“Deny an insurance claim, save the world. Ledgerbound is a hilarious, narrative-driven tactical RPG/dating sim filled with all your favorite epic fantasy activities: battling evil enemies, filling out paperwork, rescuing your company from financial ruin, pursuing HR-approved relationships, and more!” – Steam Description

Ledgerbound is a tactical RPG akin to something like XCOM or Fire Emblem. Don’t let that scare you away though, it is MUCH more forgiving than something like XCOM. The best way that I can describe the story for Ledgerbound is it plays exactly like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. In fact, I could be quoted as saying that to anyone who would even be in conversing distance while I was playing this game. You play as Rayna, an insurance adjuster for a life insurance company that covers adventurers, or in this world Heroes. Rayna reads a lot of books to herself and doesn’t have many (read any) real life friends so she spends a lot of her time talking to her hat rack in her office named… well… Hat Rack. She reads to Hat Rack and during her day to day job, she uses board game minis she makes herself to reenact the Heroes’ battles in order to prove the Heroes were negligent and therefore her company would not have to pay out. The biggest Hero team in the world, the Regulators, are defeated and paying out their life insurance to their family would completely destroy the company. After reading the report and finding that the Regulators were defeated by an ancient primordial evil, you do what any insurance adjuster would do. You set out on a quest to fulfill the ancient prophecy and prove that this undefeatable ancient primordial evil can, in fact, be defeated and the Regulators just hadn’t prepared correctly. If you’ve ever filed an insurance claim, you’d know this is pretty standard stuff even in our boring real world.

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Combat Readiness & You

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The combat is probably 30% of the game, but I think it’s the part that takes the most brain power. Each character has an element: Plant, Water, or Fire. If you’ve spent any time around Pokemon, you’d know water beats fire, fire beats plant, and plant beats water. There are spots around the map that can empower or weaken elements by standing on that tile which allows some tactics in your tactical RPG. When you attack, if the unit you are attacking can attack back they will retaliate. That also goes for when your units are attacked though, there are some battles I had where my dodges and counterattacks completely won within the same round.

Once you gain enough experience during combat, you’ll level up. Leveling up will increase your stats as you’d expect during any RPG. You do get the effects mid combat though, instead of having to go back to camp after combat to level up which was a surprise. A welcome surprise, but a surprise none the less. I beat the game before writing this review and I did not find a level cap, so I am uncertain if there is one. My highest character did reach level 21.

After you get enough levels, you can choose a promotion. Another way to think of this would be an advanced class in a standard RPG. From what I could tell the promotion had both a ranged and a melee option which let you tailor your party to your needs and playstyle. I selected the ranged option for Rayna and unlocked another promotion but both of those options were ranged. If you went melee for Rayna’s first promotion, your options would be melee only for the second promotion. Everyone else had a ranged or melee option and from what I could find only had 1 promotion opportunity. The promotions DO change the characters appearance as you can see below (which is just extra super bonus points for me)

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Swag Bags Galore

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Each fight that you participate in will have 3 objectives. One objective is always “Keep everyone alive” another has something to do with the main reason you’re there. Maybe there’s an item you have to get, maybe there’s a named NPC that you must defeat, or maybe you have to complete it in a certain number of turns. The third objective is sometimes known ahead of time and sometimes it’s just labelled as ??? where you’ll find out partway through the mission. If you complete all 3 in the same mission, essentially perfecting the mission, you will be rewarded with a Certificate of Mastery. These will be used as a threshold for certain conversations that I won’t spoil, but I would encourage you to try and complete all these missions to the best of your ability. If you don’t do it the first time around, you can revisit the battles when at camp using Rayna’s tried and true method of “making board game pieces and acting it out” as we discussed previously.

For each objective you complete you get tickets. You can trade these tickets for swag. Swag comes in 4 types. You can get Lanyards, Trading Cards, Keychains, and Pins. Each of these are equipable items to augment your abilities. Reminiscent of something like fallout there are some bonuses that are +x Strength when next to a male ally, +x Dodge vs a female enemy. Some are just flat stat bonuses and not conditional, such as +x to healing stat, or dodge, resistance, you get the idea. They have degrees of rarity and the more tickets you get the higher tier of Swag that you can unlock to equip to make your characters the strongest they can be.

Your other option for gear are liabilities. Each liability has a coverage cost and that can be raised through specific actions in game. You primarily gain liabilities through relationship levels so you will have to talk to your companions as frequently as possible. There are 2 types of liabilities, active and passive. Active liabilities give you active abilities and passive, you guessed it, give you passive abilities. As you gain relationship levels (either platonic or romantic) you will unlock more liability slots.

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HR Violations 101

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Now that you’re in camp, you’ve fought, and you’re stressed out. You can talk with your companions to manage your burnout and build relations with them. There is a well written cast for you to explore, some of which come to you from the start and others come halfway through your journey. I think all of them are worth talking to though.

You’re not going to be able to talk through all your storylines in on playthrough on the standard difficulty. Well, at least I couldn’t and I played Persona enough to think I can manage my time effectively. Changing equipment takes time, conversations take time, re-doing battles to get those sweet sweet Certificates of Mastery takes time. The camp mechanic is a lot of spinning plates and you have to make some decisions for your priorities, but maybe if you played on an easier difficulty you could have more time for storylines. Unfortunately, I am only thinking of this now as I write this review. As I concluded my playtime with the game, they did add a feature to remove all the time management costs. So you could turn that feature off completely and just play in the lawless land but I think if you missed it the first time around, you just get to play a second time. Especially as we lead into the next section..

One word of caution, as you progress your relationships. Pay attention to the companions preference to monogamy or polyamory. If you are in a monogamous relationship and try to pursue a new relationship you will be forced to end a relationship with the current partner. I wouldn’t know because in my quest to see all storylines (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it,) I ended with 3 girlfriends and 1 boyfriend.

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• Graphics– The graphics are good, albeit a little jarring. The standard graphics in the visual novel portion of the game are wonderfully done. I have been surprised to not see VGen artists offering “Ledgerbound Style” PNGTuber art because the characters look like they could be imported just as easily into PNGTuber+. The Chibis for combat really took some time to grow on me, but what sealed the deal was them changing their appearance based on their advanced class. I love that stuff so much.
• Gameplay– The gameplay might not be for everyone. The game is listed as a tactical RPG but if you go into that expecting a TRPG you might be disappointed. This is more visual novel with some combat on the side to push watching the character development unfold. The game has a story to tell, it is very upfront about also being narratively driven, and it tells it extremely well.
• Sound– The voice acting and sound design is amazing. I wish I could just sing the praises nonstop here, but there are times where the sound mixing seems to mess up. Either the volume gets so low it can’t be heard or the sound file just doesn’t play. The devs have acknowledged this and are working on fixes, but as it stands right now it can take you out of the narrative.
• Controls– Controls are explained clearly, and they make sense. You can play with a mouse and keyboard or controller as I did sometimes when it was 4am and I was still up playing this game.
• Story– Wonderful wonderful wonderful. The story plays out how you’d expect a wild and zany dungeons & dragons campaign to start out, but the characters are more than just their quips, one-liners, and general horniness. The story that you discover with these characters is extremely well written and I’d argue really sad in some cases.