The Banner Saga 3 Reviews
A daring, exciting and bleakly powerful payoff that handsomely rewards your investment in its characters.
Stately, vivid and tragic, this brooding epic finally reaches its climax.
The Banner Saga 3 offers the darkest entry yet in this beautifully animated tactical RPG trilogy. Choices matter and come fast and furious, making this journey a thrilling roller coaster from the opening moments to the ending credits. Combat can be a bit of a chore once you find your footing, and the story ends all too quickly, but The Banner Saga 3 is a rich and powerful experience and a worthy end to a breakout trilogy.
Not a good standalone game but a fine ending to the trilogy, that manages to make three games feel like one.
This concluding chapter is uneven due to breakneck pacing and minimal characterization, but it's ultimately a satisfying finale that remains true to the melancholy soul of the series
Smart adjustments to mechanics make the act of playing the Banner Saga series finale feel as suspenseful as the story it tells.
The story I ended up with, with its highs and lows, felt like my story, forged by the calls I made in the stress of battle, and I own them. For better or worse.
“Nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired” perfectly sums up this final entry in The Banner Saga series. Our fleeting time in this world has never been a happy one, and everyone is all the more weary at the end of it. We've had plenty of memorable moments with various characters along the way, but it's in this entry that the entire journey falls into a bloody maelstrom, as the game steams full throttle towards its brutal conclusion with unfortunately barely a thought to spare for its characters.
Alas, main characters sometimes receiving a single line of dialogue to describe their end, if anything at all, is what makes The Banner Saga so unique. Life is fleeting, as it is for the hundreds of clansmen I lost throughout the past four years, as it is for my characters who wandered off and never returned, and as it is for the ultimate conclusion to The Banner Saga.
The Banner Saga 3 closes the book on an incredible saga of turn-based action and dark, haunting storytelling. It's hard to make player choices and branching narratives successfully payoff over the course of three games, but Stoic Studios have done just that. It's a shame that they never tried to revamp or update the sluggish combat speed along the way, but that's a small price to pay for a once in a lifetime narrative experience like this.
The Banner Saga 3 closes the epic journey created by Stoic. However, its condition of being the ending makes the game a constant rush and, in the end, the decisions and climaxes lose their purpose.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
A fitting end to the trilogy, and fans of the series so far will not be disappointed with the new gameplay features or the excellent storytelling.
Despite some gripes about the translation from PC to console, The Banner Saga 3 does an admirable job wrapping up a grim tale of separation and loss. And it does that with challenging and fun tactical battles as well as fascinating player choice throughout.
If you've played the first two, The Banner Saga 3 is impossible to ignore. In this final chapter, everything is broken and mended and broken again. I was never sure if there would be--or even could be--any kind of happily ever after to this massive mythology Stoic Studios has built.
A fittingly bombastic end to one of the best tactical RPG series on PS4, The Banner Saga 3 closes the book on a trilogy that fans of strategy and epic, sprawling stories should embrace immediately.
The Banner Saga 3 wraps up its six-years-in-the-making epic in poignant, gripping style. The game's tactical battles still have some issues, but their rough edges have been sanded down to the point they no longer detract from the game's stellar writing. The Banner Saga 3 deserves to be held high as a prime example of both video game storytelling and a crowdfunded project done right.
The Banner Saga 3 is a fantastic tactical role-playing game that confidently concludes the overarching storyline of the series in a manner entirely befitting with what has come before. Little has changed on the combat front - although this game does perhaps feel a mite easier than first two Banner Saga titles - but it's the storytelling where the release truly excels. The stakes are high, and after two and a half games spent getting to know dozens of wildly different characters, watching their fates unfold during the superb finale can be both exhilarating and soul-destroying.
The Banner Saga 3 is a proud continuation of the games that came before it.
The Banner Saga 3 doesn't offer real innovations or unexpected elements, but, nevertheless, it's a great concluding of an interesting and thoughtful tactical RPG series that will please all fans of dramatic fantasy stories.
Review in Russian | Read full review