Banner Saga 3 review

What kind of game is this about?
The Banner Saga 3 is a combination of adventure and tactical gameplay. The story is inspired by Nordic mythology and fantasy. The action is closely related to the two previous sections so it is not recommended to play it before you've completed the previous games. The game does not have a multiplayer component, and it can end in about six hours.

We all like to feel special, so video games in the main roles give us heroes bigger than life. But heroes in grounded stories are mostly not special or godly days, but rather good mediators. At this starting point is the series of games The Banner Saga, which concludes its story of the epic conflict between light and darkness to a third part.

To be immediately direct, the third part of Banner Sage is not worth playing if you are not familiar with the previous two games. It is possible to look at a brief summary of the action so far and only continue from Chapter 16, but in this way, half of the experience is lost. The best case is to play this game if you can use the recorded files from the previous games. However, there should be no reliance on the previous action as a minus, because the third part is initially conceived as the ending of the trilogy. If nothing, now all games are available on all platforms so you can play them in a row.



The story in the third part leads to the culmination and collection of the decisions made so far. Humanoid races are before the collapse until the forces of darkness come upon them. Heroes of previous games were divided into two groups. One group, headed by Rook, is trying to keep the city of Arberrang alive, fighting against internal intrigues and sabotage. The second group, which we follow from the perspective of Iver, is on a suicide expedition to the source of darkness. Their adventures are separate, but in the last two chapters of the game, they begin to influence each other.

The story in the third part leads to the collection of decisions made so far.

The Banner Saga 3 is a classic but still impressive epic about combat, sacrifice and mortality. It's the ending point in which not all characters will get a living head, and as far as the characters you've met through two games, you will not care - especially if your decisions lead to ruin. In the grand finale, the feeling of hustle and bustle does not have a stable rhythm, so this may not be the perfect ending full of nostalgia. However, it can be said that the story is liquid, which can be seen for a durability of only six hours, on average less than in the previous two games.



The Banner Sage style has remained consistent so it's still hand-drawn graphics and mostly static way of passing through the story. Visual style is still attractive, even four years after the original, although the transition between the perspectives of the characters in the dialogues seems to have been sloppy or at least a bit sluggish.

The flamboyant part of the presentation is again that not all the conversations in the game are sounded.

The reflection part in the presentation is still that the conversations in the game are not sounded. Such a move was clear in the first part (it was a new game on the market) and even in the second part (the developer did not ask the players what they wanted), but in the back of the saga it leaves the impression of half-finished games. Namely, the main parts of the game in which the story is being recounted have the narrator's voice. However, the other half of the game is still quiet. We are not talking about hundreds of hours of text that should have been recorded. When you collect all the dialogues, maybe you have an hour of conversation in the head, and there was no budget for that? I know that somebody will be a split, but that does not change the fact that this part of the presentation is done halfway.



The Banner Saga 3 does not bother to be much more than finishing or playing a gameplay. There is a novelty in gameplay, but not so much as to change the basic concept that we saw four years ago. One of the prominent supplements in the three is fighting with the waves of the enemy. It works so that during the conflict you get a certain number of moves before a new group of enemies is found in the field. If in a given number of moves you can defeat all existing enemies on the battlefield, then you get the choice - wait for the second wave or escape. Running is a safe option (it always works), and it is also more advantageous because the reward for fighting later wars is simply not worth the risk, since you can disable half of the team for one item in this way.

With a new wave attack system, players are penalized if the battle does not end in a certain number of moves.

The struggle is essentially completely solid when some new characters and their specific abilities are inserted into the mix. For example, the character of Juno's sorceress is actually immortal, and a player through a strategic energy gathering in another dimension helps her to rise as a result of defeat. A new layer of individualization of characters was added through heroic titles. There are 19 titles that can increase certain character stats through five levels, with each character having only one title after the 11th level. The titles themselves always give passive bonuses so that they do not have a visible impact on how a concrete battle takes place.



Outside the battlefield, there is still a system of management of the army, morals and resources for survival. I'm not sure if this is because the third part is shorter than the rest, but this system was so handicapped that I did not see his point to the very end. It was only in the last two chapters that it became clear what all this served, and by that time, it was not a difficult decision for me. I always thought there were good and bad decisions, but I would not particularly suffer because of one because that gameplay is running on the old "on the bridge you get, you lose on the brim."

I always thought there were good and bad decisions, but I would not particularly suffer for either one.

When I'm already losing, I have to mention that I have lost a bit of nerves with the PC version of this game. For some reason I did not have a single start without crashing or cramming in endless loading. It is a bit of anxiety that crashing and lurking always took place on loading, not during the gameplay itself (which means that my progress was always saved). I do not know what the situation is on the consoles, but on the PC count that in ten of the game launch I had the same decay.



All in all, the Banner Saga 3 definitely feels bustling through technical difficulties, mostly lacking innovation and experimentation. Also, in the third Banner Saga, certain segments of the story are suffering because it could not be a bit longer because it would require higher investments and a budget that the developer did not have. The finish line is therefore a little quicker, although this does not mean that anything less emotional or less cost-effective. The goal was to finish this story anyway - whatever it turned out - primarily because of the players who enjoyed the first two. In some other circumstances, the Banner Saga 3 could raise the entire series to a higher level, but in the end, it only went to the final forgiveness.