The Banner Saga has you leading a group of warriors and civilians to escape the horde of Dredge that have been making their way through Human and Varl lands. You have to make choices and watch your supplies throughout your journey that will effect your caravan and the lives of those that fight in battle with you, certain choices can lead to characters leaving or being killed.

Making certain choices and winning battles will gain you renown which you can use to buy items in markets, buy supplies, or level up your characters. The renown system is one of the things that could use work as you never really have enough or have any need to buy items from the markets (except for supplies), characters that you spend a large amount of renown on can be killed or leave based on your choices or from story events, and there are a lot of events and stretches of area where supplies are scarce. Running out of supplies means that morale will go down, which effects the willpower stat in battle and will cause civilians and soldiers to die every day they go without food. Civilians aren't actually used for anything though and soldiers only matter when you run into large groups of enemies where you will enter a "war" and have to choose how to fight, you should always take the option to charge your enemies with your main characters because it will gain you the most renown and lose you the fewest soldiers, making the choices very uninteresting. Even the finale of the game that has you holding a town for a few days gives you a lot of what should be interesting options but the best thing to do is to always fight on the battlefield.

The battle system is turned based and has some good ideas, such as characters having armor and strength where strength represents how much damage someone does and their health. They also have a stat that shows how much armor they can break and willpower that can be used to fuel their active class ability and that can be used to move further, increase armor damage, or to increase strength damage. Trying to do strength attacks on a unit with higher armor will only do one damage and their armor may deflect the attack completely. It's a good system but is kind of ruined by the weird meta game it creates where you want to run around wounding all of the enemies instead of killing them due to the terrible turn order system the game uses. The turn order has one of your men goes followed by one of theirs, what this means is that if you are down to two enemies left they will keep getting turns while you have to play through your six characters, some that might be too far away or too wounded to attack the enemy. Luckily when you get down to one enemy your entire force gets to move before they do. Characters that lose all their strength in battle are wounded for 1-3 days and have their strength reduced by the number of days if they take part in a battle again, it's more of an annoyance than anything else, often they will heal during your travel between fights and it seems to go against the feel of the game where anyone could be killed. Battles are often very easy as well, which makes the war battles even stranger when hundred of enemies fight your hundreds of soldiers, and you easily win often losing only losing a dozen NPC soldiers by the end.

The game has you controlling two different forces throughout it and you end up not getting much time or interaction with most of the game's characters. Battles can still be fun when the turn order isn't causing problems and the game has great art, music, good writing, an interesting world, and some good choices to make along the way. Hopefully the sequel will give you more time and conversations with your main soldiers, improve the battle system, and allow for better and more detailed choices.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/721872859811872769
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/721878285886496769

I did not make my way through the first game in The Banner Saga without missteps. There are certainly some story beats that I wish I could take back—a few characters that needlessly died, days at a time where the caravan went hungry because I wasted our supplies. Those moments followed me throughout the campaign, and I'll have to deal with them into the rest of the trilogy. They are my burden to bear, my history with the game.

They tell my story—and I can't wait to fill out the rest of my banner.

even if gameplay kinda repetitive and start becoming more interesting near the end, except final battle, almost soft lock,

for God's sake, art, OST, animations very unique and mesmerizing. also, unpredictable and interesting encounters. got wet eyes from last cutscene, soundtrack+direction did a great job

everything is amazing and creative in the game, except gameplay

I tried to play The Banner Saga when it initially released. The art and story really intrigued me, but I wasn't into tactics or strategy back then, so it sat in my pile of shame for the longest time. This year I decided to dive back in, and while it maybe hasn't aged the best when it comes to features and variance of encounters, it still captures the dread and sense of being hunted better than almost any other game I have played.

Taking your caravan across the lands, being stopped by an endless list of challenges, surprised, and genuinely shocking moments was great. I am really looking forward to continuing the saga with the sequel next year.

Also if you stick to the main line, you are looking at around 7 hours for completion. That's a pretty decent run time for a tactics game to get a quick taste on what is on offer. I played the entire thing on Steam Deck too, and that was a really nice way to experience it.

I'll be honest; at first, I didn't like the game. The combat mechanics are very unique but it didn't click for me and the story was kind of slow for the first hour or so. After that first hours though, the game got much, much better both in terms of story and combat. I actually began to really like the combat. The worldbuilding of the game is also very detailed. I don't think I need to say much about the hand-drawn art because it is just SO BEAUTIFUL, as you can see in the screenshots. The music is also amazing and harmonious with the atmosphere.

All in all, The Banner Saga is a good game with a good story that have sometimes harsh but never nonsensical choices and consequences (that carry on to the next games) with turn based combat and caravan management/ survival elements.

Banner Saga is a super unique blend of styles that creates a game unlike most I’ve played. Filled with a branching narrative, evolved Oregon Trail style travel, resource management, and grid based strategy combat, I had an absolute blast with Banner Saga.

First off, the presentation is excellent. Austin Wintory’s score is at times haunting and at others triumphant. I loved how well he executed something that was so different from what I’m used to hearing from him. The art and overall atmosphere was awesome too. My journey really did feel almost hopeless, and I really felt a connection with the characters as we struggled through our journey. The lore too was surprisingly deep. I had fun pulling up the map to check out the backstory of the places I would be traveling by or even to just take a look at other parts of the world.

The combat is similarly well executed. Think Fire Emblem with its hero characters ducking it out on a grid but with its own twists. First, units on either side alternate turns by unit and not by team. So instead of one team going and then the other, it swaps between your unit, enemy unit, your unit, enemy unit, and so on. This makes paying attention to the turn order even more important than normal and creates some distinct challenges. Also each unit’s health is also their strength in addition to armor. Take too much damage, and you can’t deal as much back or even break through armor.

Combat on Normal was exhilaratingly challenging. It definitely didn’t hold back which contributed to the atmosphere of the whole game but it wasn’t so overwhelming that I felt like I couldn’t win. I definitely pulled out some close calls though. Only exception to this is the final boss which was cool in concept but terribly aggravating in execution. Doesn’t help either that targeting enemies could sometimes be hard to decipher, and I ended up hitting the wrong enemy a couple times because it was just so hard to see where my unit was targeting.

As a whole, you’ll be going on journeys with different caravans filled with different characters, all of whom will come across all sorts of obstacles and encounters. It’s up to you the player to not only keep supplies up to support your caravan but also make difficult decisions. There are some pretty dire consequences if you choose wrong. I’d know since I made some pretty idiotic choices myself looking back. There are also some potentially great rewards too though. I never felt cheated by the choices either as results felt fair to each choice, and I looked forward to these tricky conundrums.

Overall, The Banner Saga is a great strategy narrative game that truly pushes the boundaries of creativity. There are some rough edges to sand off, but I think if the rest of the trilogy really improves on this, it could turn into an all-time favorite for me!

This is like someone, somewhere said, "Okay, Oregon Trail is a fantastic game that you can't improve on...... but what if you were Vikings?? I played through this game in 2016, but wanted to revisit it this year so I could have an excuse to play 2 and 3. It remains delightful and flawed all at the same time.

You and your little caravan make your way across a (huge) map, bound for story beat points to progress, ostensibly to flee a scourge of Dredge and mount some sort of defensive front. The map is massive, full of clickable features and points that all have their own little bit of lore written in, if you take a minute to look around. As you progress, there's a combination of written-in events that have lasting consequences as well as randomly generated events that affect things like morale, food, items, etc. You also trigger battles along the way, which take place in a tactical RPG-esque field with squares, movement points, etc. It's basically games you've seen before in a Nordic/Viking wrapper.

The good points are many. The art style is fantastic. I'm not sure I've seen another game that has the same look and feel as The Banner Saga, honestly. The backgrounds are simple and elegant, without feeling too sparse, and the animated character designs are superb. The music, too, is fantastic, and really sets the mood for whatever is going on at the time. I also felt really connected with the characters, and really tried to put myself in their shoes to make the really important, game-hinging decisions along the way.

My only true complaint about the game is the weird difficulty spike at the end. I played on normal difficulty and, aside from myriad injuries along the way didn't really have trouble making it through the fights. I leveled up my characters, tried to give them useful stats, and mostly felt like I was doing what I should to prepare for the ending of the game. Turns out I had specced entirely wrong, was woefully unprepared for the ending battle(s), and ended up having to drop the difficulty to easy to avoid replaying the entire thing again. Because it's a linear game, there's no grinding or seeking out additional fights at the end to correct poorly placed stat points, and you basically have to take the ending as it comes. The difficulty spike was incredible, and even after doing some research on teh Googlez, I noted many people expressing similar frustrations about the end fight sequence.

Still, this was a delightful game, and I'm really looking forward to my playthroughs of 2 and 3 now.

I thought I was going to like this one because I tend to like tactical RPGs. Unfortunately, it didn't do it for me.

I didn't care for the writing/story; it bored me.
I didn't care for the art style; it was too plain and grey/beige.
I probably could have gotten more in to the combat system, but the rest of the game was dragging me down. I just didn't care about what was going on and there was tons of reading involved.

Too much reading or listening to things I don't care about will push me away real quick.