Don’t get me wrong: I’d rather I played all three Banner Saga chapters back to back. You make bad decisions, you lose people who you cared for deeply.Īnd so maybe the four-year journey was smart, despite all its flaws. Your characters are exhausted, and so are you as 10 to 15 more enemies spill out of the depths to halt your journey again. There’s never enough time in The Banner Saga 3. It’s one more layer of stress though, and a perfect complement to the “World is Ending” motif on the story side. It was mostly my own intrinsic interest in the combat that kept me invested. But chances are a drawn-out fight means more injuries, and were these items worth the ragtag, mostly maimed group of soldiers I stumbled into the final battle with? Probably not. Some of these are great-for instance, letting a character strip away enemy armor faster. Fighting to the end nets you more renown of course, but also a high-level item. On the other hand I never felt like the rewards were that worth the penalties.
Thus I found myself forced to improvise, using units I’d never bothered with in previous games, as all my first-stringers were downed or injured. There’s no healing between waves, nor do your abilities recharge to full. You can swap out and reposition your own units between waves, but even so it’s an interesting wrinkle. Those who love Banner Saga’s deep tactical combat can opt to court a second and sometimes even a third wave of enemies though. Those who just want to see the story? Fight off the first wave and then flee-as far as I can tell it has no impact on the story. The Banner Saga 3 introduces a new idea to the tactical side: Wave battles. IDG / Hayden DingmanĬould I have been more efficient? Possibly. By the time my mottled company staggered towards the ending, every single one of them was injured. Gone was the leisurely pace I’d set before, exploring every nook and optional situation. I’d built up a decent bulwark of supplies over the last two games but I felt the pressure.
Each day Juno and Eyvind march is one less day of supplies in Arberrang, fewer fighters, more dead civilians. The “day” counter is back, prominent at the top of the screen as always, but this time only to spell out your doom. Only maybe a dozen of the game’s 40-plus characters feel fully realized with a beginning, middle, and end to their arc. If The Banner Saga 3 has one failing, it’s that an ever-expanding cast across the whole trilogy has left most with barely any room to speak. Not every character gets their deserved payoff-in fact, most don’t. All the old grudges, settled.įinally after four years of cliffhanger endings and meandering setups, catharsis. All the questions posed by the first two games, answered. It’s everything a finale should be-the most dire of straits, peril around every corner and death in the wings.
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On the plus side, it means The Banner Saga 3 is the best of the bunch by far. But nevertheless these feel less like sequels and more like an episodic release, stretched across four years. Stoic did design it as a trilogy, made that fact clear up front. It’s hard to hold this against The Banner Saga, per se. The climax of the game, the penultimate sequence, a character lists off a bunch of the choices you made along the journey and I’ll be honest: I remembered none of them. It expects you to have knowledge of events you’ve likely forgotten, or that at the very least are hazy by now.
Worse, The Banner Saga 3 constantly references its predecessors in ways big and small.
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