Rating of
3/5
It’s Like Twitter…
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/19/15
“The Banner Saga” is a 3-part TRPG from Indie developer Stoic, which was founded by ex-BioWare employees known for working on “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” While I don’t care for post-AD&D BioWare and care even less for anything ‘Star Wars,’ the fact that “The Banner Saga” has a unique look and draws heavily from Norse mythology captured my interest early on. Unfortunately, “The Banner Saga” has taken a few wrong turns in its development process which ultimately leave it disappointing.
Presentation
According to the game’s end credits, “The Banner Saga’s” art was inspired by the animation work of a man named Eyvind Earle who was an artist at Disney during the cartoon giant’s early years of movie-making. True to their inspiration, the artists at Stoic have done a fantastic job of capturing the unique essence of early animated feature films – not only invoking memories of films by Disney, but upstart films like Don Bluth’s “The Secret of NIMH” – both with the styling of the game’s cast of characters and the vibrant colors than bring both environments and characters to life. The environmental backgrounds and scenic views that illustrate the characters’ travels through the game world are filled with intricate detail and make solid use of the tried and true mechanic of parallax scrolling to add depth in a 2D world.
Unfortunately, these lush and intricate illustrations don’t get nearly as much screen time as one would expect based on all of the screenshots and press material that is promoted by the game’s publisher, Versus Evil. There is actually very little if any significant animation in “The Banner Saga,” which instead relies on a lot of static talking heads (and torsos) with barely-animated eyes or some looping animation of a sleeve or cape being tousled by the wind. I went in expecting glorious cutscenes and animation incorporated into the gameplay, perhaps a bit like “Dragon’s Lair,” but alas there is nonesuch to be found.
Even worse, a huge portion of the game is spent watching a tiny caravan of characters slowly crawl across the screen like a line of ants. While this does give the opportunity to fill the background with beautiful scenery, it also hides the fact that the tiny caravan isn’t actually animated at all, aside from a looping animation for the titular Long Banner that flies from the lead wagon.
The audio in “The Banner Saga” is also quite artistic and inspired, yet also not up to expectations. The soundtrack is a glorious composition of Icelandic inspired music and specific scenes are narrated by (according to the end credits) an actual Icelandic individual, which lends a lot of authenticity to the world the devs have been trying to build. The problem is that there just isn’t enough voiceacting. There is a lot of text and a lot of dialog in “The Banner Saga,” but there is next to no voiceacting for the huge amount of cutscenes that make up approximately half of the game. None of the main characters are given a memorable voice to go with their memorable appearance, which is quite disappointing.
Story
“The Banner Saga’s” bright colors and friendly character designs only serve as a distraction from the game’s incredibly dark and unfriendly narrative. While Norse sagas aren’t exactly ‘Happily Ever After’ type affairs, with the majority of them revolving around the world ending in Ragnarok, all the gods dying, and the entire Earth freezing over, “The Banner Saga” takes things a step further and delves into “Game of Thrones” levels of grimness.
One of the most amusing comments I have ever seen with regard to “Game of Thrones” is a comparison to the social media plaguebearer, Twitter, in that both “Game of Thrones” and Twitter feature 140 characters and something awful is always happening. “The Banner Saga” is like that.
“The Banner Saga” follows the exploits of two groups of people living in a Norse-inspired world of ice and snow where ordinary humans and horned giants called varl live in alliance decades after the deaths of the gods and two wars in which the humans and varl joined forces to push back invading forces of mysterious stone-men dubbed dredge. Clearly a lot of background writing was done to create a fleshed out world for “The Banner Saga” to take place in, yet the result is mostly a large parchment-style world map covered in clickable locations that simply provide a massive info-dump of out-of-context ‘knowledge’ about the game world, throwing around meaningless proper names with impunity.
The player’s journey into the world of “The Banner Saga” begins with a varl tax collector/historian named Ubin. The player is thrust into this role, and the game refers to Ubin as ‘you’ during early dialogs. Things quickly become confusing as Ubin is pushed into the background and different varl take center stage, with ‘you’ ultimately being thrust into the role of a varl warrior named Hakon who, after some “Game of Thrones” style terrible things happen, must lead a caravan bereft of its original commander back to the varl capital with a snotty human prince in tow.
Muddying the plot even further, none of the characters that appear in the opening chapter play a significant role in the rest of the game, as the player is shuffled off to make decisions for a different group that starts on the opposite side of the map, while the original group doesn’t make a return appearance until the grand finale. This second group of characters contains the three most important ‘main’ characters of “The Banner Saga,” Rook, Alette, and Iver (all of whom appear on the title screen). Rook is a hunter living in a small village with his daughter Alette. While out hunting one day, the two are shocked to encounter a group of dredge. Of course, terrible things happen, and the entire village finds itself fleeing an oncoming dredge onslaught, guided by the sage advice of Iver, a varl war hero who single-handedly slew a Sundr – an elite type of dredge with superpowers – during one of the wars.
‘You’ are Rook for the rest of the game, making decisions for this sad band of refugees as they attempt to flee to someplace – anyplace – that isn’t being overwhelmed by dredge, which turns out to be a significantly more difficult task than expected. Rook’s decision-making is a significant portion of the gameplay, but ultimately is little more than a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book in digital form with plenty of seemingly wise decisions that lead to – wait for it – terrible things happening.
“The Banner Saga” plays out over the course of 7 chapters, but is, unfortunately, only the first part of a planned trilogy of games. It takes about 10 hours or so to play through these 7 chapters, but I found myself having a difficult time finding the willpower to dive back in and play through a sequence of tediously watching my caravan crawl across the screen, punctuated only by talking-head decision-making sequences that almost always led to a bad situation becoming worse. To make one final “Game of Thrones” comparison, “The Banner Saga” feels a lot like a season of the HBO TV show, in that a lot of generalized awfulness happens over the course of the season, but the overall narrative and plot barely goes anywhere and leaves the viewer without any cathartic resolutions.
Gameplay
“The Banner Saga” is approximately 50% Tactical RPG and 50% Choose Your Own Adventure book. While the tactical battles are rather well-done and the combat/leveling system is interesting and unique, the decision making via dialog trees is egregiously boring, no decision feels like the right decision most of the time, and the awkward auto-saving system the game uses just makes it impossible to replay a decision-making segment that goes awry without also having to slog through a bunch of other things all over again.
The combat system in “The Banner Saga” is rather unique in the way it employs stats and character levels. Each character begins at Rank 1 and can move up through the Ranks to a maximum of Rank 5 by killing a specific number of enemies, then spending a specific amount of the team’s pool of Renown, with the cost increasing by 5 for each Rank. Gaining a Rank provides the character with 2 attribute points to allocate however the player wishes, with pre-determined Ranks providing a boost to the character’s special skill (of which each character has a specific Active and Passive).
Where “The Banner Saga” differs from every other tactical game I’ve ever seen is the way it handles hit points and damage. Each character has an Armor and a Strength stat. Armor absorbs damage, while Strength serves as both the characters’ health and damage output. In order to deal Strength damage, a character must have a higher Strength than their target’s Armor, and an attack reduces the target’s Strength by the difference. In situations where enemies are well-armored, characters must attack the Armor stat instead in order to reduce it enough for Strength-based attacks to penetrate it. Of course, as characters/enemies take Strength damage, their damage output decreases.
“The Banner Saga” also has a novel take on the turns that are the core or a turn-based TRPG. Instead of each character acting based on an initiative stat, the player is given the opportunity before each battle to setup the turn order for their warriors. In combat, the player’s team and the enemy’s team simply take turns acting with one character, with the character determined by their spot in the turn order (which is always visible). I’ve seen a lot of complaining online about how awful this system is for turn management, as it supposedly benefits the team that is losing by giving more turns to individual characters that are outnumbered. Apparently the complaint is that a specific strong unit will get to act every turn if all of its weaker allies get killed. While true, I never had a problem with the tactics behind this system, as I simply killed the biggest threats first. Weaker enemies pose significantly less threat, so I always made sure to take out the viable threats while their turns were spaced far apart by the actions of their weaker allies. Overall, I found the tactical combat to be quite good, aside from the fact that most dredge enemies are comically over-armored.
Problems start to creep into “The Banner Saga” in the way resources are handled. Instead of having gold and experience, as a typical RPG would, “The Banner Saga” simply has one resource: Renown. Renown is earned by killing enemies in battle (1/kill) and is also randomly given out as the result of decision-making or mandatory story events. Aside from ranking-up characters, Renown is also used to buy the few things available for purchase at the market stalls in the towns the caravan passes through. These wares include accessories for heroes – who each have a single equipment slot – that can boost a wide range of stats or add passive abilities as well as provisions for the caravan.
While travelling, the caravan consumes a unit of provisions each day. When the caravan is at 0 provisions, instead of consuming a unit, members simply die of starvation and the numbers of clansmen, warriors, and varl in the caravan decrease. Losing members via starvation also causes the caravan’s morale to drop. Ultimately, these numbers mean little, as the caravan’s population only really matters in a couple of big battles where the outcome can be improved by outnumbering the enemy.
The grimdark/desperate struggle presented in “The Banner Saga’s” story naturally means that there will NEVER be enough Renown available to buy all of the good accessories or rank-up characters, let alone to essentially waste on buying provisions for the caravan, which seems nearly impossible to keep stocked (apparently it is, though, based on the Achievement list). Even worse is the fact that characters the player had been using and ranking-up might just up and die during a Choose Your Own Adventure segment, despite the fact that characters are never ‘killed’ in battle, but instead ‘wounded’ and given a small Strength penalty for a day or three.
It’s certainly a welcome change from the typical TRPG not to be forced into insane amounts of grinding, but the fact that “The Banner Saga” doesn’t allow grinding AT ALL in order to build up a buffer of Renown or supplies left me feeling like my grip on the game’s flow was tenuous at all times. This feeling of despair and barely holding on is only amplified by the fact that “The Banner Saga” does not allow any kind of manual save. Instead, it constantly performs auto-saves, leaving a string of them in the player’s profile trailing back through the chapters all the way to the beginning. Sure, it’s nice that the game provides what essentially amount to bookmarks, but this obvious attempt to prevent the completely benign act of ‘save scumming’ really rubbed me the wrong way.
In the end, I never really found the balance of “The Banner Saga’s” gameplay to be particularly good. While the tactical battles are engaging and I like the use of Renown for leveling characters, the tedious amounts of caravan-watching gameplay and constant Choose Your Own Terrible Thing That Will Happen decision points left me bored and disengaged most of the time.
Overall
“The Banner Saga” will surely catch a lot of eyes due to the unique art direction. Unfortunately, the great art that looks like old-school ink-and-paint animation features next to no actual animation. The grim, depressing narrative in which it seems that nothing can ever go right ever again is too realistic for a pessimist like me (despite the fantastical and mythological elements) and keeps the game from being ‘fun’ or ‘enjoyable’ at any point. The unorthodox tactical combat has obviously proven off-putting to some, but is actually the high point of the gameplay. Unfortunately, the combat as a high point doesn’t outweigh the overall boring and unbalanced caravan management and decision-making segments that drag-down the whole experience. Even as the opening act of a trilogy, I don’t feel like I can stomach much more of “The Banner Saga” unless part 2 drastically revamps the save system and provides enough wiggle room with resources for the player to feel like they have a modicum of control.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
