![]() But it’s the Ravens who definitely have the tougher job in this game. While fully half of this final installment is concerned with a do-or-die mission to save the world, this is emphatically not a conventional “band of plucky heroes saves the world” fantasy story.īecause the game splits its focus between two vastly different parties, I definitely cultivated a few MVPs for each group and built my strategies around them. The Banner Saga 3 is bleak, but also an immensely satisfying and consistent finale that pays off on Stoic’s work to date. #The banner saga plot seriesBut there remains a huge gulf between survival and salvation, and at every turn the already grim world of the series edged toward funereal, no matter how I tried to rig its narrative systems in my favor. That was the entire point of the first game but here in the last mile of the journey, I started hoping for “happily ever after.” Characters died because of that… and that’s when I realized that Banner Saga 3 lets you reload at various auto-save locations. Everything is not going to be all right, and sometimes people you love are going to be sacrificed for the greater good… or just to chance. You’d think in four years I’d have realized that is not that kind of story. And while I haven’t quite finished (I’m stuck right near the end, due to a far more consequential incident I’ll get to later), it’s become crystal clear that is not going to let me get the painless resolution I have been hoping for. Time and again I’d choose the heroic, idealistic gesture… and watch as yet another ally paid the price for my folly. With the stakes higher than ever before, The Banner Saga 3’s narrative likewise feels more unforgiving than ever before. It’s the visual novel-style narrative sections where you make political and personal choices that can massively affect the direction the story takes. Instead of instantly useful RPG archetypes, the Ravens have an old bard, a growing assortment of dubiously effective magicians, a giant who was as dangerous to his friend as his enemies, and some… guy named Dytch, who is perhaps the first Rando-class character in a tactical RPG (and who provides some of the most welcome and charming comic relief in this game).īut the battlefield has never really been the scariest part of this series. Their units are less straightforward, and rely on mastering a series of tricky mechanical and positional interactions to make the most of them. While the Rook / Alette army in the human capital is packed with tanks, archers, and damage-dealers that are easy enough to lead on the battlefield, the Ravens feels far trickier to command. The two armies you command in this game are very, very different. What this means is that focus-fire doesn’t work: You want to bleed enemy units without killing them so that the enemy has to burn moves on ineffective fighters, while the heavweights are stuck waiting for their turn. It’s an order-of-operations tactics game where one side moves a character, and then the other side gets to move a character. While the Banner Saga games bear a superficial resemblance to XCOM, they unfold according to very different logic. Meanwhile, a hardened and semi-criminal ban of mercenaries called the Ravens have been press-ganged into a desperate mission to save the world. In the besieged human capital, on the edge of civil war, invasion, and magical apocalypse all at once, a group of refugees-turned-heroes are desperately trying to stave off collapse and the probable annihilation. The Banner Saga 3 picks up only minutes or seconds after the last game ended, and continues the tactical RPG / visual novel adventures of two very different groups of characters. There’s such a weight of history between me and this cast of characters that as the losses started to pile up, I just couldn’t keep watching them get snuffed out because I said the wrong thing or, to be more accurate, because I kept acting as if Banner Saga 3 were a more uplifting and optimistic game than it really is. I’ve had four years to think about that too, and make my peace with my own version of Stoic’s tactical fantasy epic. ![]()
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