A cross between an animated novel and strategy game, The Banner Saga is a vibrant yet thematically dark journey through a harsh, Norse-mythology-inspired land. The first thing that you notice is the art style, its hand-drawn aesthetic immediately pulling you into the world and characters, even if they don’t actually move. They’re drawn in such a style that each one is unique, their class apparent in their raiment and weapons. As the story unfolded through the heavy use of text for exposition and dialogue, I quickly grew to hear the “voices” of each main character in my head.
You’re plunged straight into this world, exposed to names, places and historical battles that at first confused. However, this sink-or-swim approach to world building mostly works, and it won’t be long before you’re familiar with the terms “dredge” and “Varl”, the former a heavily armoured foe intent on swarming across the land, the latter a race of Viking giants that appear to have an uneasy alliance with humans at the point you enter the story.
Scenes are played out through a combination of written text and dialogue, with player choices presented in list form. The decisions you’re forced to make are morally heavy and impactful. Characters can (and will) die simply from the choices you make. It’s never clear what the consequences of your choices will be. Sometimes you will be lucky and gain supplies and/or allies from a choice, while other times what seems the right choice results in dire and unforeseen consequences.
A typical text interlude might run like so (I’ve made this one up): You’re travelling along, chewing up supplies each day when someone tells you that Grindir has been taking extra supplies for him and his mates, as well as groping the women and making suggestive remarks. Your choices might be something like a) Punch Grindir and tell him he’s out if it happens again b) Post extra guards on the supplies with orders to look out for Grindir c) Laugh at the guys blowing off some steam, but warn them against harassing the women. Generally, once you’ve made your decision, the consequences then play out over the next few in-game days, but I also had some characters double cross me and then come back begging to be let into the caravan once more, so there’s a real dynamic and circular feel to the writing. Some situations are far more life-threatening and, a bit like in Telltale’s The Walking Dead series, ask you to choose between several horrible actions. There’s also the DNA of The Witcher’s narrative structure here, especially with choices made early on having long-lasting repercussions.
The other half of the game is it’s grid-style, turn-based strategy battles, which take up the bulk of your actual playing time. The systems available revolve around three main pillars: armour, health and willpower. There are other stats that the game will tell you are equally important, but these are the main three that need boosting straight away. Highly armoured units on both sides are able to withstand direct attacks and only lose one or two health at a time. Therefore, if you face an opponent with a high armour score, it’s definitely worthwhile concentrating on special attacks that wear it down effectively, so you can then move your heavy hitters in to take them out. Willpower works as a kind of extra fuel, allowing you to move extra tiles in a turn or add bonus points of damage to attacks. Once you’ve used a character’s supply of willpower, it’s gone for that fight, so I soon learned the importance of increasing this stat whenever I promoted a fighter to a higher level.
While I found the turn-based gameplay enjoyable enough, I did feel a yearning for some of the options present in other recent tactical titles such as Mario & Rabbids. I came to love overwatch so much playing that game that the absence of characters immediately trained in the ability in The Banner Saga sticks out for me. While it is reportedly possible to upgrade certain ranged characters with such an ability, I found the upgrade trees and options in The Banner Saga extremely unclear, to the point where I often opted to enter fights without any ranged units at all because they are so useless early on. The lack of variety of unit types is also a valid complaint here, but that’s apparently fixed in the sequel, which is due to be released on Switch quite soon.
If you play on any difficulty but easy, defeated units from your team will require extra days of rest at camps and towns before they will be ready to fight again, which of course chews through precious supplies. This isn’t a big deal early on, but the overall numbers in your caravan will soon start to climb into the many hundreds, and a decline in morale from constant defeat or low supplies is especially dangerous as you move between safe havens.
Sometime, encounters are too large to represent as a grid battles. You’ll then enter war battles against other large groups. This mode asks you to choose how to approach an enemy force, with higher casualties sometimes the result. You can lead the charge yourself, which will load a tough battle with your chosen team. Victory here usually gives you the option to push the advantage and hopefully reap item rewards, but I soon learned to value every win and often opted to retreat while the going was good and the enemy was licking their bruised paws.
This may all sound a bit complicated, but everything gets presented to you over time and The Banner Saga rolls along at a pleasant pace, interspersed with moments of gentle calm as you watch your animated army trudge across the beautifully stark landscape, rendered tiny against it. It’s during these moments that the Switch port really sings, for although the graphics are tiny, they are gorgeous and there’s a vibrancy to the hand-held experience that gets a little lost in docked mode. Both ways of playing are perfectly fine, and offer the same overall experience, the only difference being the option of touch controls when portable. However, I found the touch option unintuitive and was happy to use buttons/sticks to play.
Another consideration is that this is only part one of the story, so if you dig in here you probably need to be prepared to buy the two following games as they come to Switch over the course of this year. As a result, The Banner Saga’s narrative does a Fellowship of the Ring, introducing you to this world and leaving you just as things are developing. Still, there’s good value in the title, with around ten hours of play time required to reach the end, possibly more if you opt-in for more fights throughout.
Rating: 4/5
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