Do right by your people.
Nothing is harder than living with your choices.
If there's any lesson to be had in The Banner Saga 2, that's it right there. Small choices can bring a lot of pain, and there's enough careful writing that they manage to make it genuinely hurt when a simple number that says "Clansmen" goes down because of the decisions you had to make.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is the actual game? The Banner Saga 2, second in the Banner Saga trilogy, is an RPG that pushes heavily the weight of consequences. Given it's a sequel to a game that already leaned hard on choice and consequence, I don't want to spoil the details too hard, but here's what you need to know: It's a viking style world, the sun no longer falls so each day is ever light, and these...things called the dredge are hunting the forces of humanity.
The whole thing starts with you as the leader of a relatively small clan, made up of three major types: Families and the peaceful, warriors, and the giants of men known as the varl. They are under your leadership, your protection, and your authority. With safety hard to find, and stability even harder, you have to get them somewhere that can be a proper home, a sanctuary...And not everyone is going to make it.
The game is ultimately broken up into two broad sections, and I want to cover the non-combat first. Outside of combat, the game is largely menu driven and quite linear on the broad scope. You're on a journey that your characters know the path for, so progression is entirely automated. But throughout the travels, at many points, you'll have conversations or story events pop up, where you have to make decisions that decide what's going to happen to you and your people.
Sometimes, these are serious, high-stakes tasks. The river is blocked by an obvious trap of a barricade; do you force yourself through on your ships and risk losing vessels, pull to shore so your men can chop down the barricade (leaving you with fewer soldiers available when the inevitable attack comes), or carry the ships past on land?
And sometimes, it's smaller. The kids are getting bored and rambunctious. How are you going to keep spirits up and soldiers focused? I ended up putting the families with children all together on their own ships, on that one, giving the kids more of their fellows to play with and keeping them away from those that had to be ready to work and to fight.
It's the writing, here, that makes things sting. When an event leads to a lost ship, even though it just pops up with "-10 clansmen" or "-15 soldiers", what hurts, what really makes it feel like a punch to the gut, is all that work beforehand. Even when they're not full of named characters, it's people who trust you, people who've put their lives in your hands...And you let them slip through your fingers.
I really have to stress this. The artwork, the visuals in this game is all good and well stylized, but I've seen good looking, well stylized games before. The writing, though, and its use of interactivity in such a direct way to make even the smallest of decisions feel like they could mean everything changes? That, that right there, is a rare breed of superb. It's stellar, even.
Now let's talk about the combat engine. And this is a total shift from the narrative focused, freeflowing into decisions and events style that the other half of the game has. Here, it's raw hard tactics.
The combat in The Banner Saga 2 is built on a classic grid-based tactical RPG setup. You've got a party, everyone moves squares and attacks, characters have special abilities and equipment and levels, you've seen a lot of this core skeleton before in different games.
But that's not to say there's nothing interesting in the combat. One interesting trick that I haven't seen before, outside of this series, is in how it handles armor and health...Or rather, armor and strength. Every character in the battlefield has two meters, in blue and red respectively, for the two stats. Armor is straightforward enough, it reduces damage the more you have.
Strength is where things get a little more interesting. First, because strength is both health and damage. Not a mechanic we've never seen before, but not a super common one, either. Low strength, low damage, reduce the threat of an enemy. But on the flipside, armor is super super good when you have a lot of it. So there's this constant back and forth, a steady tension on how soon do you quit chopping off steel plate and start going for blood? How long can you afford to wait? It's a hard call at the best of times.
But speaking of hard, that does get into my one real problem with the game. Difficulty. Now, first, I do want to say that I suspect this is in part a "me" problem. I don't actually have the first Banner Saga game on my Switch, so I can't import a completed save file. And while at a glance I couldn't tell you how the default-stats compare to an endgame party, I have a pretty sneaking suspicion that I'm not getting near as much oomph as I would if I had that import.
Still, with the game as it stands on its own...Combat is hard. Really hard. And not even the fun kind. This is one of the first times I actually had to reduce a game down to Easy just to review it, because I was literally getting my entire crew slaughtered in the first non-scripted battle.
And I'll be the first to admit that balancing this kind of thing is really, really difficult. There's a reason that most games that let you import story events will still find some excuse to reset combat mechanic progression on every game, just to avoid this entire problem. But it's still a difficulty I had playing this game, as its own entity, so I've got to mention it.
That said...This is still an experience like few others. With the third game in the trilogy coming out very soon, now's a great time to get caught up. Yeah, sure, you should probably get the first game before this. But I can fully and heartily recommend jumping in, and seeing what the world of the Banner Saga can offer.