Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story finally explores the cutest League of Legends lore

Having been around for 15 years, League of Legends contains deep lore that keeps growing with every new champion added. For some, this is just text they have to wade through to find out a new character's capabilities on the Rift. But for others, it's a window into another universe that they've inhabited for thousands of hours.

Some parts of the League of Legends lore are more fleshed out than others, and one area that has always felt a little underexplored is the backstory of the Yordle race. Despite being the cutest race in Runeterra, a lot of the Yordle lore comes down to them living in some far-off magical land called Bandle City, a place that they rarely leave and that outsiders rarely visit. The end result? No one really knows much about them.

Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story finally expands on that lore by taking you into Bandle City for the first time and letting you explore the world of the Yordles.

“We don't really have many other Yordle-related things so it's kind of cool that this is the first time players will get to play in Bandle City, use Yordles, and make their own characters,” said Rowan Parker, Creative Director at Riot Forge, a publishing arm of Riot Games that is set to close down soon.

The goal of Riot Forge has been to expand the League of Legends universe by exploring the backstories of characters you play as on the Rift. From a rhythm runner starring Ziggs (Hextech Mayhem) to an emotional adventure starring Nunu and Willump (Song of Nunu) "Juegos De 20", the Riot Forge games built upon the League of Legends lore, but it was down to each game's development team to jump in deeper and tell stories that became canon.

“This happens a lot with [Riot] Forge games where we bump up against a blank canvas,” said Parker. “We work together with the studios to fill in the blank canvas of our IP, so that it feels seamless. A lot of players will not even realise that most of what you're seeing on the screen in Bandle Tale didn't exist before this game. We worked together with Lazy Bear Games and built a lot of the Yordle lore and a lot of the parts of Bandle City.”

There is no doubt that the star of Bandle Tale is Bandle City itself. While you may initially be drawn to Bandle Tale by the champions you know and get to hang out with, these interactions may begin feeling familiar within a few hours. Bandle City is always surprising you. It's full of the unexpected, from massive locations that are genuinely mind-bending and difficult to understand (with our simple non-Yordle brains) to "fishing" portals that let you cast your hook into Runeterra and pull out weird items.

The limited lore around Bandle City was actually an advantage to the team at Lazy Bear Games. Prior to Bandle Tale, the Yordle home was just a magical place where anything and everything was possible—which is both a daunting and exciting prospect. It gave Lazy Bear Games the freedom to try some unexpected and wacky things (some of which worked and some of which didn’t) and ultimately resulted in a location that is unlike anything else in the League of Legends universe.

“Bandle City is a magical place where everything is possible, so that gave us a lot of freedom,” said Nikita Kulaga, Creative Director of Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story and Co-Founder of Lazy Bear Games. “We did not have much information about how Bandle City looks, so we had to invent it. [At] every step we had to ask ourselves a question: ‘Is it magical enough?’”

That question ultimately led the team to create the Bandle City you’ll spend hours exploring, stuffing it with tiny details that you might not even notice until you've visited a location multiple times on your journey. It’s a place you simply don’t want to leave, with its cute visuals, attention-grabbing locations, and generally chill vibe.

Bandle City is only enhanced by its inhabitants, "Juegos De 20" most of whom are new characters in the League of Legends universe—though with more than a few familiar faces thrown in to help guide you on your quest to restore the portal network, or to request your help as you prove more useful to the city's denizens.

“It was challenging [to create this world], but I think that we made everything right,” said Kulaga. “This Bandle City is really whimsical and magical.”

This is the sixth game from Riot Forge and the team learned from past releases what could and couldn't be done in the League of Legends universe. While each Riot Forge release is a collaborative process between Riot and the external studios making the games, the core League of Legends development teams are ultimately the main keepers of the universe’s lore. But with Bandle Tale being so open-ended, few ideas ended up on the cutting room floor.

“Stuff sometimes starts out being pretty crazy, but then you find the world and the characters together and then you pare it down, and you start to see the shape of it,” said Parker. “The gut check that we have is when we go to players and Rioters who love Bandle City and love Yordles and they tell us ‘Oh my god, this is exactly what we hoped Bandle City would be like.’”

The result of that collaborative process is a fun game set in a fantastic world that's difficult to leave. You’ll want to see Bandle Tale's main story through just to be able to spend more time exploring Bandle City and existing in this space. It’s a shame that, with the closure of Riot Forge, we’ll likely never get more opportunities to explore Bandle City—but that just makes the time we do have there even more special.

Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story is available now on the Epic Games Store.