The Banner Saga 2 Review
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Introduction
The Banner Saga 2 is a tactical role-playing game from Texas-based Stoic Studio. It's the sequel to 2014's The Banner Saga, and it continues the story started by that first game. The Banner Saga 2 was released in 2016, but I recently took a look at it while preparing for The Banner Saga 3.
In The Banner Saga, you managed a ragtag group of survivors as they made their way from the human lands to the capital of the varl (giant, horned humanoids), fighting creatures called dredge all along the way. In The Banner Saga 2, with the varl is disarray due to the events from the first game, you head back towards the human lands hoping for better results.
If you have a save from the first game, then you can import it into the sequel and continue your story directly. For this case, your characters, their levels, their equipment, and their kill counts carry over. But if you don't have a save, then you have to choose which character between Rook and Alette survived the first game, and you end up with a standard party that made "canon" decisions. Importing, obviously, is much better.
Characters
Unlike most role-playing games, in The Banner Saga 2 (just like in The Banner Saga) you don't create your own character. You simply make decisions for the main characters in the story. If you like analogies, then it's sort of like if you're playing a Lord of the Rings game with Frodo as your main character. The One Ring gets destroyed at the end no matter what, but maybe you don't take Merry and Pippin with you, or maybe you send Gimli on a suicide mission and he gets killed by orcs.
Still, you get to develop the characters who travel with you. Each character is defined by five attributes: strength (which doubles as damage and health), armor (which protects against damage), break (which allows the damaging of armor), willpower (which powers abilities and exertion), and exertion (the amount of willpower characters can add for extra strength or break damage).
Characters also have passive and active abilities based on their class. These can be things like Stone Wall (which gives the character damage resistance), Tempest (which allows the character to hit multiple enemies), and Bloody Flail (which allows the character to hit an enemy four or more times, and deal strength or break damage each time). For most of the game, you have a crowd of characters following you, but you can only take six into battle with you at once, which means you have to make some tough decisions about which abilities (and characters) you find the most useful.
When characters earn enough kills to gain a level, you have to spend renown points for their advancement. Renown is mostly gained from winning battles, but you can also get some from events and achievements. Interestingly, renown is the game's only currency, and it's also required for purchasing supplies and equipment, so you have to be judicious with its use.
When characters gain a level, they receive 2 points for improvements. In The Banner Saga, characters could only reach level 5, and you could only spend these improvement points on their attributes. But in The Banner Saga 2, characters can reach level 10, and rather than let attribute scores get out of hand (which would make it too easy to one-shot weak characters), Stoic Studio added talents. Talents are passive abilities that characters can learn if they max out an attribute. For example, when characters max out strength, they can choose between Robust (which gives them a chance to resist strength damage) and Artery Strike (which increases their critical chance). So talents give you lots of new options for how to develop your characters.
Characters also get to wear a single piece of equipment. These items have level restrictions, where -- just like you'd guess - the higher the item's level, the more powerful it is. Items can improve attributes or talents, give resistances, add or remove aggro, and more, so they're just as important as every other part of a character's development, and they mean you have to hold some renown points back just in case you find something good for sale.
Finally, The Banner Saga 2 includes some new things for characters over the original game. When characters reach level 6, they gain access to a new active ability, which gives them more options in combat. Unfortunately, these abilities are almost all recycled from other classes (and the original game), so they're not as exciting as they might be. Stoic Studio also added in some new classes and character types, including poets, spear-toting kragsmen, and centaur-like horseborn. Poets might be the most interesting because they're utility characters. They can do useful things like add willpower to your party when they're close enough to a character who makes a kill, but they don't add much in the way of offense themselves.
Campaign
The campaign in The Banner Saga 2 works much like the campaign from The Banner Saga. That is, you manage your group of survivors, making sure everybody stays in good spirits and has enough to eat; you fight enemies (mostly) when they attack you and you don't have any choice; and you make decisions, sometimes important and sometimes not, during numerous story-related events. I'll cover each of these areas in turn.
Managing your survivors is much easier in The Banner Saga 2 than it was in the original game. In both games, you have clansmen, fighters and varl under your banner, but while in The Banner Saga clansmen didn't do anything (other than eat your food), in The Banner Saga 2 they scavenge for supplies and keep your people fed. Also, while in The Banner Saga you fought many "war battles" against the dredge, which required having as many fighters and varl as possible, these battles are much rarer in The Banner Saga 2.
As a result, while you're allowed to convert your clansmen into fighters, this is almost never necessary, and because you can leave most of your people as clansmen, they're able to keep you flush with supplies. An abundance of supplies means you can spend your renown elsewhere, and it also means you can rest as often as you want, which keeps the morale of your people high. I had all sorts of trouble managing food and morale the first time I played The Banner Saga, but it was a complete non-issue in The Banner Saga 2.
Luckily, The Banner Saga 2's combat engine remains just as exciting as ever -- mostly because it didn't change much from the first game. When combat starts up, you have to pick up to six characters from your party to fight the battle. Your team of characters then alternates turns with the enemy, regardless of how many characters each side has. This lasts until one side or the other only has one character left, and then the game switches to "pillage mode," where all characters get one turn per round.
On each turn, a character is allowed to move and then attack or use an ability -- except for the new horseborn characters, who can move, attack, and then move again. Because of the alternating turns, you're better off leaving an enemy in a weakened state rather than killing it (so it uses up a turn but can't do much with it), and it's better to deal with a strong opponent first rather than last. That is, The Banner Saga 2 reverses a lot of the strategies that usually work in turn-based games, which makes it fun and intriguing to play.
Because of all of the characters and abilities available to you, you have lots of ways to deal with enemies. Just as one example, I tended to use a character named Egil who had the Stone Wall ability. He'd start out each battle by rushing over to the enemies and activating his skill (which allows him to resist damage), and because he also wore a +2 aggro item, enemies would waste their attacks on him while the rest of my party pelted them with ranged attacks. This ended up being a fairly "safe" strategy, because my characters didn't take much damage and thus rarely found themselves in any trouble.
If you use a less safe strategy, or if you just fight more aggressively, then your characters might take so much damage that they get knocked out. This leaves them with an injury, which takes a day or more of resting to heal. Since resting is also useful for increasing morale, you're likely to do it every so often anyway, which means a few mistakes here and there don't really cost you anything.
For winning a battle, you earn some renown, which you can use to advance the level of your characters. Characters can gain levels once they've killed enough enemies, so it's a good idea to spread the wealth around, and to make sure your defensive characters get a few kills, too, rather than having one high-damage "killer" character who does everything.
Stoic Studio also added a few new tweaks to combat. Previously, you could only use training tents to practice with different groups of characters and to test out abilities. But now the tents include challenges, where you have to use certain abilities in certain ways, and you win renown for beating them. Battle maps include obstacles, which have a few hit points and can protect your archers from damage -- for a round or two anyway. Characters have many more ways to score critical hits (via abilities and equipment), to the point where you can create critical hit builds. And unlike the first game, many of the battles in The Banner Saga 2 include special rules or winning conditions, so they're not all the same. A few examples include surviving while waves of enemies attack you, defeating a particular enemy to win the battle, and saving a particular enemy for last so you can capture it. The variety to the battles helps to keep them interesting.
The writing for the campaign is excellent. You might actually find yourself caring what happens to a few of the characters, and being intrigued by some of the choices you have to make. Unfortunately, because there are just so many characters -- which is good for battles but bad for storytelling -- more than a few of them fade into the background and don't have much of an impact on the game. This is especially true for the varl, who for some reason get short-shrifted. I'd say that the game would be better off with fewer characters, but Stoic Studio has sort of boxed themselves into a corner. They can't just drop characters who players have spent time and renown upgrading. That would just tick everybody off.
The writing comes into play as you travel around and events pop up. Sometimes these events are just simple conversations between your characters that don't really change anything, but other times they can earn you (or cost you) morale, earn you (or cost you) supplies, give you some renown, or start up a battle. As an example, during each chapter you pass by a godstone, which is essentially a really sophisticated altar for a god. So you might stop and acknowledge the god, which might cause something to good or bad to happen, or you might just walk on by, which might cause your clan to lose morale. There are a lot of mights in that previous sentence, but that's the sort of uncertainty you face when leading your clan.
As was the case in The Banner Saga, your decisions in The Banner Saga 2 give fairly arbitrary results, which one might argue makes them a good representation of real life. But sadly the results are fixed, so once you've played the game a couple of times and learned the "right" answers, you can guarantee good results for your clan. I think the game would be better if there was some randomness involved, which would make the events different each time, and the game more difficult to predict.
Finally, while the writing is excellent, not much actually happens during the campaign. A couple of secrets are exposed, and it becomes obvious that the dredge are fleeing from something just as much as you're fleeing from the dredge, but otherwise The Banner Saga 2 is just a travelogue. Heck, there are barely even any deaths, which littered the first game. I think Stoic could have done a little more to make The Banner Saga 2 stand up on its own, rather than leaving it as a simple bridge between the first game and the finale.
Survival Mode
Along with the campaign, The Banner Saga 2 also includes Survival Mode, which gives you a way to fight 40 consecutive battles without having to worry about dialogue, the plot, or supplies. That is, it's the mode for people who just like combat.
When you start Survival Mode, you pick out any six characters from the game to form your party. Then after each fight, you receive renown and an item, which allows you to do some upgrading. Any character who loses all of his strength in a battle is killed and lost for the rest of the mode, but other characters can be recruited for a minimal cost. If a battle goes really badly for you, then you're allowed a limited number of saves to try again, but once those saves are gone, you're stuck with whatever happens, which means there's no guarantee that you'll make it all the way to the end.
I'm the sort of player who's on the opposite side of Survival Mode. I like the combat fine, but without the story and character interaction, it's sort of boring for me. Plus, Stoic Studio changed some of the combat rules for Survival Mode, and I didn't understand why. For example, while the mode is still turn-based, the turns are timed, which seems like the opposite of what people buying s turn-based game would want. And instead of alternating turns, all characters get one turn per round, which takes away from the uniqueness of the combat engine. Why do things like that? I have no idea, and perhaps for that reason Survival Mode never really piqued my interest.
Conclusion
Overall, The Banner Saga 2 is a fine game. The combat is fun and interesting, the characters and situations are well written, and the game's cartoon style gives it a unique look. But story-wise almost nothing happens, and since stories are one of the main reasons I play games (and RPGs in particular), I was a little disappointed with the experience. Still, it's tough to rate the middle part of a trilogy before playing the finale, and maybe the minimal events in this game will pay off in a big way when the trilogy concludes in The Banner Saga 3.
