So I Just Played: The Banner Saga

As a discount game buyer I don’t usually get to play games within the first month or two of their release, but The Banner Saga came out priced at only 25 dollars and I got a good deal on top of that. I was really excited to check this out because I’d heard good things and the art style fascinated me. To me its art style looked like an old animated film, like many past Disney movies, or that animated Lord of the Rings film that got released unfinished. It’s not a style you see very often in video games (although just saying that reminded me of the awesome and frustrating Dragon’s Lair) and I was excited to see how it turned out.

I’m glad to say that The Banner Saga delivered a very unique and engaging experience. There are many elements of the gameplay that are present in other games, but in every case it seems like there were slight tweaks made in this game to make them feel fresh. At its core The Banner Saga is a turn-based strategy game much like X-Com: Enemy Unknown. You control a group of 6 fighters as they take on enemy forces in turn-based action on a tiled battlefield. Both games also incorporate an interesting overworld meta-game that directly impacts the battles, but that’s where the similarities end.

I found the in-battle gameplay to be pretty challenging. There are a couple key notes about how this works, especially if you were going to compare it with something like X-Com. The action order goes A,B,A,B,A,B as opposed to A,A,A,A,A,B,B,B,B. In other words, once you move one of your characters, it’s the other team’s turn. It doesn’t matter if you have six fighters and they only have two, they still get a move every other turn. The exception to this is when either you or the enemy has just one fighter left. In this case the game enters Pillage mode, in which you get to move all your characters on your turn. It’s a big adjustment and it means you can’t set up fully co-ordinated attacks nearly as easily.

The other big factor in the combat is the Strength/Armor system. Each fighter has two bars above their head. One is strength, and the other is armor. Strength is incredibly important because it acts as both your health and attack power. This adds a nice realism to the combat. A wounded fighter will deal a great deal less damage than a fully healthy one. Obviously it’s very important to get the enemy’s strength down as early as possible, unfortunately there’s also armor to consider. The fighter’s armor affects how much your attacks on them are mitigated. Even if you have a high strength fighter, if he attacks a high armor fighter he might only deal one point of damage, or none.

Every time you attack you have the option to attack either the enemy’s strength or armor, and each has major advantages and drawbacks. If you attack their strength you’re weakening them and bringing them closer to death, but you’re not hitting them very hard. If you attack their armor you’re softening them up for future attacks, but you’re not taking off any health at all and they’ll still hit like a truck. It’s brutal. I ended up having characters that specialized in breaking armor and others that were great at killing low armor characters. The problem with this strategy is the enemy gets another turn every time you do anything, so thinking more than one move ahead is often perilous. I also often had my armor-breaker taken out early in the fight by the enemy, and without him the rest of my team might as well have been hitting the bad guys with pool noodles.

On top of all those challenges is the way the meta-game affects the battles. The number of enemies you face and their layout, as well as the amount of Willpower (special attack points) your characters have is all determined by how well the overworld action is going. Let me tell you, it’s usually going poorly. At different times you play from the perspective of different characters, always leading caravans of survivors struggling through harsh winter conditions away from an endless sea of enemies. You need to keep enough supplies in your caravan to ensure survival, and walking the caravan nonstop without rest greatly decreases their morale and combat capabilities. The problem is that towns where you can resupply are few and far between, and when you do find one you need to buy those supplies with the same scarce currency you use to upgrade your troops.

To make things even more brutal, the town you get to might only have enough supplies to sell you to last a couple more days, or it might have been burned to the ground entirely and have nothing at all. Whenever you set off from a town you have absolutely no idea how far it is to the next town. Is it two days? Twelve? Well I’m setting off with two days’ supplies, so if it’s twelve days to the next town there are definitely going to be some people dying of starvation. The only way to improve morale is to rest for a few days, but each day of rest costs one day of supplies, so by the end of the game I had a caravan full of constantly furious people who were pretty rapidly being killed off by starvation.

As crappy as that sounds, it added perfectly to the mood and story of the game. The Banner Saga is not a feel good story about happy times. It is made painfully clear pretty much immediately that things are pretty bleak in this world, and scraping for survival is just the way it is. This is reflected in everything, from the survival elements of the caravan to the way the plot deals with the death of a character. I had a few key characters die along the way, and for the most part the reaction was “Well, Joe’s dead. That’s a bummer but if we stop to mourn him we’ll all die, so leave his body here and let’s keep moving”. the luxury of proper mourning is not afforded to these people, which led to me adapting to the situation myself.

You spend a good chunk of time playing from the perspective of Rook, who is thrust into the role of caravan leader after the Chieftain dies. His daughter Alette is with him as well. Early on, and then again in several parts of the game you will be asked by Alette if she can join in the combat. She’s a trained archer so she’s capable, but she’s young and she’s your daughter. I don’t know how others played, but I ALWAYS let her join in the fighting. Here’s the thing, this world is a messed up place. There is death everywhere. The way I see it Rook wouldn’t be protecting her from anything by keeping her away from combat. Attacks come from everywhere and Rook could die at any moment, then who will protect Alette if not for herself?

Things just felt rough the entire way through for everyone involved in this world. The word despair might never have been more appropriate than it is with The Banner Saga. I felt that despair when I was playing, too, and to me that is the sign of an engaging gameplay experience. Any time I can feel true empathy for the characters portrayed in a game I will be thoroughly impressed, and The Banner Saga achieved this easily.