Hey, a proper review! Also a post I might actually post instead of just leaving it half-finished as a draft. Or maybe not. Who knows? I'm also trying a different format, more similar to my anime reviews, where instead of having two distinct sections I have one section with two scores at the end.
The Banner Saga is the first "proper" game I've played in a while, mostly because the natural stopping points in episodic adventure games is a really nice thing to have when you're a uni student with basically no time for gaming. It's one of those games that I've had a mild interest in since it came out, but never really got around to playing. Well, it was cheap at some point, and wound up on my ever-growing list of Steam games I'm not really playing. So, getting some time over the Christmas holidays to play something, I pretty much picked a name out of a hat, and found myself playing The Banner Saga, the curious little hybrid of Visual Novel, The Oregon Trail, and turn-based top-down strategy game with vikings.
What a pleasant little surprise for the end of the year.
On With The Review:
There's no two ways about it. The Banner Saga looks abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous. Everything about it looks breathtaking in one way or another. The character portraits during conversation look fantastic. The scenery in the Oregon Trail-style travelling sections has depth, and detail, and is simply beautiful. The animation during the turn-based combats was rotoscoped, a technique that gives them a fantastic, fluid feeling similar to games like the original Prince of Persia or Another World.
All of this is backed by a phenomenal soundtrack that really fits the ambiance the game creates. This is a somber series of tracks that immerse you into this world. They almost feel like songs of mourning for this tired, dying world.
And that is what The Banner Saga does best. The world is dying. The Gods are dead. The sun has stopped moving, plunging the world into an eternal winter, and an army of stone golems called the Dredge are sweeping the land, destroying every settlement in their way, taking no prisoners, slaughtering everyone. You take the role of several power-figures throughout the land, whether human or of the horned giants called the Varl, trying to lead their people to escape from the tide of death that seems to be sweeping down from every direction. You're not trying to stop the world from dying, you're just trying to scrape a few more miserable months of life for those you are responsible for. That's it, and the story never really goes much more complex than that. There's a couple effective but highly predictable character arcs, and the rest is pretty much discussing the nitty-gritty of how to survive that particular moment.
I'm tempted to call The Banner Saga a horror game. Not because it's scary, or has any of the aesthetics typically associated with the genre, but because it so masterfully creates what I think is most important in a good horror game: dread. Throughout most of The Banner Saga, what one feels isn't terror, or fear, or even sadness, an emotion that one would probably associate with the end of the world (though Banner Saga definitely has its share of sad moments). It's just a quiet, creeping sense of dread and resignation.
There's plenty of time for this feeling to set in during the Oregon Trail segments. These consist of watching as your caravan slowly trudges along the beautiful yet barren world, with a day counter ticking up, and a "days of supplies" counter ticking down. Once that "day of supplies" number hits zero, your population starts to die off. At first, this baffled me. Why all these mildly long pauses where one essentially stares at the screen? Why not just move on to the next event, and be done with it?
As I got farther into the game, I understood the purpose. These are genuinely tense times. You're sitting there, staring at the screen, torn between your wish for something to happen, and the fear that something happening may not be good for the people in your caravan. Maybe I'll come across an abandoned wagon of supplies, and not have to save my resources to buy supplies at the next town! Or maybe I'll get ambushed by Dredge, and loose a large amount of civilians. Oh, a town in the distance! I hope it's safe. I hope I can get cheap supplies there. Maybe there's a nice amulet I can buy in the market, make my fighters more efficient, protect my civilians from Dredge.
But, in the back of your mind, you know it doesn't matter. This world is done for, and so are you, and so is everyone in your caravan.
The "events" I described take place in almost FTL-style encounters, where you're presented with a few choices to make. Unlike FTL, the results of these choices aren't randomized (or, on a first playthrough, they sure as hell don't feel randomized). There's often a correct choice to be picked, though sometimes there's just a least bad or most good option to try to find.
A decision that does still baffle me is to include no game-over state through the Oregon Trail sections. As I found out by trying it simple to see, if you population hits zero, nothing happens, meaning you can pretty much ignore your supply situation and your population, which makes the choices you make in the FTL-encounters a lot less stressful. Admittedly, it's fairly easy to never run out of supplies, and you've got more than enough population to never run out without actively trying to, but it's still a bit of a damper. That said, playing as though population mattered made the atmosphere of the game all the more effective for me, so I did.
The final thing to discuss are the battle sections, which in my opinion are the weakest part of the game. That said, when the weakest part of the game is The Banner Saga's combat sections, you're doing pretty damn well, because the combat in The Banner Saga is very good.
It's pretty much standard top-down tiled-based turn-based word-hyphen combat, with a twist or two thrown in there. You get to bring a team of six characters, leveled from one to five. You then proceed to take turns moving your guys around and whacking the opponents, with one move and one action per character. One of the cleverer things is that there's two types of health each characters has: armor, and strength, and you get to decide which one to attack at every turn. Strength is your actual "Hit points", the stuff that gets your character knocked out when it goes to 0. However, your remaining strength also serves as your attack power. If you try to attack a character's strength, the resulting damage is your strength minus their armor, to a soft cap of 1 if their armor is higher, though at that point you've got a chance to miss. Attacking their armor doesn't bring them closer to death, but does allow you to do strength damage on further attacks. Each character hits armor for a set amount based off one of their stats.
This brings a really interesting dynamic to fights. On the one hand, it might be better to attack strength straight off. This means they're going to hit you for less on your own strength, so you can stay further away from death and do more damage. On the other hand, if you hit them for armor damage now, your other characters can close in and finish them off quicker.
The other main mechanic in fights is willpower. Each character has a certain amount of willpower, which are points that you can use to essentially give your characters a little bit of kick on the battlefield. You can move farther, or hit for more, even overriding their armor to hit for more than one when you've got considerably less strength than they have armor. The amount of willpower you can use per attack also varies with stats. You can also use special abilities, unique to the handful of character classes in the game, which each cost one willpower each. These will allow you to push enemies around the battlefield, make your allies automatically attack an enemy you've marked when it's not their turn, hit several enemies, or other useful little things. It's an interesting conflict, having to decide whether the situation is dire enough to sacrifice your last bit of hitting extra.
Each time a character gets a kill on the battlefield, the game remembers this. Getting to specific numbers of kills allows you to rank up, which uses up certain amounts of renown. Renown is the currency of the game. It's used for everything, whether to buy supplies or level up your guys. Every kill on the battlefield gives you 1 renown, as well as completing battles successfully or acts of kindness or bravery on the road. This means there's yet another interesting dynamic: Do you level up your warriors, thus being able to more effectively protect your civilians in the battlefield, or do you buy supplies, and prevent your caravan from starving?
The leveling system itself is also brilliant, yet simple. Every point you put in a stat is a stat you directly see on the battlefield. There isn't any "put a point into charisma so that there's a 3.2% reduction in your spell costs, but only if they're white magic and we're not going to tell you any of that". A point in strength means you get an extra point of strength in combat. A point of armor break means your attacks now break one more armor. It's all a direct one-to-one correspondence without loosing any depth, which feels very refreshing.
The combination of all these factors makes combat a series of interesting decisions. Do I level my guys, or try to squeak by with weaker warriors so that it's less likely my civilians will starve? Do I attack strength now, setting up for a slower kill, or do I attack armor, and risk taking a bit hit? Do I use the last of my tank's willpower to get up to that Dredge over there, or can my archers afford to kite him for a while?
Presentation: 10/10
The Banner Saga looks great, sounds great, and has an effective story. Above all, it's an absolute masterpiece of the grim, quiet, dread that darker Nordic-themed fantasy is so good at.
Gameplay: 8/10
While maybe lacking depth in some aspects, The Banner Saga's gameplay seems to consist mostly of interesting and difficult choices, whether it be in combat or outside it. This is something I'm down for.
Overall:
(10+8)/2 = 9
The Banner Saga is fantastic. It does everything it wants to do well, and it's not exactly an unambitious project. Go play it.
The Banner Saga is the first "proper" game I've played in a while, mostly because the natural stopping points in episodic adventure games is a really nice thing to have when you're a uni student with basically no time for gaming. It's one of those games that I've had a mild interest in since it came out, but never really got around to playing. Well, it was cheap at some point, and wound up on my ever-growing list of Steam games I'm not really playing. So, getting some time over the Christmas holidays to play something, I pretty much picked a name out of a hat, and found myself playing The Banner Saga, the curious little hybrid of Visual Novel, The Oregon Trail, and turn-based top-down strategy game with vikings.
What a pleasant little surprise for the end of the year.
On With The Review:
There's no two ways about it. The Banner Saga looks abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous. Everything about it looks breathtaking in one way or another. The character portraits during conversation look fantastic. The scenery in the Oregon Trail-style travelling sections has depth, and detail, and is simply beautiful. The animation during the turn-based combats was rotoscoped, a technique that gives them a fantastic, fluid feeling similar to games like the original Prince of Persia or Another World.
All of this is backed by a phenomenal soundtrack that really fits the ambiance the game creates. This is a somber series of tracks that immerse you into this world. They almost feel like songs of mourning for this tired, dying world.
And that is what The Banner Saga does best. The world is dying. The Gods are dead. The sun has stopped moving, plunging the world into an eternal winter, and an army of stone golems called the Dredge are sweeping the land, destroying every settlement in their way, taking no prisoners, slaughtering everyone. You take the role of several power-figures throughout the land, whether human or of the horned giants called the Varl, trying to lead their people to escape from the tide of death that seems to be sweeping down from every direction. You're not trying to stop the world from dying, you're just trying to scrape a few more miserable months of life for those you are responsible for. That's it, and the story never really goes much more complex than that. There's a couple effective but highly predictable character arcs, and the rest is pretty much discussing the nitty-gritty of how to survive that particular moment.
I'm tempted to call The Banner Saga a horror game. Not because it's scary, or has any of the aesthetics typically associated with the genre, but because it so masterfully creates what I think is most important in a good horror game: dread. Throughout most of The Banner Saga, what one feels isn't terror, or fear, or even sadness, an emotion that one would probably associate with the end of the world (though Banner Saga definitely has its share of sad moments). It's just a quiet, creeping sense of dread and resignation.
There's plenty of time for this feeling to set in during the Oregon Trail segments. These consist of watching as your caravan slowly trudges along the beautiful yet barren world, with a day counter ticking up, and a "days of supplies" counter ticking down. Once that "day of supplies" number hits zero, your population starts to die off. At first, this baffled me. Why all these mildly long pauses where one essentially stares at the screen? Why not just move on to the next event, and be done with it?
As I got farther into the game, I understood the purpose. These are genuinely tense times. You're sitting there, staring at the screen, torn between your wish for something to happen, and the fear that something happening may not be good for the people in your caravan. Maybe I'll come across an abandoned wagon of supplies, and not have to save my resources to buy supplies at the next town! Or maybe I'll get ambushed by Dredge, and loose a large amount of civilians. Oh, a town in the distance! I hope it's safe. I hope I can get cheap supplies there. Maybe there's a nice amulet I can buy in the market, make my fighters more efficient, protect my civilians from Dredge.
But, in the back of your mind, you know it doesn't matter. This world is done for, and so are you, and so is everyone in your caravan.
The "events" I described take place in almost FTL-style encounters, where you're presented with a few choices to make. Unlike FTL, the results of these choices aren't randomized (or, on a first playthrough, they sure as hell don't feel randomized). There's often a correct choice to be picked, though sometimes there's just a least bad or most good option to try to find.
A decision that does still baffle me is to include no game-over state through the Oregon Trail sections. As I found out by trying it simple to see, if you population hits zero, nothing happens, meaning you can pretty much ignore your supply situation and your population, which makes the choices you make in the FTL-encounters a lot less stressful. Admittedly, it's fairly easy to never run out of supplies, and you've got more than enough population to never run out without actively trying to, but it's still a bit of a damper. That said, playing as though population mattered made the atmosphere of the game all the more effective for me, so I did.
The final thing to discuss are the battle sections, which in my opinion are the weakest part of the game. That said, when the weakest part of the game is The Banner Saga's combat sections, you're doing pretty damn well, because the combat in The Banner Saga is very good.
It's pretty much standard top-down tiled-based turn-based word-hyphen combat, with a twist or two thrown in there. You get to bring a team of six characters, leveled from one to five. You then proceed to take turns moving your guys around and whacking the opponents, with one move and one action per character. One of the cleverer things is that there's two types of health each characters has: armor, and strength, and you get to decide which one to attack at every turn. Strength is your actual "Hit points", the stuff that gets your character knocked out when it goes to 0. However, your remaining strength also serves as your attack power. If you try to attack a character's strength, the resulting damage is your strength minus their armor, to a soft cap of 1 if their armor is higher, though at that point you've got a chance to miss. Attacking their armor doesn't bring them closer to death, but does allow you to do strength damage on further attacks. Each character hits armor for a set amount based off one of their stats.
This brings a really interesting dynamic to fights. On the one hand, it might be better to attack strength straight off. This means they're going to hit you for less on your own strength, so you can stay further away from death and do more damage. On the other hand, if you hit them for armor damage now, your other characters can close in and finish them off quicker.
The other main mechanic in fights is willpower. Each character has a certain amount of willpower, which are points that you can use to essentially give your characters a little bit of kick on the battlefield. You can move farther, or hit for more, even overriding their armor to hit for more than one when you've got considerably less strength than they have armor. The amount of willpower you can use per attack also varies with stats. You can also use special abilities, unique to the handful of character classes in the game, which each cost one willpower each. These will allow you to push enemies around the battlefield, make your allies automatically attack an enemy you've marked when it's not their turn, hit several enemies, or other useful little things. It's an interesting conflict, having to decide whether the situation is dire enough to sacrifice your last bit of hitting extra.
Each time a character gets a kill on the battlefield, the game remembers this. Getting to specific numbers of kills allows you to rank up, which uses up certain amounts of renown. Renown is the currency of the game. It's used for everything, whether to buy supplies or level up your guys. Every kill on the battlefield gives you 1 renown, as well as completing battles successfully or acts of kindness or bravery on the road. This means there's yet another interesting dynamic: Do you level up your warriors, thus being able to more effectively protect your civilians in the battlefield, or do you buy supplies, and prevent your caravan from starving?
The leveling system itself is also brilliant, yet simple. Every point you put in a stat is a stat you directly see on the battlefield. There isn't any "put a point into charisma so that there's a 3.2% reduction in your spell costs, but only if they're white magic and we're not going to tell you any of that". A point in strength means you get an extra point of strength in combat. A point of armor break means your attacks now break one more armor. It's all a direct one-to-one correspondence without loosing any depth, which feels very refreshing.
The combination of all these factors makes combat a series of interesting decisions. Do I level my guys, or try to squeak by with weaker warriors so that it's less likely my civilians will starve? Do I attack strength now, setting up for a slower kill, or do I attack armor, and risk taking a bit hit? Do I use the last of my tank's willpower to get up to that Dredge over there, or can my archers afford to kite him for a while?
Presentation: 10/10
The Banner Saga looks great, sounds great, and has an effective story. Above all, it's an absolute masterpiece of the grim, quiet, dread that darker Nordic-themed fantasy is so good at.
Gameplay: 8/10
While maybe lacking depth in some aspects, The Banner Saga's gameplay seems to consist mostly of interesting and difficult choices, whether it be in combat or outside it. This is something I'm down for.
Overall:
(10+8)/2 = 9
The Banner Saga is fantastic. It does everything it wants to do well, and it's not exactly an unambitious project. Go play it.
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