The Banner Saga
Banner Saga is a graphically beautiful game even though it lacks quality animations. The story is also well written, as this is the majority of the game play. The Turn-Based combat and how it ties into its Renown resource system is where the game falls horribly flat, causing you to become more and more depressed the longer you play.
PROS
- Great Graphics & Art
- Unique Health and Armor Mechanics
- OK Price point
CONS
- Horrible Renown System
- No Voiced Dialogue
- Harsh and Unrewarding experience
- Lack of Quality Animation
Release Date: 14 January 2014 | Developer: Stoic
Banner Saga is the first installment of a trilogy of games in this series by Stoic. I’ve had all three Banner Saga games in my Steam library for longer than I can remember and have always wanted to play them, as they are filled to the brim with great reviews.
As I was busy putting together my Best Viking Games, Best Turn Based Games and Best Story Games lists, there was no better time to load up the first Banner Saga game to see what all the fuss is about, as it fit in all three of these major game genre categories. Although, not all is good in paradise, as a tenth of its reviews are also negative.
With that said, let’s dive into this Banner Saga Review and see why.
The Banner Saga Gameplay
The game started off well and was rather enjoying myself, as I played through the first three chapters of the Banner Saga. The gameplay is centered around two major parts.
The Dialogue Choices and the Turn-Based Combat.
As the game starts off with the Turn-Based combat, let’s take a look at that first.
Before each battle, you are able to position your characters at any positions you like within a designated area before combat begins, allowing you some form of strategy in terms of formation, although this doesn’t really play much of a role, as you end up having to walk up to the enemy to fight them regardless, because archers are absolutely useless.
Each character can select to attack the enemy, targeting either their Health & Strength or their Armor, or use a special ability.
Health and Strength are tied as one combined stat, so if this drops to zero they are dead, but at the same time, the more you chip away at this stat, the weaker their hits on you become, as they are losing Strength as well.
So, while you might think to only attack this, the other stat (being Armor) protects them to a large extent.
While an enemy has full Armor, you won’t be doing much damage to their Health/Strength bar. Therefore, you need to first lower their Armor to around 30% or less, before attacking their Health/Strength stat.
I had no problem with this combat system, as it’s pretty clever and accurate to a real fight. The more you get hit and cut open in a real fight, the less lightly you are to deliver a powerful hit back due to your injuries.
Combat battles can however take quite a long time and are slow paced, which is fine too until you see how the leveling system works.
After finishing a battle, leveling points are not dedicated to experience gained across all members of your fighting troops, as you would find in a game such as Final Fantasy for example.
Instead, only the warriors that landed the killing blow on an enemy gain “experience” in terms of “Number of Kills”. When they reach a certain amount of kills, they are able to be Promoted “leveled up” which costs Renown.
I will get to into more detail on Renown shortly.
So even though everyone was involved in the killing of the enemy, only those that officially killed the enemy gain the potential to level up.
I have never seen such a badly thought out leveling system in 25 years of gaming. It makes absolutely no sense and is the reason that no other games make use of it. The entire team contributed to the kills, so why is only one character getting the recognition?
But this is just the beginning of the problems with the game mechanics.
The issues get progressively worse in the fact that after the few initial battles, you soon are severely outnumbered by the enemy, who are much stronger than you with a ton of armor on them, so taking them down requires a lot of work.
There is no one or two shotting an enemy, even though the intro tutorial leads you to believe this is possible.
Even the smallest and seemingly weakest enemies require a lot of hits to lower their armor enough to start chipping away at their Health/Strength, which takes a lot of time. All this is happening while the large Dredge (main enemy of the story) are smashing your head in each turn due to their massive amount of Health/Strength.
Because of this your fighters will “die in battle” more often than not in battle. I barely made it out of most battles with only one or two still standing.
Now, I could have overlooked this if my characters leveled up and gained new weapons/armor and skills, thereby becoming stronger after each battle, but unfortunately this is not the case at all.
Character progression and growth is basically non-existent in The Banner Saga, causing you to feel as weak in Chapter 7, as you were a the start of the game. In actual fact, you are become weaker the more you play the game, due to the game’s biggest design flaw.
You see, there is one major resource that governs everything in The Banner Saga and that is RENOWN.
You earn renown from winning battles or choosing certain options in the dialogue. At first the game leads you to believe that this is used to firstly promote your character, which is a cheeky way of making you spend Renown, before you can Promote (level up) your character, opening up two skill points that can be spent on one of the 6 sections.
While other games give this to you for free, I didn’t have a problem with this system until I reached the 4th Chapter when I realized that renown is also used to buy Supplies.
Supplies are what keeps your caravan traveling and its people (warriors and civilians) alive. As soon as this runs out they start dying at an alarming rate.
As they travel days pass and with each passing day, an amount of Supplies are subtracted from your total load, depending how many people are in your caravan. Again I don’t really have a problem with this on its own either.
The problem comes in the fact that your characters and their leveling potential, is now directly tied into the same resources that governs your ability to travel, which is one of the worst design decisions I’ve seen in a game
Once you hit Chapter 4 onwards, you start to lose supplies VERY quickly as the distance between towns increases, requiring more days to travel, which requires more supplies.
Another problem is that your Renown gained from battle remains the same (around 8 per battle) and does not exponentially increase alongside the increased supply requirements to sustain it, so you essentially become more and more poor as you progress.
On top of this, the game also starts to throw an annoyingly large amount of pop up decision making scenarios your way, while on the road or even in towns.
Each of these are poorly explained dialogues and usually gives you a few options to choose from.
The problem comes in that ¾ of these choices are a trap that end up in you making the “wrong choice” and the game punishing you hard for it, by either losing a warrior, morale or supplies. As this continues, you start to feel more and more depressed about playing the game, as nothing you do seems to be right and you never get stronger, only weaker and poorer.
One dialogue option asked me if I wanted to fight the Dredge, to which it made very clear outnumbered me, or if I wanted to send one my main Characters, Mogr (which at that point was level 4 already) to make a distraction so that the rest can sneak past.
I obviously chose the distraction as I would lose the fight, seeing that I literally just came out of a fight and all my warriors were injured (the game also likes to pile a string of fights at you for some reasons as well).
This resulted in the game telling me “oh well you probably won’t see him again” and ripped one of my core Turn Based units from me, that I have invested a lot of time and Renown in.
All that precious renown wasted because of seemingly insignificant dialogue that gave me no warning as to what the consequences might be.
The biggest problem with this defective Renown system is that due to the long travel times, dialogue quests stealing your supplies and the lack of increased Renown gained, you are forced to spend any and all of the little Renown you gain from the long tedious battles on supplies, just to get you from point A to B.
This means that you cannot level up your warriors and they now remain stagnant at their levels, but at the same time the enemy grows stronger with each chapter.
As you can imagine, you quickly become far too weak to even scratch them and battles become slaughtering when it should be the opposite, as you should become stronger, giving you as the player the satisfaction.
It’s not about the game being easy or difficult, it’s about a broken resources system that is linked to too many harsh progressions systems, which is a massive oversight from the developers.
At that point I closed the game and probably won’t be opening it up again.
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The Banner Saga Graphics
Banner Saga’s hand drawn graphics of both the characters and side scrolling landscapes are beautiful. In my opinion, they alone have been responsible for this seemingly success of the game series, due to people buying the game because it looks cool and not what flawed game mechanics lie underneath.
Characters
The hand drawn art of the characters has a anime look to it, using a flat shader style, very similar to that of Hayao Miyazaki, who created classics such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.
Characters are very well drawn, each having a very distinct look to them through their scars, hair, clothes and stances.
The one side where the characters are let down though is the animation, well let’s rather say the lack thereof. There is zero animation in the dialogue. The characters are single static images and nothing more. Not even their mouths move when they “talk”, it’s all static and very dull.
One nice drawn image of a charter isn’t enough to draw me into them, as animation reveals their mannerisms and thus their personality, all which is missing.
Landscapes & Environments
The background art is also so gorgeous and well made. The artists really understood the importance of scale, using it to show how vast and large the landscape is behind the very small people walking in front of it.
There is a well made parallax effect implemented as well, which causes foreground elements to pass the screen quickly, while further away background mountains move much slower, much like how they would in real life if you look out the window of a driving car.
The Turn-Based fight scenes also make use of depth extremely well.
The artists layered the environments with people watching the action from higher areas above (where you are), making them large on screen, as well as other people much smaller on screen in the distance,a s they are much closer to the action.
This really fills the environment so well giving it so much depth and mood. No other Turn-Based game I’ve seen using this top down style camera does that, so it’s really refreshing to see.
On the flip side, the character animation of the crowds in the side scrolling scenes is once again very cheaply done.
These are simple looped walking animations that have been added to a handful of differently colored characters, that are just copy pasted to make a “crowd”. The artists were very lazy in this aspect of the game, which is very unfortunately as this is a very large part of your game view (besides the dialogue views), as you mostly spend a lot of time traveling the landscape in this side scrolling angle view.
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The Banner Saga Audio
Background audio fits the theme of Banner Saga well, but is nothing amazing. There is a certain set of background audio that pops up at random times during the dialogue sequences that is way too loud and overbearing.
I had the background audio set to 30% in the settings menu (which I do for most games I play) but this seemed to not have any control over this “other” dialogue background audio. It kept popping up and was extremely loud with drums and vocals, prohibiting me from concentrating on the dialogue I had to read.
It also only played for about 30secs at a time then disappeared again, so all in all very poorly executed.
Sound effects are nothing bad but at the same time nothing amazing either as they are mostly generic metallic sounds of swords clashing against each other.
What I really felt was severely missing in the audio department was the lack of dialogue. There are a few parts of the story (mostly where you enter a new, major town) that the narrator speaks and his voice is so good, adding so much immersion to the story. Yet this happens few and far between and he only tells one or two lines, aming you feel deprived.
There is a ton of dialog in Banner Saga, with so many characters that pop up in the story, but also disappear or die off just as fast, it’s hard to keep track of it all. This causes you to quickly become disoriented when characters refer to another character’s name, yet you have no clue as to who they are unless you pay so much attention to the names of previous dialogues.
It felt like Game of Thrones all over again, as you are just flooded with random names of characters you have no connection or reference with.
If the developers took the time to add unique voice overs to each character, this would have made the story so much immersive, as just hearing a certain character speak allows you to connect and reference them in the story much faster than a wall of text.
Voiced dialogue is severely needed in this game to enhance its very long and drawn out dialogue sequence that is the majority of the game.
The Banner Saga Storyline
Speaking of the story let’s take a look at this, as this is a major part of Banner Saga. While the theme of this game is clearly Viking inspired it is very much fantasy at the same time.
Beside the human race there are giant Viking looking beings called Varl, who are currently at peace with the humans, but were at war in the past.
Their main enemy is however the Dredge which are ghostly types of beings with thick armor plating. The Dredge are your enemies in the Turn-based combat 90% of the time so get used to seeing them over and over and over again.
The story is well written and characters are unique and mostly interesting if you put the time into reading all of it, which is the majority of the game, as this game seemed to become more of a visual novel with choices, rather than a game filled with battle and player input.
The story is however told in a very dull manner whit the same old repetitive still image so charterers. There are a few sections that diverge from this mundane method, giving us some wonderful art to tell the story in a much better way, such as the one below. Unfortunately these are few and far between
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The Banner Saga Bugs & Annoyances
I didn’t find any glaring bugs in my gameplay, as this game has been around since 2014, so they have clearly all been worked out.
My only dislike is that of the auto save system where you cannot manually save or have multiple auto or manual saves.
This becomes an annoying problem due to how harsh the dialogue choices can be. If you make one wrong decision in the obscure dialogue, that’s it, you cannot reload from a previous point. It will sit with you for the rest of the game.
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The Banner Saga Review Conclusion
The Banner Saga is a game that has the most amazing 2D Graphics and Art, seen in both its environments and characters. The artists showed how well scale can be used to dictate a world and its landscapes, although animation could have been much better.
The Viking fantasy the world creates is beautiful and captivating, as you learn about and play with the giant sized Viking warriors known as Varl, with their signature protruding horns who fight and travel alongside the Humans to defeat the Dredge, as well as an unknown enemy, threatening all three parties.
The story and concept is well written as it tells of the journey and adventures of two separate groups of Varl/Human caravan armies, traveling towards each other.
The story and dialogue does however take over most of the game requiring a lot of reading, without any voiced dialogue to assist or pull you into the story and character’s personalities. I was expecting the Banner Saga to be more combat oriented with a splash of dialogue, instead it was the other way around.
I quickly found myself playing a “choose a dialogue option” game which in essence is really a visual novel with some Turn-Based combat sprinkled in.
The above can be overlooked though if the Renown system wasn’t so badly implemented.
The fact that the developers chose to link one single resource to both being able to level up (Promote) your characters as well as sustain their travels through the harsh environments and consequential dialogue choices, via the purchase of Supplies is mind boggling to say the least.
You are heavily punished in game via the dialogue choices, which 80% of the time end up being a trap, causing you to lose precious Supplies, or even your leveled up warriors due to one decision. It constantly feels that you are between rock and hard place, so no matter what you choose you lose, which after a few chapters of the game, starts to literally become depressing and frustrating.
Not only are your characters not progressing while the enemy becomes stronger, you are actually becoming weaker and poorer as the Renown gained, doesn’t increase along with the increased Supply requirements.
The Banner Saga is a game that I really wanted to love due to its gorgeous art and Viking themed gameplay, but unfortunately this was all brought down due to the developers choosing one of the worst resource and leveling up systems I’ve seen in a game.
I would still recommend playing The Banner Saga if just to experience the art and environments, but would not pay full price for it. Get it on sale or at Kinguin for dirt cheap and see what you think.
Well guys, that’s it from me.
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Happy Gaming
Ozarc (¬‿¬)
The Review
The Banner Saga
Banner Saga is a graphically beautiful game even though it lacks quality animations. The story is also well written, as this is the majority of the game play. The Turn-Based combat and how it ties into its Renown resource system is where the game falls horribly flat, causing you to become more and more depressed the longer you play.
PROS
- Great Graphics & Art
- Unique Health and Armor Mechanics
- OK Price point
CONS
- Horrible Renown System
- No Voiced Dialogue
- Harsh and Unrewarding experience
- Lack of Quality Animation