some sort of codex to see if there was anything else I was missing. - It's sometimes not obvious what an upgrade or piece of gear will do until you bring it or look at it. This is usually not too bad, but it does make it somewhat puzzling when you see an upgrade like "Rat Trap --> Rat Trap+" and the text does not change, or the text says "treasure" and you're not sure what that means. This never actually hindered me, but I'm listing it under negatives because it would be nice to get clarity!

Somehow too horny for a storefront that sells literal porn 10/10

Ledgerbound is, in many ways, a great game. It has personality, interesting characters with fairly decent dialogue but, in many ways, it's clearly unfinished. There will be some spoilers in this review, mostly considering the final stretch of the game. I would consider these "light" spoilers but I might be wrong. Game came out missing basic features such as a chat log, something present in most games that feature "visual novel aspects, that has since been added, but there's still written dialogue that doesn't match voice acting, voice acting that continues on after the text has stopped, sometimes voice acting won't play at all or the volume of one of the characters will be disproportional to the others; the later you get into the game the more these issues appear. Some item descriptions are extremely vague and sometimes the bonds you establish with your party, which allow for character growth, might just be tossed away in your next interaction with them, making it feel as though these bonds don't matter as much as they seem. I have some gripes with the story, especially around the final stretch wherein you get chance to talk to your teammates after an important event just happened, one of these bits is giving a comic relief character a chance to chat with you, but not two other characters that would be greatly affected by this "twist". Additionally, there is a time when you're in a rush and everyone you attempt to talk to will dismiss you as the party IS in a rush. However, you can still go "enjoy" a horny scene, which felt very odd and out of character for our protagonist. This all to say, I'm loving Ledgerbound but i don't think it's worth the price tag at this moment in time. I bought the deluxe edition to support developers but that was before I knew what feels like an unfinished, rushed game. Edit: These will include spoilers for the end. I have since finished the game; There were some actual interesting twists at the end, which made the ability to not manually save and load previous saves even more of a terrible idea. The game "features" polyamory as an option, yet, in the ending only one of my romance companions seemed to "exist", funnily enough, one of my other partners said that "platonic love" was also important, which honestly felt super weird since we were dating. The game also baits you into believing there will be much more content and levels with the "Company Swag" type lootboxes, which also contain repeats that seemingly have no effect, just a wasted pull. The lootboxes are tiered by how well you perform in the game however, they only go as far as half of what is shown. It tells you there are further tiers above but they are unattainable, whether this is because they're planning on releasing DLC, future updates with more content, adding a New Game Plus is unknown but doesn't change the fact that it is misleading. A sizeable amount of the bonds/supports you have with your team don't really have any closure, especially with Hat Rack and your chosen Shareholder. These dialogues can also be quite incoherent, sometimes there will be a decent chunk of character development and then suddenly, it's gone in the next scene. TLDR: Cool game as a concept, especially for the voice-work, comedy, LGB (yes, LGB) representation, and they included Polyamory which often isn't represented. This game is in no way worth 30 EUR in terms of content. I only got as many hours as I did because I was playing through with a friend and one of my save files, which was about halfway done, crashed with no way of recovering my progress thus artificially increasing the time needed to complete the game.

Story and art are great. One of the few visual novels that I don't mind sitting through. Fully voiced and fantastic cast. No way to save and the cutscenes are long with no dialogue log to look back to (that I could find). Not a lot of configuration settings, very minimal. The little combat I've had a chance to try is promising, but my refund window is getting smaller and the encounters have been short and far and few. Don't know if this was intentional, would be scummy if it was. Can't replay or retry battles so you can't really experiment or explore much and you will lock yourself out of side objectives. If they ever fix some of these issues, I'll change my review. Some people might like the strict gameplay, but I prefer a bit more freedom to make my own choices.