It doesn’t feel like there are a lot of “right” or “correct” choices for your characters in The Banner Saga 3, especially when they spend most of the game surrounded by rivals vying for control of Aberrang, that want nothing more than to see them dead. It’s actually pretty refreshing for the consequences of your actions to play out instantly, even if multiple lead characters can wind up dead over the course of 30 minutes. Things are tense in the city of Aberrang, and one misstep can plunge everything into chaos. Half the characters we’ve spent the past two games with are now trapped in a city of death and destruction, with the endless horde of Dredge clawing at the gates and walls around them. Whereas you felt the consequences of your choices further down the long, winding road in previous Banner Saga chapters, your choices in The Banner Saga 3 have instant ramifications. Speaking of decisions, they’re even more defining than your choices in the previous Banner Saga games. You’re not always forced into combat in The Banner Saga 3 rather your decisions often determine whether or not you can avoid a bloodthirsty battle by appeasing an unruly crowd with words alone.
When an enemy hits home on a character, you feel it as your poor warrior staggers and stumbles around, struggling to stand upright and gripping onto their spear or staff for support. Your selection of warriors is always outmatched by men or monsters and the turn-based battles feel largely hopeless. When the combat gets going in The Banner Saga 3, it’s ruthless. Between the conversations, there’s turn-based combat to be had-sometimes as a direct consequence of your choices-woven in between the story segments, as your characters move strategically across the battlefield, employing weapons and magic to hack away at their enemies turn after turn.
The banner saga story series#
To describe The Banner Saga series as a ‘Viking conversation simulator’ would be selling it short, but conversations and crucial decisions form the main crux of the game. Picking up from the cliffhanger that The Banner Saga 2 ended on, the final chapter of the series is “The beginning of the end,” as the poet Aleo puts it.
MacReady’s line of “Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired” in The Thing rings true for the characters of The Banner Saga 3, and it can all become a bit much when the hundredth character challenges one of your decisions that’ll have drastic consequences for the rest of the game. There’s nothing wrong with having everyone hate each other-you can’t really expect everyone to be overjoyed when reality itself is crumbling around them-but there has to be some give to this. Nowhere is this more evident than The Banner Saga 3, where everyone’s really tired and, for the most part, really pissed off. The number of weary, miserable faces ready to stick a dagger in your back has only increased as the series rolled on, dwarfing the number of characters you could count on as genuine friends. The Banner Saga was never about happiness or making friends along the way-it was about survival, at all costs.
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