As hinted by the title, The Banner Saga is part one of an epic Viking story where every choice you make directly impacts how your journey unfolds. It combines strategic turn-based combat with gripping text-based decision-making to draw you into a fictional world inspired by Norse mythology and filled with rich lore, as well as plenty of interesting characters you’ll grow fond of as your adventure progresses.
The Banner Saga doesn’t waste any time establishing its foundations. The gods are dead and the sun has stopped moving with the world stuck in a state of eternal twilight. Humans co-exist alongside horned giants known as Varls, despite the occasional turmoil, and now an ancient enemy threat referred to as the Dredge has returned to kill every living being in sight. This backstory is used to introduce you to a convoy of characters comprised of both humans and Varl along with clansmen that travel the lands in a caravan party with their own missions at stake.
For most parts, you’ll be taking in the stunning sights of the barren but beautiful lands as you watch your group of heroes and followers traverse the harsh Nordic environments while stopping off at any villages, camps or other points of interest. Where you travel depends on the route you take on the map. Resting at encampments to pass time is vital if moral and supplies are low. High morale reduces the number of casualties in battle and affects willpower. Each time you set out on an adventure, supplies are used to sustain the journey. The same resources used to purchase much-needed supplies are also used to level-up members of your party, so it’s a bit of a balancing act between improving party member attributes while ensuring followers don’t drop off because of food shortages. Camps also provide you with the chance to upgrade allies and equip items to enhance your characters in the hero tent.
It’s the choices you make during each chapter that make this such an enjoyable experience from start to finish. For every decision there is a consequence that will alter how the story unfurls. This is most evident in the text-based sections and exchanges with various characters over the course of the game – all told from the perspective of interesting lead heroes. It’s during these scenes you’ll be required to have input in the outcome of a situation – such as how your party will approach a battle, or if they should even engage in battle in the first place. Characters can convey multiple emotions, depending on which text-based choice you select. There are rational approaches and results to situations or more hostile solutions, if this is how you prefer to operate. Certain scenarios will obviously lead you into a battle you may have been able to evade altogether, or even result in a character’s demise.
It’s often hard to guess how a verbal exchange between groups of characters will play out. Even if a choice you make is seemingly the correct one, the game has a habit of offering up plenty of surprises with elements of betrayal, deceit and even alliances or relations you may not have expected over the long run. Fortunately, this does not lessen the experience, with the game being roughly ten hours long, playing it again shouldn’t be too much of a problem if you want to take a different approach or perhaps wanted to better prepare for the second game, when your unique progress and storyline carries over. A lot of the time you’ll also be dealing with various minor problems. These equate to side-quests where you’ll find yourself interrupted from the main task at hand with issues like inter-party squabbling to more serious matters such as dealing with a murder. Whether you delve deeper is dependent on your unique reply. These individual matters in general add to the immersion.
The text-based decisions made as you progress lead nicely into the strategic turn-based combat. The battles play out on a grid in a similar fashion to popular titles like Final Fantasy Tactics. There are a total of 25 playable characters and seven different classes, with certain characters, such as Varl, taking up more of the grid than others. The classes include the usual close combat types to the ranged variety. One difference in combat is the strength and armour icons. As the player, you can either choose to chip away an opponent’s armour or try and damage them directly by attacking their strength.
Breaking armour essentially makes an enemy vulnerable to more damage than normal in future turns. There’s also willpower which is a limited resource used to boost the power of a character’s action. The amount of rest characters have can also influence the level of success in battle. Apart from this, it is business as usual with the standard choices each turn including the option to attack, use a special ability (such as enhancing a fellow party member's stats or attacking multiple enemies at once), move or end the turn.
Like the dialogue, battles have consequences. Taking particular characters into combat can result in their eventual loss. It all depends on whether you are victorious in battle or are defeated. A lot of this is based on the strategies you implement. Classes such as archers are best kept at a distance from the enemy, whereas brute strength units – many of whom are Varl – relish in close combat. Enemies can attack in battle from all angles, adding extra depth to the strategy. In saying this, some role-playing veterans may find the battles too predictable in terms of the required approach (as well designed as this area of the game is).
If you do find the challenge is not great enough or perhaps too difficult, you can always adjust it to an easy or harder setting. The brilliance of the actions in battle is how it rolls over to future decisions you make in and outside of battles afterwards. About the only other notable downside here is the interface at times can be a bit clunky to navigate when making selections. Apart from this, the battles do a great job at bringing the narrative to life.
Bringing together the entire package is a beautiful art style and an absorbing soundtrack. Still images of this game don’t really do it justice. You simply need to see it in the flesh in order to realise just how good it looks (or at the very least watch some footage of it in high resolution online). The graphics are comparable to a classic Disney cartoon with bright colourful hand-drawn characters contrasting the stark, harsh and cold backdrops. The cut scenes will draw you into the world and while the character attacks in battle aren’t quite as stunning as other role-playing games, the animations, as few as there are, still look great.
Collectively, all of this does a superb job at drawing you into this fictitious world. The soundtrack and audio are equally as magnificent, with a score from Grammy-nominated composer, Austin Wintory. There are satisfying sounds in battle when swords make contact with enemy armour and a great sense of atmosphere when entering a village and engaging in conversation, and then hearing background noise from townsfolk and burning campfires. Alas, voice acting is limited. The music does a wonderful job matching an array of intense and more emotional moments, with all of this making the game world feel alive.
Conclusion
If you happen to love Norse mythology or epic fantasy stories full of consequence and deft storytelling, then look no further than The Banner Saga. This is a beautifully crafted game that uses its intriguing cast, gripping tale and absolutely stunning artwork and soundtrack to transport you to a world filled with plenty of danger and surprises. The turn-based strategic battles might not be equally as thrilling to everyone who plays this, and the interface in this part of the game can be a bit clunky at times, but this doesn’t detract too much from the collective offering.
Comments 27
Haven't picked it up yet but it'll probably be my eShop purchase. I still can't get over how beautiful it is.
This looks amazing! Certainly on my wishlist.
Played the first on PC and the sequel on ipad. Great games. Definitely a better experience when handheld for me, so it will be perfectly at home on the switch!
Just another game to add to my wish list as I play catch up for the next 5 years!
Ya I wish it was a bit longer than 10 hours, so a compilation may be the way to go. Looks really cool though.
I´ve been asking myself for the last couple of days if I should go for this one or Battle Chasers first....(I´m leaning more towars TBS because it´s more story oriented - I think - and the sequels)
@Spoony_Tech
I know what you mean. When I saw today's North American Download Update, I sighed and shook my head. There's no way to catch up on it all!
I really want both of these but I need to know if 3 is good. Mass Effect proved that with known trilogies you should always wait to find out if the end sucks before you commit, lol
I need a money tree.
I’ve been wanting to play this for ages, but at $30AU for 10 hours, I’m tempted to wait for a future bundle/discount with the other games included. Mainly because I have tons of other games to play at the moment.
I would buy a physical collection of all 3.
I bought it day one and played it for few hours.. To me, it’s one of those games that looks stunning in a trailer but then not that good when I actually play it. I love the genere but this one didn’t click with me. So I guess I’m gonna pass on the other installements
@Danito definitely The Banner Saga, especially if you have any affinity for western RPGs or older, text heavy games. It is really well written.
I’ve enjoyed some turn-based strategies, including the Mario + Rabbids game. How does it compare with a game like that? Granted, they’re not the same, but just looking for others opinions and maybe comparisons of one feeling slower, etc
This sounds absolutely awesome and I want to very much!
@Whalehome TBS has a fairly similar setup but is much slower paced; no crazy bouncing off teammates and sliding into warp pipes and such. It's probably more similar to Fire Emblem than anything. There is no cover to hide your characters and battles are far more punishing.
It looks nice but I just can't get into these kind of games anymore
Looks awesome, but given backlog, no need to get it now. Will wait for price drop.
Bought it and swallowed it whole.
It reminded me a lot of those pen-and-paper-adventures I played as a child in the way it tells its story and the way it is influenced by your decisions.
I must admit that gameplaywise I didn't know well enough how the strategy works in this game until almost the end. It kind of tells you everything important in the beginning and I did not remember everything well enough (but well, you can always just look it up again and it is not THAT complex, though complex enough to be difficult to master).
You don't really have to know anyway. Most of the battles (except for those that really progress the story) won't be repeated. If you mess up, you suffer consequences, but most can be compensated by good decisionmaking.
I don't think the game is brilliant by any means. The gameplay was alright, the story was alright, the characters were alright. I liked the music a lot, though, and I liked the aestethics far more than I thought I would. Especially the little animations and the cameramovement during dialogue. It showed the attention to detail the developers payed.
As mentioned above I still could not stop playing the game until I was done and even now I am tempted to try again with better skill to try and reach a different ending. And though it was not that memorable to me, all in all it was a really entertaining and well crafted game that I would recommend to fans of pen&paper and or strategy games likewise.
Certainly on my radar. Maybe there's going to be a trilogy physical?
Hey you know what, I told myself, second game is out so maybe it's time to get the first game! Let's head over to Nintendolife
...NOTHING. Totally worthless. You'd think the reviewer didn't even play the Switch version since it doesn't mention A WORD on the port... framerate? Loading times? Portable mode concessions? Nope. Well, surely it'll mention the resolution?!
NOPE.
NOTHING.
Why even bother? Hell of a worthless review, game's been out for years already, even freaking Appstore reviews are more helpful than some NL stuff. Meh, very disappointed.
Hi @Turrican280 I'm hesitating between the iPad (larger screen, touch control) and the Switch version, which one would you recommend?
Hi @Contes, I haven’t actually bought it on the switch yet, although I was very close yesterday seeing them all in the sale. I did however find that the ipad is great for this type of game.
But it seems you can only get the first two on iOS as opposed to all three on the Switch at this point in time. Had they been available on the Switch when I originally purchased them, I would’ve probably bought them on the switch knowing I could play them all on one console. And having only completed the first and a portion of the second, I think I may have to now do that!
@Turrican280 Thanks for your reply! Too bad for the third episode indeed, I didn't know they simply don't have any plans on porting it to iOS, I guess that's due to Apple's fee but that's disappointing anyway.
@Contes
No problem 🙂
Yeh I agree, especially when they have the first two already.
Do you plan on getting them for the Switch now?
@Turrican280 Still unsure: when looking at the Switch screenshots in this article, I'm afraid this seems like a lot of interface and details for a 6.2” screen.
I own an iPad Pro 9.7” and will likely switch for the new 11” Pro model this year, so I'm really thinking it will likely be more comfortable... at least visually. Gameplay-wise is, a few years ago I played X-COM on iPad: the tablet got really hot after some time, and it was really tiresome for my hand to move around the screen given the many actions the game required. TBS could pose the same issues, although visually it looks more appealing, notwithstanding the absence of the 3rd episode on iOS.
@Contes
Yeh I have found with a few games there is just too much interface for the screen. Text suffers etc.
That’s the advantage of having controllers, you don’t have to experience the heat from the console itself. Although I can imagine the iPad Pro will run games at a lower temp being they are very powerful.
I love the X-COM series. Played XCOM:Enemy Within and XCOM 2 on my PC and have been itching to play them on a handheld. So I am really looking forward to XCOM 2 in May on the Switch.
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