Various Thoughts

Ended up doing a second playthrough despite my previous feelings and even wrote a partial walkthrough along the way.

While I was apparently wrong about camp conversations being important, your choices during the game do in fact have a rather large impact on the journey. Not so much the ending though, which only has a few variations. It mainly seems to be how many party members you have access to and whether or not you get a perspective choice in the last chapter.

That’s still more variation than most RPGs can offer though and it’s definitely interesting to run through once or twice. I think I may have to give the Banner Saga a second chance.

When I first played the Banner Saga long ago I didn’t get very far; the combat’s armor system simply didn’t agree with me. This game, which in most ways mimics that one, initially caused a similar reaction due to the round-robin nature of the combat system (the armor system here is fine).

Fortunately, said system turned out to be easily abused. The trick is simply to use less characters. Preferably just 1-2 (though I ended up using 4 for most of Thorn’s section due to lack of foreknowledge), so that you get far more turns than the enemy and can pick them off essentially at will if the individual character is strong enough. Choosing characters with ranged attacks or buffing abilities to fill those slots (namely Warlock, Monk, Archer, or Assassin) makes it even easier. Taking advantage of the fact that ‘until end of turn’ effects actually last until the next time you use that character in order to kill entire squads with an Armor-buffed Retaliation combo is also an effective strategy.

With combat no longer an issue I was free to focus on the RPG/choice part of the game, which is incredibly massive. There are tons of choices to make (effectively irreversible choices thanks to the auto-save system, unless you want to completely re-do a Chapter) and these choices have actual consequences, ranging from losing access to various party members or characters to determining which of the apparently 7 endings you’ll get. It took me ~20 hours to finish this first playthrough and that was without ever using the world map’s Camp function, which I only realized far too late takes you to a special screen where you can talk with your party members rather than the normal party management screen. I suspect there would have been fewer storyline deaths had I talked to everyone at every stop (though I got an arguably good ending with the evil sealed, practically all the main supporting characters were dead).

I’m not sure I’ll ever play it again though because I really hate not knowing which choices will do what in order to plan out a route in advance and considering the scale it seems unlikely anyone will do an in-depth guide mapping out the various consequences.