Released on July 26, 2018, The Banner Saga 3 is a tactical , turn-based role playing game developed by Stoic games and available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
The Banner Saga 3 is the haunting final installment in Stoic Games’ brilliant trilogy. Blending decision-making gameplay with strategic turn-based combat, you control a caravan of heroes, fighters, and clansmen on an epic journey of survival against all odds.
If you haven’t played the first two games, I highly recommend trying them first. The series plays out as one continuous storyline, and you can even import your save file from each previous game to start the new game just where you left off with the same heroes and story conditions. If for some reason you have no save file, each game past the first offers a choice of two sets of default story paths from previous installments.
The basic story of this third installment is simple. One group of survivors struggles to keep order and fend off the stone-like Dredge in the human capital Arberrang, while a smaller team of mercenaries and spellweavers travel into the darkness that threatens the world to put an end to it. The basic premise might be simple, but the details are anything but, and most decisions will have questionable moral implications that often split between compassion and practicality. Putting trust in some characters can be very risky indeed, and even the most prominent characters can be killed off by a misjudged story decision.
The hand-drawn visuals are stunning, and much detail has been put into the combat maps and backdrops, as well as character design. While this game does not showcase as many enchanting landscapes as the previous ones in the series, since it takes place either in the capital city of Arberrang or the strangely twisted wastes of the darkness, these areas present in the third game are beautiful in their own rights. The layers of Nordic longhouses and crowds of desperate people in Arberrang are very well implemented, and though the purple hue of the darkness might get a little boring after a while, the fractured landscapes hold a fascinating and eerie beauty for the eye that is willing to look past the mostly monochromatic color scheme. And composer Austin Wintory returns with yet another brilliantly haunting soundtrack that perfectly sets the alternate Norse mythology mood.
The gameplay is divided into two types. You will start out by making decisions through a text-based narrative style with the backdrop of your caravan and its surroundings or reading dialogue in close conversational scenes between characters and choosing responses. The fairly slow, stationary nature of The Banner Saga 3 means that supplies do not matter as much as in previous games, so the focus will be more on immediate narrative and not on the bigger picture of long-term survival. At specific moments in the story, you will enter combat, commanding up to six heroes in slow, methodical turn-based battle.
This game introduces a few new elements to combat, though the basic premise and most details remain the same. The strength attribute makes up both a hero’s health and damage, so a wounded hero will deal much less damage, while armor is subtracted from strength damage and can be broken by an attack that targets it. This lends itself to some interesting strategies, but the difficulty can feel a bit inconsistent, especially if your heroes take too much damage before they can deal any. This also means a battle will get slower the longer it draws out, as heroes and foes alike are drained of their strength. In addition, heroes can only die in story decisions. If you lose heroes in combat, they will become injured and gain a penalty to strength until the injury heals. The third game adds a wave-based system, where you can swap out heroes between waves and gain increased rewards for beating off more enemies.
I loved the story and direction of this third entry in the series, enjoying the change in tone that the developers implemented. In this game, you are not fighting a morally ambiguous war against another race that has the exact same goals in mind (and maybe some revenge for past wrongs). Instead, there is still quite a bit of ambiguity, what with the Dredge and warring human factions all trying to hold the safety of Arberrrang, but there is also a much more pressing threat: the amoral darkness that is spreading over the world, indiscriminately twisting everything it touches.
That is not to say that this game is perfect. I found it a bit short and wished it could have lasted longer, and the combat still felt a little unbalanced at times. But overall, this is an excellent end to the series and a worthy game to play. Though to be fair, you really should play through the first two before getting this one, if you haven’t already.
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