A beautifully animated story-driven strategy game. The first of a trilogy.

Story is pretty good, albeit predictable, and the start not being that engaging until you get introduced to Rook and Alette. Through the game, you follow two separate groups, Vognir's and Rook's, each with their own caravan you have to manage. Each day costs you resources and morale, and random encounters can cost both resources but also your soldier's and clansmen's life. The game is filled with weighty choices, and some of them heavily impact the story, since the choices you made in the first game also carry over to the next one. Gameplay is pretty bare-bones, reminiscent of the Shadowrun games, but simpler. It's decent, and it had some intense battles, but I realized the game actually punishes you for killing enemies. An immersion killer, in my opinion. I wonder if it was an intentional choice, even. You'd think killing enemies as fast as possible sounds logical, but I guess not. The music is good, but most importantly the art style is FANTASTIC, clearly inspired by classic Disney movies. It really carries the game, sometimes I stopped just to admire it. Probably one of the prettiest animation styles I've seen in a video game.

Gameplay might not be much, but I think it's worth trying for the story and visuals alone. I'll probably go straight to the next one. I'm between a 6 and a 7, rating might change after playing the trilogy.

★★★ – Good ✅

Edit: From a 7 to a 6.

This is like someone, somewhere said, "Okay, Oregon Trail is a fantastic game that you can't improve on...... but what if you were Vikings?? I played through this game in 2016, but wanted to revisit it this year so I could have an excuse to play 2 and 3. It remains delightful and flawed all at the same time.

You and your little caravan make your way across a (huge) map, bound for story beat points to progress, ostensibly to flee a scourge of Dredge and mount some sort of defensive front. The map is massive, full of clickable features and points that all have their own little bit of lore written in, if you take a minute to look around. As you progress, there's a combination of written-in events that have lasting consequences as well as randomly generated events that affect things like morale, food, items, etc. You also trigger battles along the way, which take place in a tactical RPG-esque field with squares, movement points, etc. It's basically games you've seen before in a Nordic/Viking wrapper.

The good points are many. The art style is fantastic. I'm not sure I've seen another game that has the same look and feel as The Banner Saga, honestly. The backgrounds are simple and elegant, without feeling too sparse, and the animated character designs are superb. The music, too, is fantastic, and really sets the mood for whatever is going on at the time. I also felt really connected with the characters, and really tried to put myself in their shoes to make the really important, game-hinging decisions along the way.

My only true complaint about the game is the weird difficulty spike at the end. I played on normal difficulty and, aside from myriad injuries along the way didn't really have trouble making it through the fights. I leveled up my characters, tried to give them useful stats, and mostly felt like I was doing what I should to prepare for the ending of the game. Turns out I had specced entirely wrong, was woefully unprepared for the ending battle(s), and ended up having to drop the difficulty to easy to avoid replaying the entire thing again. Because it's a linear game, there's no grinding or seeking out additional fights at the end to correct poorly placed stat points, and you basically have to take the ending as it comes. The difficulty spike was incredible, and even after doing some research on teh Googlez, I noted many people expressing similar frustrations about the end fight sequence.

Still, this was a delightful game, and I'm really looking forward to my playthroughs of 2 and 3 now.