Learned my lesson not to buy a gog game without checking the reviews first for bugs. Months after release the Prepare For Battle crash still goes unfixed. I've sought methods outlined in the forums for fixing it (involves tinkering with msconfig) but now it just returns to the top menu instead of crashing to desktop. I cannot believe that, months after release, seemingly no effort has been undertaken to fix an inherently broken release.
The Banner Saga takes place in a wonderfully built world with nice characters, an interesting story, and a great theme. The problem is, of course, that for all its shine and patina it seems to be missing a lot. The game is terribly short and I don't mean that a gameplay time of 10 hours is bad I mean that I feel that the first game in the series feels incredibly unfinished. Each of the Star Wars movies works as a story by itself. Each has its own beginning, middle, and end. The Banner Saga is a $20 game that is, solely, a beginning. When one completes The Banner Saga one is not left wanting more, one is left groaning "Wait, that's #@$&ing it?!" The game play is also somewhat repetitive. To compare it to something, Final Fantasy Tactics works because each class is extremely viable (as the Straight Character Challenges would show) as well as being different and interesting enough. Additionally, FFT let you generate generic characters in addition to the numerous story characters so you could thoroughly poke at and experiment with the game. None of this is true for The Banner Saga and it suffers for it.
