The Banner Saga is a Brutal Nordic Classic
A journey through a beautifully artistic landscape, with unique and engaging characters, and challenging decisions that are hard to forget.
What makes a game memorable? It’s a question that’s difficult for me to answer concretely, because everyone experiences games in a different way. I think there are some basic criteria that a game has to meet to be “playable:” functional controls/combat schemes, understandable visuals, and sensible sound design are the first things that come to mind. But those things are the basics, it’s possible for a game to have all of them and still not be memorable. There’s something more, a spirit, that some games are imbued with that leave an indelible mark on the psyche of the player; an experience.
The Banner Saga has been on my radar for the longest time. Turn-based tactical combat has always appealed to me, even when I’m not super good at it (see: my look at Children of Zodiarcs). Where that game fell short for me this one takes up the banner, so to speak, and leads the charge.
The Banner Saga was created by Stoic studios, which was founded by three former BioWare game developers, who decided they were ready to dedicate themselves wholly to a passion project. In 2012, they departed from BioWare, and set up a Kickstarter for the game that would become The Banner Saga. With the unique art style, and a story that has actual decisions with consequences, it was pretty much set to be a success in an era of artsy roguelikes. It was no surprise that their Kickstarter was a massive success.
Released in 2014, The Banner Saga received a lot of praise for its memorable art and sound design, as well as for the combat and challenging gameplay. Join my caravan and walk with me through the beautiful art and design of my latest adventure.
If there was one word I could use to describe The Banner Saga it would be, “journey”. Mechanically, the game is focused on journeying between points, attempting to find safety from threats both old and new. These trips showcase beautiful visuals: sweeping vistas, windswept glaciers, and glowing forests. The story isn’t just about the people in the caravan, it is of the land and the history. These last two are vitally important, because the visual storytelling in this game is relied on heavily to clarify the world in a way that narration would ruin.
Everything in this game is hand-drawn and animated, both in mechanical game play and in cut scenes. There was only one dedicated cinematic scene in the game, right at the beginning. Everything else is either semi-still character interactions, or landscape environment effects. Both of those are very good, though the character animations become a little repetitive over time.
As an art direction the style chosen for the game does wonders in making it stand out. The art is stylized in every instance, though subtle differences in style can be found between certain aspects of the game. Battle maps tend towards a soft, painted feeling, with a riot of details hidden within. Character conversations, on the other hand, have broad, loose details, with what feels like the barest minimum detail needed to flesh out the character.
There is beauty in both the simplicity and detail, and this Nordic adventure slips between both aspects seamlessly throughout game play.
During a battle, the details on screen set the scene and let any narration be brief and diegetic. The style throughout the game is cohesive and never feels like it pulls the player out of the world. The maps have an adjacent art style to the landscapes in the game, creating a more personal, detail-rich environment that is still cohesive.
The landscapes are stunning; mountains and valleys rise and fall in a constant slow crawl as the caravan moves, or are beautiful stills in towns or camps. These moments, which amount for over half the game, are more suggestive of what the game is trying to represent, and account for some of the most beautifully executed stylistic decisions in the game.
A lot of strong, and almost harsh light and shadow work, create hard, planar shapes in the landscapes; shapes that, when placed behind constant organic flow of the banner as the caravan travels, or intermixed with the wind and weather, create a dynamic that is both frightfully still, yet wonderfully alive.
The environment showcases the power of suggestion: huge clumps of trees with barely two colors have no problem communicating what they are; towers, banners and buildings, constructed of simple, hard shapes; buttery soft coloration contrasting with strong lighting. All combine to create a unique style that really is the primary draw of the game.
It is through the landscapes that so much of the story is told, there are often details like dredge in the foreground or shattered buildings in a town you are coming up on that give you hints about what has or may transpire soon. The environment does the primary job of setting the scene, requiring little to no exposition to solidify the situation the characters find themselves in. The only outright expository information the game provides is through the “godstones:” monolithic cultural relics that the caravan comes across whilst traveling, which the game uses as opportunities give relevant information about the gods and the world to the player, to fill out their understanding of the world.
The clever use of layered elements fore-to-back lend a sense of scale to the world. While this is not particularly trendsetting, the way that The Banner Saga plays allowed the devs to employ more extensive foreground elements than would be possible in a different game. In some more traditional side-scrolling games, foreground obstruction would be used sparingly, as to not interrupt gameplay. In The Banner Saga the portion of gameplay with the most incredible landscapes suffers no interruption or obstruction from the use of every part of the scene, giving those scenes the ability to showcase the world as an entirety, rather than specific snapshots.
The characters have a specific set of repeated “Idle” actions when they are in conversations that can get repetitive, though this is less a negative than an observation. The addition of any motion at all, and deviation from a traditional visual-novel still, is refreshing and adds a significant amount of characterization. The animations are mostly unique, mainly due to the characters themselves being unique enough to require their own custom touches. The animations seem organized by classes, but there are only a small number of character and class combinations, so the few times there is repetition among the characters it does not stand out as such.
Design wise, most of the characters are unique with their own specific touches, though some of the Varl (giant characters) run into a certain sameness with some of the less important characters. This may be a matter of perception though, with the Varl shaped hole in my mind being less robust than the human one. The character art is incredibly enjoyable and stands as an interesting halfway point between the landscapes and the battlemaps, with a sense of simplicity to line and form while still capitalizing on details like wood grain or hair strands.
The basic game play works between three specific systems that orbit around the resources “Renown” and “Supplies”. You utilize Renown as a currency for purchasing supplies in a pinch but its primary use is to upgrade the characters. Supplies are essential to the constant journey through the game and are often used as a reward or punishment for decisions made.
Boiled down, the three main modes of the game are the Tactical Combat, the Journey, and the Character Interaction. Renown comes primarily from combat. Supplies are used for every day of journeying, and can be gained through character interaction and/or events the caravan encounters. Renown can always be gained, and never lost, while actions taken can lead to a significant loss of supplies. Character interaction can take place on the journey, in towns, or at camp, and can lead to entire new routes or painful results.
The combat is relatively tight if sometimes uninspired. The animations are beautiful and the system works on a basic Armor vs. Strength mechanic with a resource called “Willpower” thrown in, that can be used to activate special moves, add more power to attacks, or even move further than normal in a turn. The turn system is another aspect that felt interesting and balanced, until one unit is left on either side, the entire mechanism is back-and-forth. One unit from the players side moves, and performs an action. Then the opposing side moves and acts. When only one unit is left on a side, a special mode called “Pillage” is activated that allows all of the winning sides units to move before the last poor bastard left.
One of the points that I enjoyed about the combat was the armor mechanic. Armor can be worn down by attacking it directly (at times armor absolutely has to be broken before anything substantial can be done) and conversely, weaker units can be reinforced via a shield wall mechanic. Whenever units are stacked close to each other, if any of them have shields they grant a resistance bonus to the surrounding units that is particularly key in harder fights.
This is a game that was absolutely worth waiting for, and I should have played it the day it came out. The art inspires a lot of strong feelings, and the mechanics create an investment in the story. The game presents the player with decisions, and an unstoppable commitment to those choices that is hard to find elsewhere. In fact in other games, the same aspects that make The Banner Saga shine would feel limiting, invasive, or absolutely constricting.
In The Banner Saga there are harsh limitations on the ability to “undo” choices, which further entrenches the player in the world, and adds a significant amount of depth. Once that realization hits the details of the world are gathered with more focus, devoured as though they may not be seen again. Characters lives take on more urgency, and the pace of the journey becomes more intense.
The game is a perfect blend of an entrancing art style bringing an incredibly deep world to life, catching the eye with its beautiful landscape backdrops and hooking the player with tactical combat where the stakes are always high. Stoic set the bar high when it comes to visual storytelling in this game and leaves the player needing to explore more of the world in the rest of the trilogy.
The world is already painted, but the story is a banner yet woven.
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