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It’s stressful, but crucial to the story Banner Saga wants to tell and the emotion it intends to make you feel, and it succeeds at this almost perfectly. The choices presented before you become agonizing decisions that often decides who lives and dies, leaving me paralyzed as I hoped I’d made the right call.
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With how constant the possibility of death becomes, I was invested not only in each character’s narrative but also in fighting to keep them alive as best I could. The tension of the narrative - the abundant despair and sacrifice every step of the way - rejects the overly cautious writing far too often substituted in for more disruptive outcomes, and makes the characters you travel with people you care and worry about. It’s bleak and unrelenting in its showcasing of how dire a place the world has become, as you embark on a caravan fleeing to anywhere not already destroyed, many not living to see the journey’s end. The Sun has stopped moving, the gods are dead, and the return of an enemy thought extent threaten to annihilate those few who still survive. The Banner Saga is quite simply the telling of the end of days. It wrapped me up so tightly in its intrigue that even when its problems surfaced they could do little to take me out of the experience, the only real issue then being that said experience unfortunately only has enough time to tell part of its story. In a medium so over saturated with derivative fantasy, the distinctiveness of the world Banner Saga creates pulled me in eagerly awaiting even the most trivial of pieces of exposition. It paints a picture so lavish and compelling that it's almost irritatingly compelling with each new thread it introduces, so rich that you want to spend time learning about every character and piece of lore but haven’t the time to do so. The Banner Saga’s awe inspiring scope is both its biggest strength and weakness.