The Banner Saga

Ages ago, in the heady days of April of 2012, I kickstarted a game that I thought had a lot of promise. I gave them a bunch more money again in March of 2017. The Banner Saga lived in my "to play" queue for a decade and change and, well, recently I decided that not only did I have the time, but I had the inclination to play it and its sequels. I probably shouldn't have waited.

I've talkedtyped a lot about the kinds of games I'd lie to see, particularly ones that have good writing, striking art, and elements of humor. The Banner Saga has all three plus excellent music and well-realized mature themes. There's good and bad in it, just like all games I suppose, but it all comes together in a way that not a lot of games do. There are some significant spoilers in her for games released between 2014 and 2018 so if you don't want those, you might look away. I'm also going to break it down as I am normally accustomed to doing and, because words are hard, I'm not going to spend a bunch of them explaining game mechanics thoroughly.

A Brief Overview

The Banner Saga is a story driven narrative following a series of characters trying to save their friends/family/world from one or more untimely demise(s). A turn based tactical combat underpins the narrative and every decision makes a difference, though some are gravely more important than others. There are a couple dozen or so named characters, mainly your heroes, and the point of view character bounces around between bands of folks doing things in different parts of the world. The themes are Old Norse, which, if you know me (and if you don't I have no idea how you found your way here) you know that this is right up my alley. Little did I know in 2012 that I'd spend significant time learning the language in the ensuing years.

 

The basics of the tactical game aren't particularly deep but they have some nuance, especially in the second and third installments. Movement is somewhat complex given that some of your characters take up four squares and easily get blocked by your other characters if you don't plan it out carefully. There's also a round-robin "I go, you go" turn timer that has some interesting consequences. If you blitzed down the cannon fodder too fast and didn't wear down the scary bad, you'll be terrified to know that the scary bad moves *way* more often than you'd like. Armor is a flat value off of damage, but strength is your hitpoints and the base amount of damage you do on a normal hit. If you've taken damage, you can easily get in a place where a normal attack vs. strength wouldn't move the needle much if at all, but you can also attack armor which knocks off a chunk. Characters also have a willpower microcurrency that allows you to boost your attacks and power special moves and whatnot adding another layer.

Time outside of the tactics game is split between narrative and caravan modes with the former handling a lot of the heavy dialog, especially between more than two characters, and the latter being where you see chibis of your heroes, clansmen, and the giant varl that make up your caravan. Hiking to the next town (no horses, says lore) costs supplies and morale a la The Oregon Trail and you hit some pseudo-randomized events on the way. These adjust morale, supplies, the folks in your caravan, and can set up events for the future and perma-kill characters as well. Can you tell when a character is going to perma die? Often not, but we're not there yet. All three games, should you import your games from the previous, build into a whole with many events harkening back to previous choices often in previous games to determine how it all works out. Often this is big stuff like "does the world end or not" and "does Egil die in a terrible way." Is it always obvious which choices you're making? No, but we're still not there yet.

The Good

The game is strikingly beautiful, in the style of western hand-drawn animation. I wanted to saytype "cell-shaded" but that's a rendering trick to make 3d content look like hand-drawn animation. The characters are distinct and well realized from the different color choices on Alette's or Nid's clothes to the distinct horns on every Varl. There's a small number of animation frames for each during their dialog scenes so it isn't just a flat image with text below it and the camera bounces around between speakers which is a nice touch. The landscapes and battlegrounds are very nicely drawn and help to sell the (presumably) iron-age Viking-era setting replete with godstones, runes, and stonework. 

Austin Wintory's soundtrack is also a work of great beauty. The mix of modern and traditional instruments and vocal elements gave it all an authenticity that I greatly appreciated. I never found a situation where the music didn't match or didn't help sell the emotional beats of what was happening in the game. I'll also add that there were points during some hectic battles where the music changed to match my angst. I don't know if that's due to a dynamic music system or not but it was hella rad when it happened and it happened multiple times over my not-quite-40-hour playthrough. 

Bad things happen to good people and occasionally, good things happen to bad people. I dislike seeing beloved characters killed off arbitrarily (more on that later) and it's real easy to get attached to these characters. These events come early and often and many of the ones that survive bear the marks of their choices and/or fortune in inescapable ways. One of the PoV characters loses their freakin' arm in one fight and their eye in another. Dude survived in my games, tho. As loss is a major theme in the game in its particular dark and gritty way, I ultimately added this point in the good section though I struggled a lot with where to put it. This is ultimately what kept me from enjoying Darkest Dungeon which I wrote about way back in 2018 in review.  The themes of loss and struggle rather remind me of The Black Company which is worth a read if you haven't already.

Characters often say little but tell a big story. Decades of GMing have taught me that words are cheap and that actions are preferable when you can swing it. A surprising number of characters have well-realized arcs, many of them shaped by your decisions in game. One of the stronger examples I can give is the archer Nid, (one of my favorites) an otherwise un-noticed mother of three, only adds to the roster in the first game if you win a particular fight and had opted to have one of your heroes train peasant women as archers two chapters earlier. You also have to talk her out of leaving the group after an off-screen event in the third game by telling this battle-hardened, would-be normal mother that you know she's no coward further reinforcing the dialog and actions she had previously. The game is full of this kind of writing which so often goes overlooked.

Beyond the characters, the overall storytelling is on point. The Banner Saga spins a vast tale of love, loss, betrayal, and a harsh and uncaring world. We get hints about the bonds between Juno and Eyvind basically from the first time they're on screen and in the last game we get trickles of how messed up things are and the direct hand they had in it. Depending on the choices you've made, it all might end in the destruction of the world. Scrutinizing some seemingly throw-away dialog, I might also conclude that by Eyvind breaking the world to save Juno, that he stumbled upon a ticking time-bomb intended to destroy the world, and inadvertently conjured up (pun intended) an opportunity to ultimately save it. He even telegraphs this cryptically in the first installment IIRC. This is an impressive feat over a multi-year set of projects and one that I think probably deserves more attention.

The Bad

No game is perfect and I certainly had my gripes about The Banner Saga. 

The game has no player-controlled save system. The game automagically handles saving which sounds good on paperin a blog post but I don't think it worked out in the game all that well. Every time I went to a previous load I had to wonder how far back it was going to take me and if I had to do that last gruelling fight over again. Over time I figured out how it worked more or less, but there were still surprises. The autosave system was made a lot worse in the last installment which, for whatever reason, as super unstable. I started the game five times and it crashed or hit me with an infinite load screen three times. Not a good average. 

I also had quibbles with some of the interface design, though notably I play on a super duper wide monitor which puts active elements far out of my normal FoV. Also of note, I have questionable eyesight and very old, very scratched glasses which are becoming worse and worse. In the tactical game, I often misread who was moving. This sometimes caused me to make moves that didn't make a lot of sense. This wasn't helped by the "commit move" interaction being easy (for me) to accidentally hit. I also ran into many instances where the threat was hidden because the ever-important armor/strength values are only available on-hover and your guys generally show on the bottom left, far outside my attention. More than once I ended up making an attack that didn't do what I expected and it's not like I was heavily drinking (nb: I mostly quit this year). As a last note, even after 40ish hours of game, I still don't know how varl move along their path. In the first couple games it was annoying if I couldn't path around other characters unexpectedly but in the last game where there were on-map terrain hazards, this was super annoying. I don't think any of these are game-breaking but overall it brought down my enjoyment of the game.

The game has two major currencies that aren't people, particularly renown and supplies. Supplies are consumed moving place to place and sometimes bartered at decision points. Renown is used to buy level ups for your characters, magic items at shops, and supplies, sometimes for very bad exchange rates. If you don't have enough supplies, bad things happen and the game has multiple events that super rob you of the supplies you have so there's always a crunch on them. Renown being used for so many things and mostly being rewarded for difficult decisions and winning fights is super tight. You generally can't level all your characters up and it makes it hit even harder when you've spent a bunch of renown ranking someone up and then they run off or die terribly. Much like an earlier note, I struggled on which area to stick this in because I'm pretty sure that the scarcity of resources is intentional. The game is gritty and this is one of the ways it's sold, but it still stinks knowing that your named characters could be so much better except that you have to keep spending your renown on supplies so your people don't starve. I get it but don't like it. 

The last note I'm going to make in this section is the hardest. When you make decisions outside of combat, the consequences are often terrible and often seem arbitrary. Egil dies in one of the first scenes in the first game depending on your decision which would deprive you of some excellent writing and an excellent character for the rest of the series. I get that this helps replayability but having looked through a lot of the different paths of those decision points, you can lose out on a lot of how the game eventually plays. Didn't save the Dredge baby in the first game? Your PoV character (Rook or Alette) probably dies in the third after watching the other main PoV character die in the first. Didn't take Eyvind down the right set of logical paths at the end of the game? Get ready for some of the darkest endings for the series. I don't like this and I get that it's entirely intentional. It's easy to get locked into "lol, nothing matters" when you see decisions go way off the rails too often and this is not what you want in a narrative heavy game. This is my biggest gripe with the game and it led me to scrubbing through walkthroughs and saves regularly which didn't make me like the game more.

Final Thoughts

The ending of the first game is abrupt and sorrowful and maybe it's because I've been processing a deep personal loss this year, but it hit me particularly hard. You've spent a lot of time with these people by then, deciding on their trials and tribulations and it's hard not to care about them. At the end of the first game, one of your last decisions will tragically kill one or the other of the main PoV characters with a gut-wrenching funeral scene at the end. The middle installment doesn't pull the heartstrings quite so hard, but the last one ramps it up with a vengeance. I got the "good" ending which I fear is not the canonical ending since the next-less-good ending has more writing and a voice-over scene with two of the now-deceased PoV characters. The other four endings were bleak--very bleak--and while I'm glad I watched them all, it was a real downer and I don't honestly know if I'd feel as strongly about the series as I do had I gotten one of those other endings. As John of  The Writer's Block writes quite often: the ending is all that matters. I think this is especially true of works as emotionally charged as The Banner Saga, especially when you factor in that most players won't finish a game and an even smaller number will complete it again.

The game is dark and gritty and portrays a world where hope is fleeting and far away where it exists at all. What carries these people through to whichever ending you might get to, is their love for each other and their determination to survive. I've asked the question here before: can games be art? If art makes you feel something, then The Banner Saga is most definitely art. Despite its shortcomings, I loved the series and encourage everyone to play it. This is the kind of game that I want to see more of from the industry. It stands as a testament to what the medium can be.

Propapalooza week 19 (2024 week 50)

Finally we have reached the end of the major push for D&L props. There's a handful left that were missing pieces (because I lost them), were so unuseful that I couldn't be bothered (so I didn't paint them) and/or I'm saving them for some nefarious purpose. Also, I really, really needed to be done with them. Anyway.

First up we have a set of stone bridges. I think the two small ones and the two larger ones are from different Dungeons and Lasers kickstarters and since I had so many of them, I painted them differently. The two foreground ones are painted as normal with some additional effort toward weathering which I think worked out pretty well. The ones in back are heavily darkened because they're supposed to be in night time. I don't think that sold as well. I didn't do any OSL on the night time ones though that was my first thought because it's super inefficient to light bridges that way and I just couldn't see that being a real thing.

Next up we have four sci-fi busted up corners. These fit on top of their normal tiles which is nice but they didn't have any convenient ways for me to magnetize them which is not. I basecoated them in metallic through the airbrush which sped things up quite a lot. I spent extra time picking out details and darkening them down with various washes. I think they look OK but I doubt they're going to get much screen time because while they do match the Dungeons and Lasers tiles, they don't match my hand-made magnetized foam tiles. 

 

These are also busted up corners in the fantasy realm this time. I figured these were sitting out in the elements and weathered them down a bunch. I didn't put a ton of effort into them and it kind of shows. The shields and other wooden bits get lost a bit in the background but that's probably OK since these are background terrain pieces rather than center pieces. These might get some screen time.

 

These last busted up fantasy corners I like a lot better. I think they're more striking and spent a little bit more time on them as a result. I didn't do anything particularly differently with the stonework but I think it came out a lot better. I did some highlighting on the exposed timber which helps sell them. I have high hopes for these.

2024 finished mini counter: 399/208

Propapalooza week 18 (2024 week 49)

I'm really ready to be done with props right now but I think there's one week left. 

First up we have assorted cauldrons. I kept the hands coming out but only opted for one set of tentacles for the middle ones and picked soup and ladle vs. fireplace for the ones on the right. These are pretty simply painted as most of these have been and while they don't hold up under scrutiny, they get the job done on the tabletop. When might I use these? No idea, but I often find creative ways to sneak them in regardless.

 

 

I wanted to make these two crystals of some sort but I don't think they work. I wanted to do a "weak crystal energy near the edges" and have them fade into more normal grey rockwork but clearly I didn't. I also wanted the left one to be more red than pink but once the magenta contrast paint went down, I just kinda went with it. The one on the right has the intended tone and while they aren't spectacular in any way, I still think they're cool.

 

These two are clearly bed mimics to go along with the beds we saw in week 37. Looking back at those old shots, I do not miss the old photo studio/settings/difficulties. I didn't spend as much time as I might have on these guys because I really don't think they'll get used. Then again, mimics. They follow the same basic scheme as the beds with additional effort on the teeth and maw. A sloppy mess of Reikland Flesh Gloss tries to sell the "this is a gaping maw of a malign creature trying to eat you" effect that is the essence of the mimic.

 

Next up we have a couple weird creepy mushroom things. I had higher intentions than I ended up painting these but where I was at that point, higher quality efforts really weren't in the cards. They're basically drybrushed over a contrast paint base coat which is probably obvious. In retrospect, I probably should have done more work since mushrooms do get a lot of screen time in my games and if I'm feeling ambitious at some point in the unforseeable future, I might punch these up some. 

 

This last shot is a big 'ol grabbag of things that didn't really have a good grouping. The creepy paintings are very weird and the ones on the left are pretty much phoned in. There's a lot of 3d-ness on these that might not be obvious but in some ways it made them easier to paint. Obviously I did more work on the ones on the right and I wanted to sell the "this is a cool painting with a demon coming out of it" vibe that it seems the sculptor was going for. The bottom left is a dude in a medical pod. I didn't do a lot of work on it and it shows. Ironically, the helmet and its missing twin got more love. Where's its twin? No idea! I dropped it on the floor after painting it and couldn't find it again. Gone forever. On the bottom right we have two ammunition packs (or something) flanking a marine having a really bad day. These didn't get a lot of effort, really, and I don't expect the marine to get much screen time.

2024 finished mini counter: 383/208

Propapalooza week 17 (2024 week 48)

I'm ready to be done with props but there are at least a couple weeks go go but unlike a lot of the stuff that precedes, these guys were less phoned-in for various reasons.

First up we have a pair of neon signs in rubble. I painted them as if they were on despite being in a rubble pile because I thought that was more fun. The pop colors are mostly in Golden High Flow fluorescent because a) they really pop, and b) that just seemed appropriate. The pink and blue were adulterated with normal flat acrylics because I couldn't get a proper coat of the blue fluorescent and couldn't mix a convincing pink fluorescent out of the colors I have on hand. The rockery is drybrushed and washed as usual. Also of note, the signage is only visible from the front so the backs are comparatively really boring.

The two dudes on the left here are pumps of some kind so I painted them in a retro and dirtied-down red. Part of the red is played by Daler Rowney Inks through the airbrush and then washed down with various colors. I did some weak detail work and cleanup and lots of washes to get them where I wanted them. Notably, the first layer of wash over the metallics re-activated some of them but I'm way too lazy to go back and fix them after the fact. The two little guys I think are supposed to be crypts or something and despite being small, I did quite a lot of work on them. It started with a slap chop with washes and Contrast Paints followed by another drybrush. I picked out the metallic details and finished with another wash. I think they look good for the small investment in them. 

These next two are clearly bookshelves but are they really dumb mimics? No idea why they have eyeballs on them. I like that they're whimsical and did minimal work to pick out the books and potions and whatnot on the shelves. These too started with a slapchop but I ended up painting over most of the non-wood bits anyway because I wasn't happy with them. Not sure if the red irises were appropriate but they are hard to miss.

Last up we have the try-hardest items in this set. I like the effect of gemstones but I don't super like painting them because they require careful blends and edge highlighting. These sat with rough highlights for a couple months but when I finally got around to painting them, They turned out pretty well. I'd tried to edge highlight the gemstones individually but never got a result I liked so ended up with an extremely light drybrush instead which I think looks pretty good. They're nicely dramatic on the table but unfortunately they also took a long time blending every single facet. 

2024 finished mini counter: 361/208