Post Script
How The Banner Saga makes a virtue of its unfairness (contains spoilers)
Comparisons between The Banner Saga and Fire Emblem aren’t far wide of the mark. You start with a small band of heroes, steadily accumulating more on your travels, knowing all the while that there’s a strong chance some of them won’t make it to the closing credits. It stings to lose a unit in either game. Yet in Fire Emblem, barring the occasional unfortunate dice roll, any loss is always your own fault. In Stoic’s series, you can be left without a valued fighter by a decision you took outside battle with no way of knowing the outcome. It sounds grotesquely unfair, and at times it certainly feels that way. And yet the game simply shrugs and invites you to accept it. And, somehow, it works.
It’s partly a matter of consistency. At the end of the first game you face a choice that means losing one of your two leads. Whether you choose Rook or his daughter Alette to fire the arrow to defeat the Dredge demi-god Bellower, they’re subsequently killed. At which point, if Stoic hadn’t already made it obvious, just about anyone is fair game for the developer’s axe.
This sends a clear message to the player: don’t get too attached to anyone. Sure, you’re supposed to care about these characters up to a point, but with the threat of death hanging above everyone, it pays not to invest too much in individual units. It’s a way for Stoic to ensure you don’t simply end up with two or three hugely overpowered characters that rout the enemy on their own. For the sake of good balance on the battlefield, it’s something of a necessary evil.
And the new wave-based skirmishes introduced in The Banner Saga 3 are the perfect way to build up anyone you’ve left benched for a while. Chances are, after the first wave, you’ll have one or two units down and out, or at least weakened sufficiently to require a substitute to start warming up. You might well find your bard suddenly becoming a first-team regular, their ability to champion heroes and insult the opposition making a bigger difference than you thought. Or you can simply give the weak links the spoils of battle – assuming they’ve reached the required level, of course – to give them a fighting chance. Besides, given that the stakes have been raised for this final chapter, and losses are more frequent, you’re going to have to rely on a larger pool of units anyway.
This all makes sense from a narrative standpoint, too. If you’ve chosen to ignore Stoic’s warnings, and maxed out the stats of one or two units, it hurts all the more when they’re no longer available. Take Nid, for example, our deadliest archer for the better part of two games. We’ve promoted her ahead of anyone else, her accuracy earning her dozens of kills, letting us max out most of her stats. So when she suddenly decides she’s had enough of all this death, taking her chances away from the caravan, we feel somewhat winded.
Likewise when, after deciding Folka hasn’t steered us far wrong, we trust her judgement one too many times, and suddenly our level 15, dredge-obliterating shieldmaiden is no more. Shortly afterwards, when scenarios within Arberrang leave us close to losing both Tryggvi and Bak, we begin to wonder if Stoic isn’t deliberately targeting our favourite units, with the cannon fodder left annoyingly untouched.
The fact that you care enough either way is to the developer’s significant credit. Through its storytelling and its systems, The Banner Saga has established a large cast of characters who all have a role to play, no matter how small. As the bard Aleo says, “The true hero comes reluctantly.” So it often proves here. Amid all that bleakness, there is something genuinely heartwarming about an underdog suddenly finding its bark: a touching moment of defiance in the face of impending disaster.