I know that Alex is a fan, and Vinny is doing his most Vinny impression and starting from the beginning (not a knock, it is a weird game to pick up in one of the later iterations), but otherwise, I feel like after the first one support or interest (at least here) died down quite a bit.

I am just now probably halfway through the third episode, rather late to it all because I wanted to play it all when it was all available and holy crap it's really good. The writing and world building is excellent, and the combat is for the most part very satisfying. I am not in love with the turn-taking aspect of the strategy because it can make things really go sideways when you are many and they are few, but overall I think it's pretty well balanced and keeps it unique throughout each of the games.

Anyone else actually trek the whole experience or did most of you stop with 1 (if you played at all)? Either way, I think it's worth checking out and I hope people will post here with some interesting ways their personal saga went based on their decisions.

I lost interest in the first game after three or four hours. I remember the combat seeming a bit shallow, but that wasn't really my main concern with the game. I hated the caravan journey segments of the game. Hated them. I hate being given agency in dealing with some problem for a split second, and then having that agency taken away. You don't get to react to the consequences of that decision, to try and adjust for a mistake on your part. It's like I get to make a decision, and then my character just falls into a coma until the next decision comes along.

I remember an event from the first game where a few people wanted to join the caravan. I don't remember what I chose (Let them join, Send them away, Send them away with supplies), but the event ended with them stealing a bunch of shit in the night and getting away. No opportunity to prevent them from doing that, or chase them down, or anything. I just found that to be frustrating and ultimately unacceptable. The lackluster combat didn't help, for sure. Neither did the disparity in art quality, for that matter. Those landscapes are breathtaking, but I found the character portraits and just about everything during the combat sequences to be outright ugly.

I get why people like them, though. I've got a cousin that raves about them every chance he gets. I'm glad to hear that they've remained at a consistent level of quality for the whole trilogy.

The third one pulls off the defiant and possibly doomed final stand and suicide mission scenarios better than any other game I've ever seen.

Played the first to completion and enjoyed it. Haven't touched the other 2 yet.

@relkin: How detrimental are scenarios like that? Also, I was reading how sometimes the outcome of your choices doesn't always line up with your choices in a way that can feel random and disjointed. Anyone else ever get that feeling? How common is it? etc etc

Been thinking about picking this up, but just want to make sure I know what I'm in for.

@babychoochoo: You are definitely asked to make choices without all the facts, and when those facts come to light (often immediately after you make the choice) sometimes the outcome doesn't go well for you. In the second game, the rewards/penalties are mostly non-critical things like items or food or your team's battle set up, but in the first game, side characters live or die because of it.

@babychoochoo: The random events have, pretty consistently, a good solution, a bad solution, one or two nothing happens solutions. I'd say the game is fair in that sometimes the decision that turns out to be the best one, isn't, and vice versa. On top of that, while you can look up a guide for all of the "best" choices, none of them have such an impact as to make the game unbeatable. Losing supplies only really can impact large battles in the first game (and even then, I recommend attacking with your heroes which nullifies the need for an army anyway). Basically, the only aspect of the game that truly impacts the difficulty is whether you rest injured heroes enough to recover if they're injured. Everything else is largely storytelling.

I played the first game when it came out. Then when part two came out I went back and replayed the first. Then when the final part came out I get again went back and played the first two.

Now having completed the series I can say I enjoyed it all thoroughly, however I wish I had waited until the end and played it all together. I remembered just enough to know I was missing important information from previous play throughs. There are way too many characters to try and keep track of all of them over years and years in between.

I played them all as they came out and my best piece of advice would be to treat them all as a single game meant to be played together. These games do not hold your hand at all when it comes to keeping track of the characters and there are a ton of them. The first game remains one of my favorites of the last five years and while there are slight diminishing returns after that, the whole package is very much worth playing. My main issue with 3 was that the whole game felt like an end game sequence and it got to be just exhausting by the end of it. It felt like there were very few quiet moments and almost no respite from this oppressive feeling of “everyone is fucked, everyone is gonna die, keep going, don’t stop.” I missed a lot of smaller character moments and world building from the first two games.

@babychoochoo: I only played for a few hours, so I honestly don't know how detrimental it was in the long run. From some of the responses here, it seems like it could be pretty devastating in the first game, but it's not a big deal in the sequels. I'm not sure that knowing that beforehand would have changed how I felt about the game, though. Like I said, I hate getting agency for a split second and then having it ripped away from me.

This is definitely true, and it does happen occasionally in the sequels but there are a couple of characters in the first one that are either inaccessible or killed depending on your choices, and it happens far enough down the narrative path that you can't really go back. One character death in particular is linked to an achievement because there are like 5 different ways they can die, some of which are sealed the second you let another character into your party at all.

Your mileage may vary, but once I kind of embraced the idea that the game is designed to be harsh in its own way, but never (or at least rarely) so difficult it feels impossible (typically if the actual fights are hard it's because you didn't rest your injured guys or, on the rare occasion, you didn't have a chance to or you are forced to work with underleveled heroes). It's meant to be a brutal feeling game, even if the numbers like Varl or Fighters or Clansman don't have a tremendous impact on the game as a whole (so far at least, still not finished with the final act of the 3rd one), but as @relkin indicated very understandably, that might just not be the kind of game for you. It's, to put it lightly, very bleak and is designed to feel like you're being punished because of the nature of the world they're in.

@relkin: @sethmode: @veektarius: Alright, cool. I appreciate it, my dudes! Doesn't sound too bad at all really. Definitely gonna pull the trigger on buying this after I wrap up VC4 then.

@babychoochoo: Yeah I never braved hard, but on normal it feels like the right amount of challenge and penalties for me. Also, just something I should have mentioned before: you can change the difficulty at any time if you need to (it just locks out achievements). I can't remember if the game tells you that or not.

I listen to the music a lot, but haven't actually started playing them (I only own the first one anyways). Great music.

I was a backer of that first game and played it when it came out 4 years ago, but never got around to the second one. I remember enjoying a lot of the presentation and storytelling, but didn't ever quite love it. The two things that really grated me were the combat, which always felt simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, and the capricious nature of a lot of the decisions leading to characters continually dying. It probably didn't help that I had to drop the difficulty to easy for the final battle, which really soured me at the end.

But of course, now that the third game is out and people are coming out of the woodwork to talk about how well it ends, I kinda want to give the series another shot... the only real problem being that I don't remember shit about anything that happened in the first Banner Saga or any of the choices I made. Something something "end of the world" something something "sad vikings." I hear the combat is at least more interesting, though that health/armor dynamic always rubbed me the wrong way.

@arbitrarywater: I had to start from the beginning, and that was after playing 1 AND 2 when they came out because I couldn't remember jack shit and the recap wasn't all that helpful for me personally.

I grew to like (not love) the combat, and while I still think the series is really, really great, the rules are arbitrary as hell. The each side gets a turn mechanic is clearly there for balancing purposes (this becomes especially true after you get an ability that allows you to enter "Pillage" mode -- where a team can go several times in a row -- under the right circumstances, and it essentially trivializes a lot of the fights), and it can be annoying as hell with the wrong load outs or with a bad approach, because basically you could have 6 guys alive to their 2, and let's say hero 6 is the only one you have left with enough strength to take out the remaining dudes. The turn mode would go 1-E1-2-E2-3-E1-4-E2-5-E1-6 which means the TWO bad guys would get the chance to move 2 or 3 times before you even get to the last hero, which can REALLY do some damage to your team with bad luck.

Anyway, just a mini rant there. I just finished it today and the end is really great, and I look forward to playing again with some different decisions and see how it impacts things.