Quick Look: Banner Saga 3

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Banner Saga starts stays and finishes strong.

What a fine series.

Really enjoyed the previous 2 games. Looking forward to finishing the story

holy shit that video bumper text

Whoa. A not-so-quick quick look. Love it.

In my opinion, quick looks are so much better with just two people. It often feels when there are larger groups the conversation take weird turns and the focus isn't always on the game.

@spindini: agreed! Glad GBEast has been doing more of it lately.

Vinny and Alex QLs probably have to my favourite.

I've been looking forwards to this final installment of the Banner Saga for quite some time now, and it sure doesn't disappoint. I'm a bit further in than Alex, and the story goes in some really cool, unexpected directions. The writing being so gosh darn good certainly helps.

I'd also like to say that I personally looove this combat system. I've been playing on the hard difficulty, and every fights is challenging and quite different from the last. I believe Alex was on easy here, and I noticed that there was a fairly limited variety of enemies. In my save, I feel like they mix it up a lot more heavily, forcing you to adapt different strategies for each engagement.

Nice QL. I do vaguely remember the quick looks for 1 and 2, but this grabbed me.

Almost unfortunate.

And yes, do agree with @spindini also. Both approaches have their strengths, but you could see how much more focused this presentation was.

Also speaking of, good presentation @alex

The Banner Saga is a fucking beast of a game series, and that video bumper text is a fucking beast of a series of words.

The deck for this QL is some peak level stuff. I look forward to playing this game once I finish replaying the first two because I can't remember anything about either of them other than death and dismemberment.

I am right now reminded that I never got around to playing the second one. May have to take the opportunity to pick up the trilogy on ps4.

As a tip for anyone: in combat, because turns always alternate between one of your units and an enemy unit, this means that even if the enemy has only one unit left, they will still get to act just as often as they would if they had six units. As a result, it can be in your best interest to instead whittle enemies' health down (as that also influences how much damage their attacks can do) without necessarily killing them outright. Leaving the enemy with more units also means their stronger units will have to wait longer to act, as it still needs to cycle through all of them. If they have one or two strong units left and no other units, that means their strong units will get to go constantly.

I totally need to get back into this series. Played the first one and loved it up until that last boss fight which was fucking brutal (I eventually just put it down to easy to finish it).

Real Dredge get down on the flo (on the flo) real Dredge get down on the flo (on the flo) LIKE A PIMP!

I heard the second installment was a commercial disappointment. Good on them to buckle down and get around to complete the finale of the series.

@twoarmed: I haven't played 3 yet, but I've heard that, that tactic is not as effective as it was in the previous games in the series. Is it still the most effective way to play?

It is arguably even more effective I would say because now in addition to giving potentially stronger units more turns if you kill off what you don't need to kill at the moment.. dead enemies on one side of the game all leave behind debuff puddles that drain your willpower and strengthen enemies that walk over them.

Which is devastating for that group because almost ALL of their combat is survival based.

@do_the_manta_ray:

Vinny and Alex QLs are definitely my favorite as well. Alex is very good at presenting games and Vinny is good at asking general questions.

Finish The Fight

I more than likely won't be playing any of these games, but I cannot deny the awesomeness of the art direction. So much eye candy in this series!

Couldn't agree more, this was a very nice Quick Look!

Not enough people have said it, but the video description is one of the best I've seen in a long time. I'm so happy.

I do quite like the worldmap & the cutscenes, but the actual game looks pretty rough to me. Like the faces of these characters all look pretty much the same with some features added or changed up. Nid is just a differently coloured Oddleif for example. And when it comes to the combat screens, it looks even rougher. The recruitment spell just spawns a new dude without any animation, it just plops down on the field. And those fire patches in the last battle of this quicklook look pretty much worse than the early Heroes of Might & Magic games.

The combat mechanics also look somewhat questionable to me. Why does the game not let you actually move around the fire patches, instead of always drawing the shortest pathway to the target location? That seems quite frustrating to me in a game of tactics & precision. And the willpower mechanic seems quite hard to understand as well. Some heroes have more than others, and i assume you're tapping from some kind of limited pool when you used it, but you don't actually get to see any of that information easily upfront. The only willpower info on screen is that of the shared bonus willpower pool.

These things just prevent me from jumping in, although the story does seem pretty interesting.