The Banner Saga - Cannibal Caravan

The Banner Saga, according to the developers, is Oregon Trail meets Fire Emblem. The game has you walking around with your caravan. You are the leader and you travel from one place to another. Although the main storyline doesn't change much, almost all the events are randomized. You don't know what is going to happen and you are often biting your nails thinking what you should do in this situation. This is a time of war, the naive will end up being stabbed over and over in the back until they learn. I did. At the start I was helpful and shared my supplies with suffering people. After I get to the later parts of the game where food becomes scarce, people stab me in the back, rob my caravan, kill my people, and people starving everyday. I learned quickly to start accepting bribes, to take what I want, to look out for my own caravan first, and ignore people begging for help. I don't have food to spare anymore.

People dying can be the most brutal. Heroes you train up and level up and even gear with items, they could fall off a cliff, they could get stabbed in the back, or they could just leave if they don't agree with your decisions. You will never get them back, you might lose your most leveled hero, and you don't get the items you lost. They disappear from the storyline too so it starts becoming more and more empty. However, some people might join you depending on your choices. Its pretty hard to tell which decision is the best and you will always end up regretting your decision. However, people in your caravan will often die and/or leave. If you run out of food, a portion of your caravan starts dying every day and the rest sort of cannibalize them so you can keep living (that is what I assume at least. How else do they survive another day.) The number of people in your caravan decides the outcome of a war. If you have higher numbers the enemies are easier, if they're lower the enemies are stronger. You can charge in to fight stronger enemies to save more lives from your caravan, or you can stay back and fight weaker enemies at the cost of sacrificing more lives.

The art and the animation is gorgeous. Its part of the reason I wanted to try this game in the first place. The story and the random event elements are also entertaining. However there are a few problems with the game and most of them is in the combat system. Its a tactical TBS combat but every turn you alternate between you and your enemy. This is a very big problem because, if there is a big threat on the battlefield and it has a really high armour and strength pool, you can't kill it fast enough you'll decide to kill off the small guys around it first. WRONG. If you do that you will die because the big guy is moving more often now and will one shot your heroes one by one. In this game the stats are armour which will reduce damage taken, and strength which is equal to your health and your damage. If you are low on strength you will deal less damage. If their armour is too high you won't be able to hit through to their strength and you have to choose to break their armour first. So the strategy here is to leave everything on low health, then kill the big guy, then go back and kill the small guys. This is very tedious and stupid. You are penalized for killing enemies.

After winning battles you will get renown points for everything you kill. Heroes who score the last hit will get exp. You use that exp along with renown to promote them. Each promotion gets you more stat points, allows higher level items to be worn and may level up your skills depending on the level. You can customize where you want to put your stats. However another big problem occurs. You have to purchase food with renown points. Why? I don't have a clue but you do. Eventually your caravan will be starving if you spend all your renown on promotions. That or you feed your caravan and your heroes suffer from lack of levels. Its a lose lose situation here.

Another thing I have to point out is the lack of representation of women in the game. Its all about men, talking with other men, fighting with men against other men. The only women I've seen so far is your daughter and Oddleif, the wife of the chieftain, whose husband gets killed about 5 minutes of meeting him so you take over the spot of leader for the caravan. She won't lead the caravan because, "She's a woman. People won't follow a woman chieftain and other groups would attack them because their chieftain is a woman." Well that sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation! No it isn't. Later on she asks if its ok to train some of the women who want to in archery. If you agree then the men in the caravan starts getting uppity saying they won't want to fight alongside their wives, sisters, daughters. I did get a response from the developer about this.

There will be more women in the next game. It was actually more a limitation of money more than anything- each new class was fairly expensive to create, but I feel like we did as much as we could to represent them well.

I was thinking more about how women could be included into the storyline. Instead of just men flexing at each other proving to each other who has the bigger penis. But that brings me to another point. All the classes in the game except one are male. The only class women can be are archers.

If you like a beautifully animated Tactical RPG with random elements that screw you over at every point possible. This is the game for you. There are some flaws, but the game itself is enjoyable despite those flaws. The flaws are pretty big but its all contained in the combat itself. If you really hate it you could turn down the difficulty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIH0vS9AG4