The Banner Saga 3

« The moving, fitting climax of a true epic. The Banner Saga took four years to complete and is living proof of what a strong vision, flawless artistic direction and well-tuned game mechanics can achieve when working in perfect synergy. If the screenshots speak to you, you will find here a game that is truly in a league of its own. »

« In the end you experience emotional exhaustion, relief and light sadness at the same time. This is normal when you complete any great journey, even if it has happened in a video game. »

« This is a tight trilogy with so few slow parts that I could barely tell I had sunk 13 hours into the third episode by the time I was finished with it. I could easily see myself returning to the series at episode one just to experience the story from an entirely new perspective. If you've played the first two games, I have to wonder why you're reading this. Quickly, save the world from the dark! Or you know, some other choice betwixt saving the world and desolation. »

« Like closing the final chapter on a thousand-page-long fantasy novel, The Banner Saga 3 delivers a dark and thrilling conclusion to remember. »

« Basically, it’s George R. R. Martin rules here. The stakes are stupidly high and no character is safe. You may be paying for a full front-row seat to watch one of the most well-realised worlds since the original Mass Effect trilogy, but you’ll only ever need the edge of your chair. »

« A daring, exciting and bleakly powerful payoff that handsomely rewards your investment in its characters. »

« One of the best tactical and adventure saga comes to an end bringing to the table the usual stellar production values in narrative, choices and tactical battles. A must have, and play. »

« The trilogy reaches its eventful climax. If you like tactical roleplaying games it doesn’t get much better than with this epic entertainment. »

« Otima Trama com 2d lindo , porem com limitacoes em mecanicas do combate tatico, limitacoes em dublagens e animacoes.....otimo indie...porem com limitacoes provavelmente associadas a orçamente »

« Satisfyingly concludes the saga while keeping the same standard of tough gameplay and gorgeous artwork. »

« It’s difficult to make a game where “your choices truly matter” - and Banner Saga does not claim every choice matters, because they don’t - but it’s very good at giving players that illusion so that they‘ll inherently put more thought into their choices when major decisions roll around in the story. Sometimes, these choices can be frustrating because they seemingly can have no logical link between your choice and the outcome, so at times it’s easy to become overwhelmed with a frustrated paranoia that comes from a game trolling you instead of the actual tension in the game itself. This happens often enough to be frustrating and immersion breaking, especially when it results in character deaths. Banner Saga 1 was especially guilty of this - being a field medic shouldn’t result in a member of the caravan randomly dying off screen, that doesn’t make sense. By Banner Saga 3, there’s fewer of these moments but they can still stand out when they do happen. There is also a pivotal moment in the game where all of your choices are tallied up and taken into account and it results in a last third of the game that has a markedly different structure and can result in some great tension but also some incredibly awkward moments where you might be ripped away from an important story beat just because a timer went out. And ultimately, your most important choices are taken into account at the very end of the game which determines which ending you get and this is where the links become slightly arbitrary and it can make your choices and their outcomes feel more like a lottery than something you actually intended. Story-wise, the games are at their best when they’re being character-driven and when there’s an overwhelming sense of mystery as to why all of this is happening. The third game takes a couple of 5 minute conversations to essentially lore-dump all of its crucial revelations around the last third mark. It’s so significant that it completely reframes the reasons for why anything in these games have been happening at all and I definitely feel like players who knew some of these elements would have made radically different decisions as a result. It doesn’t hit like a personal, “I’m a monster” moment, it ends up just being frustrating. For example, groups like the Valka get dramatically fleshed out and their abilities get spelled out in excruciating detail that pretty much takes most of the mystery out of these wizards. This could have been avoided if the games had taken more time to pepper these revelations throughout the story, rather than just dump them in during the last third of the third game. It comes across as either Stoic themselves hadn’t figured all this stuff out or they were going to keep this all a mystery but perhaps the ending became too ambiguous and open to interpretation. It’s just frustrating that it takes most of three games to get basic context for why there’s a literal uroboros trying to eat the world and what’s the deal with Juno and Eyvind besides, “It’s the power of love.” Plus, Bolwerk becoming Bellower always felt like a strange plot-line, especially because it’s never clear as to how much of his decisions are Bolwerk himself or just a result of Juno’s magic. It ultimately felt like a cheap way to use him as a final boss. Nevermind the fact that there’s an ancient prophecy created by the gods, and as to what has actually happened to the gods and what the Menders did to the Dredge. This takes too long to be brought to light and it doesn’t raise the stakes when it is, I just ended up thinking about all the decisions I would’ve handled differently. Fair enough if it’s a lesson in hindsight, but this is a videogame and it felt like a cheap way to get me do a second playthrough. Gameplay-wise, aside from the repetition and the fact that the third game has the worst enemy variety, it’s disappointing how the third game handles your Banner Saga 2 import. In the second game, your characters from the first game are preserved exactly as they were at the end, your decisions mattered. But come the third game, all of your characters (that weren’t already) are all set to level 8 and it feels like a cop-out. The game basically rewarded the players who didn’t manage their party properly and made poor stat investments; and the players that played well keep their characters anyway. So if this was done in the name of balance then I genuinely don’t understand how or why. Sure it could have been a way for keeping low level characters relevant, but if I didn’t like a character, I was not going to use them - especially when Banner Saga 2 simply throws new characters at you. Plus, it comes across as an attempt to pad out battles because now the enemy comes in waves and you have to deploy your party accordingly. This would’ve been fine in a stand-alone game, but it’s not fine when there were important mechanical decisions that I made to get here. Simply, in Banner Saga, your choices do matter, until they just don’t. »

« La tercera parte de una trilogía estupenda, la verdad, este es un poco más flojo que sus antecesores. Pienso que el primero es brutal porque fue la novedad y el dos, le añadió mejoras que lo hicieron estupendo, pero este ya estaba un poco desgastada la fórmula y no me gustó tanto. Aun así, es un buen juego y entretiene, buena banda sonora, buen argumento, animaciones únicas y un apartado artístico de primera.¡ RECOMENDADÍSIMO ! »

« such artI just wanted look at the art,bought this game soley to enjoy the artwork in all the 3 gamesthe turn based RTS is superb »

« after the 2 the three is verry great and also the last chapter of the banner saga »

« This franchise is abandoned. I cannot recommend this to anyone if playing on steam. This one is full of bugs to the point it's unplayable. Game crash, Game save lost, UI being bugged, character soft locked. People seemed to have been pointing out these issues since release, but devs went on with their days by just typing acknowledgement and never fixing the issues. UI bugs seems to apply to some characters who are under leveled compared to the saves given by default. To be more clear, if you have a save from Banner Saga 2 and the character has movement/attack range of 3 while default save character have 4, it will show the movement capability as 4 while only having the ability to move 3. This is a deal breaker in these type of games where you need to plan ahead to fight enemies. »

« The Banner Saga Three weaves a grand finale, but struggles to tie up loose ends. Seen in context with the prior two installments, it seems to me that the Banner Saga is less a series of three games and more one game chopped up into three parts. While it’s true that all three games find a definite climax to end on, in every aspect but the story, the Banner Saga games are almost identical. That isn’t a bad thing when it comes to the production values: The art is its evocative self, switching between the haunting woodcut-like rendering of the lands and detailed and expressive depictions of the characters during combat and conversation, the former sporting impressive animations, the latter owing a lot to the style of the hand-drawn early disney movies. The music beguiles with haunting horns and overall excellence. The dialogue is sharp and yet relatable, which is a hard needle to thread. Less welcome is the lack of evolution of the game systems. There are a few more options for character growth, but in the end those just add additional options to increase the very same attributes and hit chances. There is a new class of enemy, but they basically behave the same as the other enemies. The involved numbers become greater, but the game experience stays the same. Especially now that all three installments are easily accessible, it really feels like the Banner Saga is one whole. So is it worth sticking around through the whole saga? That question hinges on the story sticking the landing. Has the landing stuck? Mostly yes in my opinion. The End of the World is addressed, how well is dependent on your performance and decisions. The great mystery of how the Apocalypse started is explained. I’m not exactly happy with a few of the turns the story takes, but overall, the finale is well worth witnessing. Only… a few of the crucial details of the plot remain frustratingly vague, and not in an intentional way. To me it feels like the writers had lost sight of these details at some point. It’s a bit of a shame, because some of these details were very intriguing. Especially the last race entering the ranks of playable characters remains quite underdeveloped. Still, if you have made it this far, you’ll want to get to the end, to see all the sights the saga has to show you. They are well worth the modest time investment the game asks of you. TLDR: If you’ve played and enjoyed the first and second Banner Saga, you owe it to yourself to experience the finale. Everybody else should start at the beginning or walk away. »