The Banner Saga 2

released on Apr 19, 2016

The award winning and BAFTA nominated saga continues in The Banner Saga 2. Continue your journey soon after the climactic events of The Banner Saga. The choices you made in the first game will affect who is alive and who is dead in this exciting sequel.


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A decent continuation from the first episode. The combat remains entertaining and strategically interesting, and I really enjoyed some of the new abilities and "twists" present in some encounters. It continues to be interesting to learn more about the world and each step forward continues to feel full of danger. The story was fine - it feels a bit less grounded than the first episode (leaning harder into fantasy with the Valka/Menders), but mostly suffers from being a "middle episode". Progress is made and there is somewhat of a climax at the end, but it ends up feeling more like a cliffhanger than anything being meaningfully resolved.

Casi igual que el 1. No me interesaron mucho ni los personajes ni la historia, pero es divertido.

This game is so emotionally exhausting for some reasons pt2

This review contains spoilers

still conflicted on this entry in the trilogy days after completing it. in the grand scheme of things it is ultimately perfunctory; it furthers the groundwork laid in the first game and leads into the excellent finale. however, the banner saga 2 feels like the part in which the character work takes a backseat, all while the tactical combat layer suffers in scope.

it's understandable due to the narrative framing of this game. the end of things is coming. dredge are pouring out of every crevice of a world splintering apart. there's very little time to justify reflection, at least one might think. yet we end up getting new characters in the form of bolverk and rugga which push the needle forward, but never deliver a rich character layer themselves. bolverk almost reaches this with his role, his dreams about damnation at the white tower, about betrayal. in the end he actually attacks juno and iver, possessed by the presence of bellower. but it's precisely in the ambiguity of bolverk's autonomy that later leads to confusion in the trilogy's ending. the final setpiece's accompanying visuals are incredible, eyvind erupting with lightning and bolverk arriving with bellower's body, but the final mini-game encounter between iver and bolverk is tedious and to me embodying of the way that the combat became a bit gimmicky in this part.

in the other caravan, the decision from the first game and how its handled ultimately feels a bit lackluster, and i think that's true even unto the finale. having both played as rook and alette i feel like both games lack a deeper reflection on what has been lost respective to each character. for rook at least we feel the immediate loss, and there's even a dream sequence in which he sees alette and is somewhat able to confront the tragedy of it all. for alette the game focuses on her inheriting the mantle of her father's banner and what it means to lead. but none of this ever feels like it comes to a thematic end, subsumed instead in the total impending annihilation. again, it all makes sense narratively, but your connections to these characters depend on the little moments. like, when rook says that he doesn't want iver to go, simply because he's his best friend. more emphasis goes to rugga's character, a desire to add a layer of political intrigue into the game, and it largely works well enough. yet, is there a huge payoff to rugga's involvement?

and i wonder if a lot of this is a fear of the game feeling like a visual novel. visual novels even to this day are in a weird spot if not outright ignored generally and the time of banner saga's production was no different. the series overall really feels like it wants to deliver most things through combat or caravan UI. it's a curious thing to think about all this time after the fact.

as it all stands, i'm quite critical of this entry, but it's still a fantastic game and there's little in this space that competes.


Very good time. Doesn't do much to improve upon the first one other than some QOL improvements. But again, art, animation, soundtrack, world, and story, were all so deep and good.