The Banner Saga Review
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The Banner Saga is a turn-based tactical RPG funded by a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and developed by Stoic, an indie studio formed by three ex-BioWare Austin developers. It's a bold title that makes a very strong first impression, thanks to its art style, strongly inspired by Eyvind Earle (especially known for his work on Disney animation in the 1950s), and to its unusual gameplay structure, which replaces the classic player-driven exploration and quest-based progression with the management of a caravan of refugees on a long and possibly doomed journey.
In other words, if there's something The Banner Saga can't be accused of, is of being a me-too trend follower. This refreshing attitude did a lot for my enjoyment of the game, but it couldn't hide some deep faultlines in the game's design, especially (but not only) concerning its controversial combat system.
Notes: For the sake of full disclosure, it's worth noting that I backed The Banner Saga during its Kickstarter campaign and that I played the game through completion before the release of its first patch, which added a few missing functionalities and rebalanced the later sections of the game in response to players' complaints.
A Viking Candy Saga
The Banner Saga takes place in a fantasy setting liberally inspired by the Norse sagas of yore, with an apocalyptic tinge to its pitch: the Gods are dead, and recently the sun has stopped dead in its tracks, locking the lands in an eternal day. Things take a turn for the worse when, from the perspective of two distinct groups made of pre-made unique characters, you witness the beginnings of what seems to be a full-scale Dredge invasion, the Dredge being an enigmatic race of silent black-armor-clad giants that seem unbeatable, and already caused trouble to the humans and Varls (a race of horned giants) in the past.
It's a story that seems doomed not to end well, one that plunges you into the events from the very beginning with little regard for your confusion, expecting you to be able to immediately make choices that will carry heavy consequences for the characters you've just met. While the finer details of the game's lore can take a while to pick up, the broad strokes are simple enough to understand, and Stoic has done a good job at giving the players the information they need without resorting to exposition dumps, with very few exceptions. As I've said, the choices you make all have an impact too, and the game does an exceedingly good job at putting you into the shoes of a leader forced to make tough calls in a desperate situation, having to deal with the perils of battle on one hand, and starvation and illness on the other.
All that said, I couldn't help but notice that it took me longer to get inside the character's heads than the game expected me to, which made the first hours of the game feel a bit hollow and artificial, a feeling I suspect I wouldn't experience again were I to replay the title. There's also a certain occasional element of "guessing what the designers intended" in some choices that can feel frustrating, especially considering the gameplay consequences can be massive and lock you out of characters you had come to rely on in battle. The Banner Saga is a tragic story, so I never expected the choices to be "fair", but rather unfair in a way that makes sense, and I feel the developers occasionally missed the mark in that respect.
However, as long as you're willing to accept the consequences of your action and approach the story as a story rather than a game, it works. It's just a pity that, being the first title of a planned trilogy, the game ends quite abruptly and without a proper resolution at the 10-hour mark, because I had grown to care about its characters: whether I was dealing with abrasive princes, caring fathers, regretful war heroes, or mysterious "Menders", they all made an impression and convincingly populated the game's beautiful, dying world.
Marching On
Roughly half, if not more, of the time I spent playing The Banner Saga wasn't spent in combat, but managing my caravan. On its face, it's simple, even basic gameplay: watch your caravan travel through gorgeously painted stylized landscapes, keeping an eye on the Supplies (the more people you have, the faster they are consumed; should they reach 0 your people will start dying of starvation) and their Morale, taking stops to rest at your Camp (where you can also experiment with strategies in mock battles and occasionally involve yourself in optional conversations) as often as possible to avoid depressing your characters to the point of affecting their combat capabilities (low Morale gives maluses to the characters' Willpower, a resource used to power special attacks). To help spice up things and avoid infuriating players with the slow pace of the caravan travels, the folks at Stoic have filled the game with a respectable number of text-only events modeled on King of Dragon Pass, that range from dealing with possibly poisoned supplies, to stopping fights between your people, to deciding whether it's better to celebrate a childbirth to raise morale or carefully spare your supplies for times of hardship.
Despite the abundance of these semi-random events, the game doesn't do a very good job at hiding its linearity, and occasionally struggles with making these minor events, or indeed caravan travel in general, feel like they have an impact, both in terms of emotional resonance and gameplay effects. The first time I saw some of my Clansmen were dying of starvation because I hadn't managed to secure enough supplies I got a lump in my throat, but soon it became just a number that appeared on screen, with no relevance whatsoever to the story. Even worse, letting your Clansmen die is, in many ways, advantageous: the same currency (Renown) is used to both buy supplies, upgrade your characters, and buy trinkets to assign to your characters for bonuses. Having a smaller caravan means you'll consume less supplies and have more Renown to spare to upgrade your Heroes (the characters you use in battle and that have the most relevance story-wise).
The game also uses a War sub-system during your caravan travels, sometimes pitting you in all-out battle against a very large number of enemies, the outcome of which is decided by the strategy you decide to adopt in its text interface, with your numbers compared to the enemies'. This only slightly mitigates the problem I was talking about early, as losing a War doesn't seem to have terribly weighty gameplay consequences and very rarely seems to lead to a game-over. Truth be told, should you decide to involve your Heroes in a War when given the option, the comparison between your caravan and the enemy forces would determine the number of foes you'd face, but losing battles in The Banner Saga is a common occurrence and rarely worth fretting over. Some critics would call this an example of ludonarrative dissonance, but in my opinion, it's less a case of the narrative and themes being contradicted by the gameplay, and more of a case of gameplay doing a bad job reinforcing them. That said, it's undoubtedly more satisfying to focus on The Banner Saga's overarching mournful narrative and how it develops throughout the game, rather than focus too much on its uneven gameplay aspects.
Crush Enemies, Earn Fame
Compared to other games of its ilk, Stoic's title doesn't present a large number of stats: Strength serves as both a damage stat and the hit points stand-in, Armor is subtracted from Strength before damage is applied, Break determines Armor damage, Willpower can be used to power up special abilities or make normal actions more effective, Exertion is used to determine how much Willpower can be spent on a single action, and, finally, the Ability rank is used to determine access to more powerful variants of a unit's active ability. When a character has killed enough enemies, Renown can be spent to promote him or her, but the scarcity of points granted to raise their stats and the low stat ceilings leave little wiggle room for different builds. It doesn't help that every character comes already armed with only a passive ability and an active ability that remain the same for the entire game.
A clear picture of The Banner Saga's character system is important to understands its turn-based, party-based combat system's peculiarities. At the beginning of every battle you decide which of your characters to use (for a maximum of 6), their turn order (which is subsequently unchangeable during the battle), and where to place your characters over the battlefield (the choice is limited depending on the map and enemy placement). Rather than using an initiative system of any kind, Stoic opted for a vaguely chess-like setup where every player turn is followed by an enemy turn, regardless of the difference in numbers. The only exception to this fixed sequence is Pillage mode, which usually triggers during the final phases of the battle, specifically when one of the two sides has only one character left, and grants the other side a turn for each of their characters before the sole enemy survivor gets a turn. To give an example, if the player has only one unit left, but the AI has 3 characters still alive, the AI will get to use all three characters before the player will be granted another turn, and this new turn order will be kept until the end of the battle.
During each of these turns a character gets the chance to move once and/or take an action, though turns can also be ended prematurely if none of the options look useful. Actions encompass attacking an enemy's Strength or Armor (prioritizing between the two is the bread and butter of the game's combat), using special abilities, and, for stationary characters, resting to recover Willpower. Given Strength is both the damage stat and the hit points equivalent, crippling, rather than killing an enemy becomes the basic strategy: it forces the AI to waste a turn on a liability rather than moving a more effective character. Killing an enemy before the ending phase of the battle can still be useful, as it earns Renown and adds a star to your Horn, which can be later used to add Willpower to a character, but is markedly less so than in any other tactical turn-based title I've ever played. In fact, killing enemies carelessly can even be detrimental to overall success in battles, especially during the harder encounters.
While that might sound a bit convoluted and counter-intuitive, The Banner Saga's combat still manages to shine often. Using your character's abilities in synergy, exploiting the enemy units' passive abilities and AI quirks, judging when to spend resources, these are only a few of the important skills you might (and should) pick up while playing. When at its best, the game's battles feel open-ended and engaging, and using the tools at your disposal to come up with a strategy to best the enemies is genuinely entertaining, but as the hours pass a certain feeling of repetitiveness sets in. It's true that the game varies the enemy placements, numbers and classes fairly often, mixing and matching with impunity, but all encounters are still essentially approached the same way. There's also an aesthetic factor (and aesthetics are an important element in The Banner Saga): a lot of the enemy types look very similar, and most maps have fairly mundane art to go with fairly mundane layouts.
Offering more varied objectives would have helped a lot, as would have offering more varied map layouts. Tellingly, one of the battles I consider the most memorable was conducted atop a crumbling tower, with several tiles that couldn't be walked upon. The Varl units, which made up the majority of my party and occupied 4 tiles each, were clumsy in that arena, and were left vulnerable to the hit-and-run tactics of the enemies' ranged units. It made for an extremely interesting fight, in large part because it scratched a different itch from most of the game's encounters, focused so narrowly on maneuvering as it was. To be fair, the game attempts to shake up things for the final battle, but the results are nearly disastrous: rather than serving as a capstone, it ends up being a frustratingly gimmicky fight, which severely limits your approaches and forces you to use two characters you might have safely ignored for the rest of the game.
But perhaps The Banner Saga's biggest problem when it comes to combat is that its battles feel strangely disconnected from the rest of the title. Emblematic of this are the mechanics regarding a unit's defeat in combat: during story events, a single inconsiderate choice can lead to a character's untimely death, but in combat against hulking brutes, it only leads to a small (but admittedly annoying) Strength malus that will usually heal within a few in-game days. Furthermore, losses very rarely lead to game-overs or have in-story consequences, while pyrrhic victories because of the high number of injuries sustained aren't an uncommon occurrence. Blurring the lines between victory and defeat is an interesting move, but feels jarring when compared to the harsh outcomes the rest of the game reserves for bad leaders.
Of Carvings and Songs
Hopefully in the future someone more versed in art than me will write an essay about The Banner Saga's art direction, because there's certainly enough material: I've already mentioned, at the beginning of this review, that the artwork is inspired by the works of Eyvind Earle, but that doesn't quite give the idea. More properly, it's a tribute to the artist's work, one that lovingly recreates even the unintended quirks of the art style to make new, different material come to life. What never ceased to surprise me while playing the game, was how well the art suited the game's themes and story. There's an understated tension between the beauty of the images on screen and what they depict, one that is also echoed in the sorrowful notes of the game's understated but always present soundtrack, which is not quite as good as the art, but still praiseworthy.
There's no doubt that the game isn't a high-budget production (tellingly the only voice acting is some short narration to accompany the salient moments of the caravan journeys), but the work that has been done puts to shame all but the best looking AAA productions, and it's not a coincidence that it's often the first thing to be mentioned about the title.
Technical Quirks
I have to admit, I was surprised by how little the interface in the full game seemed to have advanced compared to the early days of The Banner Saga: Factions, the competitive multiplayer off-shoot of the title. Despite the large amount of time that passed between the backers-only beta of Factions and The Banner Saga's release, very few improvements have been made: most of the actions are still only available through cumbersome radial menus, and basic actions, for example attacking an enemy, can take a multitude of clicks. I'm well aware that we're talking about a turn-based title and that therefore there's no need to rush, but I'd have really preferred to interact with the world with a better interface. It doesn't help that information is also often hidden behind menus, and that occlusion problems often arise in combat when too many units are close together. A recent patch has added some keyboard shortcuts that I imagine will be helpful, but as far as I can tell the team isn't planning to improve the interface in the future, a rather unfortunate decision in my humble opinion.
Another, frankly, very perplexing design choice, concerns the saving system. I'm sure the team had reasons to not implement a manual saving system, but I have difficulty imagining what they could have been. The game auto-saves extremely often, without any input from the player, and overwrites your old saves when you start a new game. Compared to Shadowrun Returns, another Kickstarter-funded title that employed an unorthodox saving system, it feels a lot more usable, but I still struggle to think of any benefit compared to a manual save system with multiple slots and the occasional auto-save.
The End
Like its stylized landscapes, The Banner Saga is capable of evoking a lot with a simple brushstroke, enough not to feel strangled by its short length and mechanically narrow focus. And while, unfortunately, the precision of the art isn't matched by a similar precision of design, it's still a commendable first effort, and a game well worth experiencing.
