It’s been more than two years since the release of The Banner Saga , the flagship effort from then-freshman studio Stoic (comprised of industry vets from BioWare). The game debuted to great fanfare. Hell, I praised it as a potential GOTY contender . It earned the distinction by being bold enough to be different, but polished enough to be good. I lovingly describe it to friends as Fire Emblem -meets- Oregon Trail -plus-Vikings. So it is no surprise that the sequel, The Banner Saga 2 , follows the same formula . And while a number of subtle tweaks add up to a decent improvement there are a few lingering weaknesses that keep me from giving it the perfect score it (almost) deserves.
If you played the previous game, you’ll be happy to know that your save files and decisions carry over and influence this saga. New players are given the choice between playing as Rook, the valiant yet reluctant clan leader, or Alette, his brave and talented daughter. If the norse setting hasn’t already clued you in, this is a macho environment. But in playing with both characters for the review I found a remarkable amount of non-cliched moments for Alette’s story. Like everything else in The Banner Saga 2 , the writing is polished and sophisticated.
Perhaps it is the presence of the Varl that offers the levity the pseudo-nordic machissmo needs. The Varl are massive, ancient men with lifespans in the hundreds of years. They have a general distaste for humanity (who doesn’t?) and have an uneasy alliance with the people in this story. There is a significant amount of lore here, far more than the recap video on offer in the startup menu can supply.
The staggering amount of lore gives me my first chance to point out what I consider to be the only real flaw of The Banner Saga 2 . It’s the same one The Banner Saga had - it’s a bit shallow. Or, at least, the lore provided far, far outweighs the playtime and space it's given. This goes beyond the standard “I loved this so much I want more” argument, too. That is true, I did want more. But the depth given to details that are ultimately meaningless seems almost wasteful.
Consider the map feature in The Banner Saga 2 . Players can access this glorious interactive map full of hand-written, scrawling names of towns and forests and roads. Combined with the majestic art style and the pitch perfect score, the map adds a wonderful immersive feeling. You imagine yourself in a roadside inn, curled up next to a warm fire with a mug of strong cider as you unfurl this great parchment map across a hardwood table and pour over the details.
But the sense of adventure invoked by the map never comes to fruition, and it’s heartbreaking to glance at the map before the final chapter and see how little of it you crossed. Stoic has crafted a wide, wide world but we only play with an itty-bitty piece of it.
The same holds true for the combat. Anyone who loves turn-based strategy will find a lot to like about The Banner Saga 2 ’s take on the system. It’s fairly conventional, but a neatly balanced armor/strength point system adds a new dynamic. Basically, your strength needs to be higher than a foe’s armor if you want to deal any serious damage. So taking damage also makes attacks weaker, meaning players must think about specifically targeting armor sometimes, too.
As heroes advance in level they earn ability points to spend on basic stats, as well as a few ranked skills at higher levels. There are even items that augment different skillsets and playtypes. There are things that favor heroes who specialize in doing only armor damage, or ranged heroes.
But battles themselves have a nearly identical feel and tempo from start to finish. I replayed a late game battle and an early game battle back-to-back and it was hard to tell which was which. A similar vapidness exists in the character strategy itself. For all the fine-tuning available to each character and class, and the overwhelming amount of characters in your available roster, there isn’t much sense of any one thing making much difference.
This is also true of the caravan you manage. Players must worry about a morale meter, but not really. The overall morale rating has a slight impact on your heroes special abilities in battle, but managing the ratio of clansmen to fighters didn’t seem to amount to much.
Unlike similar games in the genre, like XCOM or Fire Emblem , I never felt that a single piece of equipment or one particular skill made enough difference on the battlefield to warrant much thought. Not every loss leads to a replay, either. Sometimes the story will just change.
And it’s those story branches that make up the roots of what’s special about The Banner Saga 2 . Yes, it’s not as expansive as it seems to want to be, and, yes, the combat isn’t the nightmarish make-or-break grind of other titles. But you will search for a long time before you find a game with more carefully constructed beauty than The Banner Saga 2 .
Anything the game lacks in its combat or its ambitions is more than made up for by the visual spectacle Stoic delivers to tell this story. Because once you get past the normal expectations you have for a game like this, you can begin to appreciate The Banner Saga 2 for what it is. A saga in every sense of the word. And it’s a living saga, where your choices have consequences. And those consequences are played out upon some breathtaking scenery.
The aesthetic can best be described as animated diorama. But this goes well beyond the shoebox and construction paper jobs from your middle school years. The distance and detail in the travelling scenes absolutely captures the fantastical scope of the story. You feel like you’re reading a storybook, and the scenes at play are precisely what you’d picture in your head. The Banner Saga 2 is The Princess Bride of video games.
It has a slightly higher runtime, too, but not as much as you’d expect. Some might call this a flaw, but I think the playtime is just right. Because the point of The Banner Saga 2 is not to tell one epic, it’s to tell many epics. Like a true saga, every version that lives on will be slightly different depending on who tells it. So it’s a mercy that the playtime is less than 20 hours because The Banner Saga 2 should be played at least twice, once as Rook and once as Alette.
The Banner Saga 2 is everything a fantasy should be, as long as you don't put the magic under a microscope. It’s not to be missed, especially if you're patient enough to enjoy things like art, reading, tactics and tales. Tension, not action, drives most of the drama across a setting and a style that is second to none. A beautiful triumph of a game for anyone who’s ever fallen in love with an epic.
Score: 4 out of 5.
