Weave your own thread through this epic strategy RPG adventure. Guide your caravan across the landsacpe of a breaking world, where tough choices, bold leadership decisions, wise use of resources and skillful battle tactics all matter in this desperate struggle for survival.
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A near perfect set of games to me. It is impossible for me to hate these games. So many positives to go through...
To start, presentation wise this game is a knockout. The character models, art direction, the setting, it all feels familiar yet mature. Normally for dialogue heavy games, voice acting would be welcome but I actually appreciate that there isn't much of it, lets you come up with the voices yourself. Just from looking at the character you get a good idea of what they're like.
THE MUSIC IS IMMACULATE. Austin Withrop? Hopefully I spelled that right, his composition is just a delight to listen to. There's so much variety too. In battles you have your heavy drums, loud clangs, thunderous trumpets. Very LOTR esque. Theres tons of mellow and somber tunes as well!
The story is just so creative, so unique and so enganging. It is a very stressful experience, but intentionally so. You always feel like you're on the run, always moving, always fighting, always making tough choices. And ALL your choices matter. Characters can die suddenly with no warning from one wrong decision. I think this game really captured the desperation and unnerving feeling it was going for.
Yet the characters are still very likeable. The dialogue is written very well, with great banter, lore, and just engaging conflicts. Some characters do get sidelined for sure, but with how big the roster is, it's not like that is expected.
I have to be fair and say these games are not perfect: first of all the quality of all 3 games varies. 1 is all around the most consistent, 2 is my personal favorite, it is the longest and has the most variety in chapters. But it also has lots of tedious moments.
3 on paper should work great, an amalgamation of all your choices condensed into one final push for survival. But the game actually punishes you by playing TOO well: you basically miss out on half of this game if you made too many right choices. It's backwards game design, locking away more content behind you messing up. I have playtested this and confirmed you can literally skip half of 3 if you know what you're doing.
Gameplay wise, I have always found it fun. On Switch there are issues on top of existing ones. Navigating the hud is wonky, and there are some visual bugs on switch as well. In general, the turn based combat is meant to be challenging, but not everything is clear and coherent all the time. But I think most of its issues are excusable.
It is so shy and so close to perfection for me. I can't reccomend it enough. I had a really
Special time with this series and I will keep revisiting it for many more years!
To start, presentation wise this game is a knockout. The character models, art direction, the setting, it all feels familiar yet mature. Normally for dialogue heavy games, voice acting would be welcome but I actually appreciate that there isn't much of it, lets you come up with the voices yourself. Just from looking at the character you get a good idea of what they're like.
THE MUSIC IS IMMACULATE. Austin Withrop? Hopefully I spelled that right, his composition is just a delight to listen to. There's so much variety too. In battles you have your heavy drums, loud clangs, thunderous trumpets. Very LOTR esque. Theres tons of mellow and somber tunes as well!
The story is just so creative, so unique and so enganging. It is a very stressful experience, but intentionally so. You always feel like you're on the run, always moving, always fighting, always making tough choices. And ALL your choices matter. Characters can die suddenly with no warning from one wrong decision. I think this game really captured the desperation and unnerving feeling it was going for.
Yet the characters are still very likeable. The dialogue is written very well, with great banter, lore, and just engaging conflicts. Some characters do get sidelined for sure, but with how big the roster is, it's not like that is expected.
I have to be fair and say these games are not perfect: first of all the quality of all 3 games varies. 1 is all around the most consistent, 2 is my personal favorite, it is the longest and has the most variety in chapters. But it also has lots of tedious moments.
3 on paper should work great, an amalgamation of all your choices condensed into one final push for survival. But the game actually punishes you by playing TOO well: you basically miss out on half of this game if you made too many right choices. It's backwards game design, locking away more content behind you messing up. I have playtested this and confirmed you can literally skip half of 3 if you know what you're doing.
Gameplay wise, I have always found it fun. On Switch there are issues on top of existing ones. Navigating the hud is wonky, and there are some visual bugs on switch as well. In general, the turn based combat is meant to be challenging, but not everything is clear and coherent all the time. But I think most of its issues are excusable.
It is so shy and so close to perfection for me. I can't reccomend it enough. I had a really
Special time with this series and I will keep revisiting it for many more years!
This review contains spoilers
Banner Saga is full of interesting ideas that I can't fully back because of the insanely reactionary nature of these games. I could talk about feeling moved by Alette's character arc if she's the one who survives, as a young girl who is forced to grow up too fast; I could say I enjoyed how fluidly the decisions carried between games; I could explain the real (good!) stress and fear I felt about the state of my caravan. Instead, I'll say something else: The unchecked fear of the Other is the #1 driving force of all of Banner Saga, from the zombie-like Dredge encroaching on your home, to the weird racist centaur people, to other caravans from different clans.
Choosing to help someone often puts your caravan in indirect or sometimes direct danger. You are trained to view the other people also trying to survive a catastrophe with extreme suspicion, and their differences from your caravan are emphasized so they seem more dangerous. To be clear, this omnipresent paranoia is never presented as a bad thing. It might be seen as a darn shame that you can't all hold hands and work together, but other people are fundamentally untrustworthy, obviously. So the "pragmatic" (and therefore right) thing to do is to prioritize you and yours, at the expense of everything else. On top of this, there are no gay people in Banner Saga, all the women are either archers or mages except for Folka (who is often the recipient of jokes about her being too fat / too masculine), and the only recruits of color are the centaurs who speak broken English and a bard who appears to be a Mongolian caricature. In a game that is so obviously afraid of the Other, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
"But you like other games without any gay people at all!" Also true. So here are some fun facts for you: Banner Saga was developed by Bioware alumni who had been on the Mass Effect team, and broke off to write their own fantasy, unfettered by bonds of AAA game development. In the same year that the first Banner Saga game came out (2014), Dragon Age Inquisition was released, also by Bioware, which made great (if imperfect) strides in including thoughtfully written LGBT characters, including a notable trans man, Krem. Bioware is a big studio that makes AAA video games, which often can't or won't push back against the status quo in an attempt to attract a wide audience. Indie game developers have historically had much more freedom, something the Banner Saga devs were clear they desired when they broke off. But the mess that is Banner Saga feels like not an indictment of the pressures of big video game companies, but a lament at how liberal the culture became.
And no, they did not earn the big "but the Dredge have feelings too!" twist in the final hours of the trilogy. It was too little too late.
Choosing to help someone often puts your caravan in indirect or sometimes direct danger. You are trained to view the other people also trying to survive a catastrophe with extreme suspicion, and their differences from your caravan are emphasized so they seem more dangerous. To be clear, this omnipresent paranoia is never presented as a bad thing. It might be seen as a darn shame that you can't all hold hands and work together, but other people are fundamentally untrustworthy, obviously. So the "pragmatic" (and therefore right) thing to do is to prioritize you and yours, at the expense of everything else. On top of this, there are no gay people in Banner Saga, all the women are either archers or mages except for Folka (who is often the recipient of jokes about her being too fat / too masculine), and the only recruits of color are the centaurs who speak broken English and a bard who appears to be a Mongolian caricature. In a game that is so obviously afraid of the Other, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
"But you like other games without any gay people at all!" Also true. So here are some fun facts for you: Banner Saga was developed by Bioware alumni who had been on the Mass Effect team, and broke off to write their own fantasy, unfettered by bonds of AAA game development. In the same year that the first Banner Saga game came out (2014), Dragon Age Inquisition was released, also by Bioware, which made great (if imperfect) strides in including thoughtfully written LGBT characters, including a notable trans man, Krem. Bioware is a big studio that makes AAA video games, which often can't or won't push back against the status quo in an attempt to attract a wide audience. Indie game developers have historically had much more freedom, something the Banner Saga devs were clear they desired when they broke off. But the mess that is Banner Saga feels like not an indictment of the pressures of big video game companies, but a lament at how liberal the culture became.
And no, they did not earn the big "but the Dredge have feelings too!" twist in the final hours of the trilogy. It was too little too late.
The Greatest Trilogy Ever Made
Great trilogy, imperfect but still great
An incredible story with some really good gameplay. Hard to rate each game individually but definitely an incredible trilogy.
Una saga que a lo largo de 3 títulos consigue crear un universo interesante, pero con problemas en su historia y la forma de contarla. La narrativa es caótica, no logra que conectes con casi ningún personaje y el combate acaba resultando monótono.