Banner Saga

There's a lot of negative or middling reviews here. While I normally dismiss those, these are well written and worth reading. You should read some of those to make sure this is the game you want. For me, this game is nearly perfect. The beauty of the music and art style cannot be argued against. I love the world Stoic has created; I love the characters; I love a lot about the combat. The world is well imagined and is quite lore heavy. There's a lot of text and a lot of character dialog. It's all well written and fits each character. The characters themselves each have their own story and background. The combat is a fairly simple turn-based strategy affair. The characters and combat really do feel like a beautiful Nordic Fire Emblem. Others mentioned that the choices you make throughout are disappointing. Personally, I loved them. They felt very real. There was no "Either save the Fire Queen to get the lava gun or save the Ice King to get the ice fists". They had weight and the outcomes were never plainly laid out until the consequences unfolded down the road. Part of me wants to replay TBS to see the other outcomes, but part of me wants my first playthrough to be my personal story. Overall, I love this game. I don't blame others for not liking it, especially when they can truly express why they don't like it. You should just know that they're dumb and wrong. ;-)

The Good : Nice Art direction, great soundtrack, calculatory chess-like gameplay The Bad : Rules are VERY counter-intuitive : the player and the AI each move a piece in turn. So if you have 6 characters on the battlefield and the AI have 2 remaining, it means that each of the AI pieces will move 3 times when each of your low-level pieces move once. In a chess game , however, pieces have 1atk and 1 hp ,so you have to be carefull with moves. In this game, the remaining pieces could very well decimate your troops without much retaliation, because your troops may have been too weakened to be of consequence. So, the right strategy to avoid injuries is to weaken enemy pieces without killing them (in order to avoid hastening the turns of his still healthy units) and only kill them when they have all been weakened (with a few exceptions like trasher unit) This result in a very tedious game that punish blitz tactics. The rest of the game plays like a "choose your own adventure books " with the same pitfall : you have to make decisions without informations on why, how, when or ifs. And the consequence feel as arbitrary as having a piano falling from the sky , killing one of your character for the DM's fun. The battle mechanic is quite deterministic whereas the story mechanic is completely arbitrary. The game feels schizophrenic. And then you spend a 3rd of your gaming time watching a caravan move in 2D. Not my idea of fun. All-in-all, a disappointment from an over-hyped game.

I backed this in an instant I saw it. I didn't have big expectations so I wasn't disappointed much. Visuals are amazing, so are music and speech but the gameplay is bland, combat is boring with skills which are not that important or usable, game tries to present random choices like in king of dragon pass but consequences of these don't seem too important. Although, it may change in part 2 or 3 if your choices affect something there. Bottom line - DO buy it if you like turn based games, it will provide you with some entertainment, but overall, don't expect to be amazed with its story.

A lot of criticism has been raised against this game, and most of it is totally valid. The game is essentially just a string of very similar grid- and turn-based fights using a party that you level up. You manage a caravan outside of the fights, but it doesn't matter at all gameplay-wise, and you'll be no worse off if all the farmers following you around get killed by monsters. However, if you're a very specific target audience, you should like this a lot! The fighting system works well, and the tactics required are quite different from what you usually see, you want to gradually weaken the entire enemy team rather than pick them off one by one. I thought it was great, but some have said that they hate the combat system. The 2D graphics are also absolutely beautiful, though the non-combat animation is pretty pathetic. The setting is neat, but the writing is trite and unengaging. All I can say is that it's definitely not a game for everyone, but it was certainly one for me!

For the first handful of hours, I LOVED this game. Gorgeous art, great atmosphere, and challenging, tactics-style combat with highly satisfying animations and visceral "hits." The emphasis put on positioning created by some units taking up 4 squares and others taking up 1, combined with the Armor/HP mechanic, and the beautifully drawn battle maps, made this seem like a real winner. What completely killed it for me and put me off of buying the sequels is the non-existent save system. In an effort to prevent "save scumming" the devs went way overboard. This is a tough game, and if you're a little OCD like me, you'll definitely want to replay a lot of these battles in an effort to finish them more effectively. But not only can you not save *in* battle -- you can't save at all. The game auto-saves based on predetermined checkpoints. So every time you want to replay a battle, you have to begin from the previous "checkpoint" -- which oftentimes is at least a couple dialogues and cutscenes back. So you have to click through them again, re-equip and re-prepare your party again, and only then can you restart the fight to try again. It is beyond tedious and just an incredibly bad design decision. It literally ruined the game for me and I bailed halfway through. If you just want to plough through the game and don't think you'll want to retry battles very often, then have at it, there's a lot here to enjoy. But if what I've described sounds like it would be an issue for you, I would save your money. So much wasted potential with this one. Disappointing.