Winter is coming. Yeah, it has become a tired meme, what with this brutal winter and Game of Thrones on television, but cold and brutal is the name of the game with The Banner Saga. A game with a lot of atmosphere and a lot of ambition, it stumbles in the execution.
Set in a Norse world, the story revolves around two different leaders. On one end, a Varl, whose kind are giants among men, is trying to get Varls and humans to work together; on the other end, a human father is trying to protect his daughter. That protection is needed due to a calamity that is sweeping the land, with dark, and even darker, forces marching across the land.
The atmosphere oozes with a thick Norse atmosphere and a very real feeling of Ragnarok, the apocalypse of the Norse gods, coming. The animation scheme is to be commended. The gorgeous 2-D drawings and backgrounds portray a graphic novel come to life. Building on it is a haunting, yet beautiful score that engulfs you like a mighty Norse wind.
Where The Banner Saga prides itself, however, is its choice system. There are no right choices in the game, only survival. The world is going to hell and it is up to you to decide if you are going with it. It is unapologetic and certainly unforgiving. Do you keep a character you badly need for your party at the cost of his failure to escort women and children to safety? Do you rob a farmer just trying to protect his land, when your own party is starving for supplies? Do you lead your army yourself or let it fight its battles for you? There is definitely replay value in finding out how doing one thing differently would have made your journey that much easier, or harder.
And hard it is, as the game’s mechanics force you to juggle numerous considerations. As you move across the world, you need to take into consideration whether to rest to replenish morale and heal wounds, or continue the journey and suffer a morale drop that can affect your performance on the battlefield. Each day spent costs supplies. The currency, renown, can be gained through choices or battles. It is used for buying supplies, leveling characters, and buying items for your characters. This makes renown very precious, but also leads to one of the game’s first problems.
Making renown the currency for three separate factors is a poor choice to say the least. It is hard enough to get enough renown to level up a good portion of your characters, and give them decent items, but when the game is constantly on your tail demanding you keep up your supplies, eventually you will find most of your characters are stunted in their potential.
Yet you need those characters well leveled and well equipped to deal with the game’s second issue, its combat. Let me say that the action can be extremely satisfying when executed properly, and the game does a good job of integrating choices into whether you should fight or not. That being said, however, it is too hard. At a certain point, I had to tone it down the difficulty settings as the game continued to send me wave after wave of increasingly problematic opponents when my own characters are not able to keep up, very much due to the problem I discussed with renown.
Finally, and what may be the saddest criticism I have for it, is the writing itself. While it managed to keep me engrossed and attached to the characters for the most part, the whole thing clumsily comes together toward the end, only to deliver a rushed and frankly abrupt ending. The whole thing came off as unfinished, as if they ran out of money. Either way, it was immensely unsatisfying.
For what it is worth, The Banner Saga is to be praised for delivering a gorgeous and uncompromising vision of Norse mythology. One can hope that the sequel takes into consideration the various problems of its predecessor. Until then, it is not yet a Banner year.
