Bastard Bonds

I was somewhat dubious of buying Bastard Bonds at first due to the art direction, but I am glad I did. Underneath the veneer of buff bears and overtones of homoerotic fanservice lies a strategic gem not too dissimilar to Ogre Battle or Final Fantasy tactics. The game tosses you into the boots of a convict, and you decide by your charges what sort of character they are- you may be innocent of the crimes laid out against you, or guilty as charged. After being reviewd thusly, you can make your character sprite and use 10 points to determine your starting skills. Each character has similar skill trees, but there are exceptions to available spells and special traits, depending on race. Only humans and orcs are initially open for the player, but you can recruit further people to your band of bastards from random encounters or enemies, albeit this is highly situational. The game features a pretty large, open-ish world and despite the combat being simple, strategy and wise planning are key features to success, as it should be. You can further specialize your casters to healers or damage dealers, your melee into tanks or heavy hitters, and your lithe rogues as critical stackers or dodgers, and anything in between. The game's in-world locations are highly varied and have a great deal of thought put into them to differentiate them from one another. Haunted spas, vampire pleasure camps, horrible meat dungeons, abandoned homesteads or demon-infested villages, and so on. The musical score is varied enough not to be repetitive, and pleasant to the ears. Negatives- Walls can block vision and sometimes pathfinding is subpar, requiring you to backtrack so as to get all four party members together again. Also, enemies tend to blindly charge at you, unless ranged. Finally, the beefcake factor is a bit of a love it or lump it. Expect many pixelated dongs. Lastly, the camp feature is fun, but could use a lot more tooltips. Has a lot of moments where you might need to consult a wiki.

I didn't have huge expectations for Bastard Bonds. I remember seeing a Sseth video a while ago, and the only thing I really remember from that was that it was very gay and gritty. The soundtrack is incredible. That's one of the first things I noticed. The character customization is pretty dang good, although there aren't many hair options and the only beard option looks pretty bad. You can use any 80x64 PNG to replace your character or any other character, and can edit your character's existing sprite too, though. Obviously how feasible that is depends on your sprite art skills. The combat is simple, but it works well and keeps the game moving at a fast pace. I think this game really has the best level-up system of any RPG I've played, although I didn't fully understand it at first. It's very clever. That's one of the bigger flaws of this game. Lots of stuff isn't well explained. You will probably have to look at guides for some stuff (but there are many worse offenders in this area on gog). My biggest frustration is probably in regards to vision and walls. Walls often block your view, even when you've toggled wall transparency on, because they're just a little too far from you. I wish the game just had less walls or shorter walls or something, since they can be a pain. Anyways I really like it. It's an RPG that keeps a very good pace, so as someone who is bored by many RPGs before really getting to the meat, that's a big plus.

It's a pretty decent party-based RPG. But for a tactical game crits happen way too often and when they happen they're often clustered. This causes frustration as you are instantly gibbed in any map with a scripted "Ambush" that the RNG decides to stick like this.

I'm not super good at games so I was really struggling in the beginning but I worked it out eventually and I'm having fun