The Banner Saga Trilogy held my attention from the moment I picked it up. I would describe this series as a hybrid of Oregon Trail and FireThe Banner Saga Trilogy held my attention from the moment I picked it up. I would describe this series as a hybrid of Oregon Trail and Fire Emblem, nestled comfortably in a Norse mythology-inspired dark fantasy setting. Banner Saga presents a high stakes story full of crucial decision making with the player positioned as the elected leader of a caravan full of survivors fleeing the end of the world.
The graphics are colorful, stylized, and dynamic, calling to mind western animated series like the Legend of Korra. Banner Saga’s writing and dialogue are stellar. There are a large number of unique characters to recruit, each with their own backgrounds and motivations to endear you to them (or make you hate them). Despite there being very little voice acting, the cast of characters all have distinct, defined personalities thanks to flavorful dialogue. After the first part of the trilogy, depending on your decisions, you can actually play the second and third parts with a completely different protagonist who has their own unique dialogue and interactions. The game is much longer than I anticipated and has excellent replay value.
Watching your caravan travel across alternating vibrant and stark regions of the world is a calm, zen experience. The environments are wonderfully detailed. Travel pauses frequently to present you with decisions concerning obstacles, story events, caravan morale or supply management, enemy or ally encounters, etc. There is an extremely wide variety of events that will occur during the long trek and I always found myself wanting to see what would happen next. Many decisions you make will have lasting impact on your caravan, on specific characters living/dying/leaving/staying, and the results of your choices often have unforeseen consequences or rewards chapters later. The thought put into the story depth of the story and the impact of your decisions is incredibly impressive. There is a wealth of mystery, intrigue, and politics to keep you invested in the plot and characters.
However, it seems so much time was spent on Banner Saga’s storytelling that the combat elements were a noticeably neglected. The battle system could definitely use a little tweaking, and though it is clunky, it was satisfying enough in the grand scheme of things for me, personally, to not mind its flaws too much. As a Fire Emblem veteran, there was sufficient challenge at the normal and hard difficulty settings, and it allows you to change difficulty at will without penalty when needed.
Most characters have their own specific abilities to play with, which keeps battles from feeling repetitive. Display of health and armor is my biggest gripe. The icons used to display them are too large and cover other units when you toggle the health display on. It would also have been useful to see ally and enemy ranges when moving your cursor over units. Targeting specific enemies with the circle pad was finicky at times. I also encountered a bug several times when after a non-player controller NPC killed the last enemy, I was left unable to leave the combat encounter until I moved all of my units for another turn or two.
Overall Banner Saga felt fresh and has great potential, but is held back by lack of polish in the combat UI and mechanics, and under utilization of the quality voice actors and animators the studio clearly had access to. I would have loved to see more voice work and animated cut scenes included throughout the tale. What was there was absolutely lovely but there was little of either until the third installment, and still not enough in that section for my taste. For me this game rates highly but I can see how it would frustrate those looking for a nuanced grid based strategy game. Banner Saga is best approached as an in depth, choose your own path, narrative experience, which is something is provides with aplomb.… Expand
