cool story but... the most boring, unbalanced game ive ever forced myself to finish

Excellent Game with a moving story, stunning visuals and a deep and engaging world. Balancing the use of characters and renown is difficult, but rrewarding and helped to keep the game challenging. Hard game to put down, 4.5/5.

The Banner Saga is fantastic from start to finish. Been sitting in my pile of games to play for a while, and I'm glad I finally go around to checking it out. This game combines a rich story set in a nordic mythology, turn-based combat that harkens to X-com, and survival decisions that remind me of the old Oregon Trail.

Three great things about the game:
- Decisions matter. They shape the way your party forms over the course of a solid 12-14 hour story.
- A solid combat system that keeps action interesting
- Fantastic story of the end times

It's not without a few faults however. The surival-ESQUE gameplay is definitely in service to the story. Things like caravan supplies and army size feel inconsequential at times. Sometimes you will spend a bunch of currency on supplies for a long haul... only to have the supplies made meaningless by cutting a long journey short due to a story element.

Other times you make sacrifices to keep your army numbers high, only never to fight or encounter another large army. Why? Because the story didn't call for you to run into an army yet. I would have much rather used the currency buy items or upgrade my party members. But there's no way to know when supplies and army size are actually needed, before you actually need them... making their currency system a bit of random guesswork

The story is good, so the above points are forgivable, but I would have liked to see them strike a better balance between the story, and the game-y parts.

You should buy this game. You will enjoy it. Can't wait to play The Banner Saga 2.

If you're interested in story driven games and RPGs, this game is definitely worth the buy. The Banner Saga is a combination of (a) turn based, micro-scale combat (a la Dungeons & Dragons or CRPGs), (b) visual novel storytelling with many choices, and (c) a clan management game. This it the abc of The Banner Saga, and its primary innovation is trying to entwine the three elements into a single, engaging experience.

There are a lot of things The Banner Saga does right:
+ A compelling story in an interesting world (basically a Nordic world where humans and giants try their hardest to tolerate each other);
+ A simple yet interesting combat system that is genuinely fun;
+ Genuinely difficult choices, both in terms of gameplay and story progression;
+ Beautiful and unique art and visuals (a sort of gritty Disney meets Eyvind Earle (mentioned in the credits as inspiration));
+ An equally beautiful celtic sound track.

But the game has several flaws as well: where it is ambitious in entwining the abc and innovative in its ways to make the interactions between those elements engaging, it never really delivers in the end-game. This is mostly due to The Banner Saga's Renown system, which hopes to bring all three (combat, narrative, and magement) together, but ultimately fails to do so.

The Renown system functions much like Experience Points, only Renown Points will buy you (1) character levels, (2) items for your heroes, and (3) supplies for your clan, which you require to travel. Although this is an engaging way of resource management, it fails in several respects. Firstly, it can be anti-fun when the player is forced to choose to buy supplies for the clan rather than spend money on leveling characters, which is a core element of what is enjoyable about RPGs. Secondly, characters that die in the narrative will have been a waste of invested Renown (I personally don't find this a big deal, but those who enjoy the turn based combat more than the narrative may find it irritating).

More importantly, this system leads to a watering down of all the three elements: combat becomes too easy and narrative and managament choices unimpactful. The clan management for example consists of managing Supplies (for travel), Figthers (for large battles and random events) and Morale (which affects fighter efficiency as well as the combat system). Yet this never ends up being sufficiently relevant: leveling characters makes it easy to ignore the penalty for having bad Morale, you always end up having enough Fighters, and buying sufficient Supplies is more of a necessary tedium.

There are some other, less prominent flaws: sometimes the writing takes much agency away from the player, resulting in catastrophes that you may feel were completely beyond your control. Often, the narrative fails to emphasize important events that aren't entirely in the script, such as a character dying due to a narrative decision. There is also very little time spent actually developing some of the side characters in interesting dialogue, and much focus rests on the main storyline. The latter bothered me enormously, because I liked many of the characters upon introduction, but barely got to interact with them. This is partially due to the game introducing too many characters, but partially simply too few of such events were actually written out.

These flaws, as well as a rather abrupt ending (which pretty much makes buying the sequal mandatory), leave me feeling slightly less satisfied than I'd hoped to be. However the flaws are easily forgiven, because The Banner Saga manages to keep the players attention where it wants it, namely with the main storyline. This storyline itself is compelling and well presented to the extent that it warrants the €20,- pricetag in itself.

Verdict: Recommended with a 7/10. The flaws in the gameplay are compensated by a great narrative experience; moreover, the gameplay has much potential and if the developer learns, The Banner Saga 2 may become a real classic.

Some games you can just tell that the creators loved them. The care, the atmosphere, the characters, story and pacing are all beautiful. I am the sort of person easily turned off by games you 'watch' instead of play, but there are exceptions out there and this is one. The isometric battles are frankly not that great, the atmosphere is what makes this.

How many games are there where you can't wait to finish the battle to find out what happens next in the story? Can't think of another right now. Superb... Off to buy 2.

Very few games have moved me to the extent to which Banner Saga has. And yet the ways in which it does so are so minimalistic that it's a wonder that I feel this way. Beneath the beautiful hand-drawn looking visuals, the progressively revealed story which draws you in more as you play, the characters you get attached to, and the challanging but satisfying turn-based gameplay, you also find a harrowing survival game. The people under your charge only show up as numbers but the more you play, the more you realize that they're more than numbers. Every step forward and every difficult decision you make affects their lives and at least I felt as if they were my charge and I was responsible for their lives and wellbeing. When those numbers started to fall, I felt their loss and my failings as a leader.

good game

Great game for casual players.

(Disclaimer: The following review was done before playing the sequel(s) and is exclusively pertinent to it.)

Banner Saga is the first chapter in a series that weaves nordic mythology and aesthetic with an interesting unique fantasy world that is quite apocalyptic in tone. It mixes tactical RPG elements with a survival "on-rails" traveling mechanic (the term "viking orion trail" describes it quite well), both dictated ultimately by a visual novel "choice-based" gameplay structure.

This game's strongest qualities are by far its brilliantly crafted artistic elements: Story, graphics and music. The graphics are wonderful and seeing traditional hand-drawn 2d animation in a world where 3d animation is the norm is refreshing. The backgrounds are inspired by artist Eyvind Earle (they even named a character after him) and are quite breathtaking. The music sounds quite authentic in its attempts to complement its theme, as it mixes elements of traditional nordic folk music (with singing), and is very well composed and was recorded in an actual orchestra which brings it to a whole new level.

The story is quite interesting and in parts quite brutal. The worldbuilding is well done and pulls you in quite intensely - though it feels a bit narrow in its scope, lacking a bit of cultural and political diversity at times. As for the plot, there are definately some "game of thronesy" ruthlessness (minus the outward adult elements to it), feeling like you're never really safe and anything can happen - except perhaps for some degree of "plot armor" that perhaps can't be avoided when you're writing a protagonist-driven narrative.

Now for the gameplay, which is where the real faults of this game unfortunately lie:

As I said before there are three elements that compose this game: A tactical RPG element that takes place in battles, a on-rails Orion Trail style travelling mechanic which takes place when going from one place to another, and a visual novel, "choose-your-adventure book" type of gameplay where the story and dialogue is presented to you and you have to make decisions to lead the game foward, decisions which can prove fortuitous or give you trouble.

The problem and the biggest flaw of this game is the fact that it pretends that it is not linear. It constantly throws you game elements that tease you into a false sense of freedom - such as the battle system, which is the only part where the "RPG" element really takes place - like for example the map system, which shows you a richly detailed world with many places to go, but never giving you the choice to actively opt to travel to any of those places, but instead claustrophobically forcing you to follow a set trail from which you can never stray off (and from which you can't even go back - once you're going foward, there is no stopping).

The resource system is quite simplistic, and the game "money" is only acquired in battle and is used for everything, including leveling up your characters. And to make it worse, it's in quite short supply, essencially robbing you with the pleasure of making your characters stronger in case you don't want to, you know, starve to death. This is where the Viking Trail element comes in - yes, you need food to feed your caravan. And not only it's difficult to find supplies, but you also lose them very easily, especially due to events that happen over which you have no control.The game also doesn't make clear what the advantage of having a large caravan even is.

Now I have only played this game once, so I only know the extent to which choices matters from other people talking about it, but as far as I know, a lot of the choices don't actually change the story very significantly. Which can be kind of dishonest as it sabotages the feeling you get when first playing the game of you having crafted your own story.

All in all, the game feels way too much like a book. A book where you sometimes play "chess" against, and a very good one at that, but still a book.

But anyway, I really enjoyed playing it, and I appreciate the effort that went into it, so I'm giving it a positive review. But it could certainly be more of a "game", or at least be more honest about how much it isn't.

Well done RPG TBS semi VN-ish game, the battle is intense and chalenging makes me addicted to the game completely, without being said to be ecstasified.

+great gameplay (every decission you had is changing the game)
+very light
+TBS combat

-Where's the single combat mode?

Decent: without VA the ecosystem seems boring, it should be atmospheric

VERDICT 8/10