Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands - Switch Review

I have been on the lookout for music-themed turn-based RPGs for quite a while now; there's a lot more out there than you’d think there’d be, but none that I have played have really satisfied that very specific itch. Enter Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands, the latest entry in my search for a satisfying music-themed RPG. After being persuaded to join a demonic battle of the bands competition (and neglecting to read the fine print), the band Deathbulge find themselves cursed, being able to fight with their musical instruments at the cost of having to fight to the death against other bands. It is up to the guitarist Faye, the bassist Ian and the drummer Briff to find a way out of this competition without losing their friends who have also unwittingly joined.

The Good

What sets Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands apart from many other music-themed RPGs is the incorporation of musical themes into its gameplay (it seems obvious at first but you’d be surprised how little it shows up in this niche). This game adds a new mechanic to turn-based combat, Measures. In music a Measure is a segment of time defined by a specific number of beats. In Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands, the Measure is the party’s turn order; a party member’s portrait will travel along the Measure and once they get to the end, they can take an action. What makes this really interesting is that certain actions can affect beats within the measure, like adding two beats of Haste to your measure will speed your party down the measure faster, letting you act faster, or inflicting a beat of Pain to your enemy’s measure, making them take damage over time whenever they travel down that beat in the measure. This leads to a very satisfying and unique gameplay style where you’re constantly juggling with adding beneficial effects to your measure while your opponent is trying to add negative effects to it all while you’re doing typical turn-based combat and to me, this is by far the most interesting aspect about this game.

The world of Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is very vast and full of life, because of which there are a lot of additional side quests the player can find. A lot of RPG side quests tend to have pretty lacklustre rewards but I’ve found this game’s side quests to be extremely rewarding. Most of the time the rewards I got from doing them were either useful items that fleshed out the combat significantly or entirely new abilities for each party member. Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is a game that you don’t want to skip the side content for.

Speaking of entirely new abilities, let's talk about this game’s customisation. Each character has 3 slots they can put skills into, with one dedicated slot to determine which class a character becomes (e.g. equipping a Show-Off skill like Hair Shredder will make that character a Show-Off). This allows you to mix and match skills from different classes to either make up for that class’ weaknesses or bolster their strengths with strategies they normally wouldn’t have access to. On top of that, you can also change out each character’s basic attack in the same way too, gaining new ones on occasion when defeating enemies and incorporating their attacks into your repertoire, which is a mechanic I expect to see in something like a Castlevania game, not a turn-based RPG.

TL;DR

• A clever and well-thought-out battle system
• Plenty of sidequests with worthwhile rewards
• Large amount of playstyle and strategy customisation

The Bad

As much as I love the introduction of Measures to the turn-based format, it does end up slowing down gameplay significantly. Having to constantly wait for your character to travel down the Measure gets really tiring after a while and is a major reason I’m not a fan of Final Fantasy’s ATB system.

So I only found out about this while writing this review that Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is based on a webcomic, so I apologise if I come off a bit rude when I say this but I actively cannot stand this game’s writing. The writing is fine if a bit bland when it's trying to be serious but when it's trying to be funny, which is almost constantly, it is straight up obnoxious. For me my breaking point was seeing a bus driver yell, “Everyone hold on, I’M ABOUT TO BUS!!!". After that I just mashed through all the dialogue and saved myself the headache.

TL;DR

• Battles can be slow at times
• Jokes often fall flat

Final Score: 6/10

Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is a very well thought out RPG that is unfortunately let down by its constant attempts at being funny. It feels like that weird kid that would hang around bullies; they’ve got their own things going on in their lives that could be a better focus for their time but they’re too busy trying to get approval from people that don’t like them and force them to eat bugs for their amusement.

Thank you for checking out our Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands Switch review, thank you to Five Houses (via Plan of Attack) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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