The Banner Saga 3

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.

Smart adjustments to mechanics make the act of playing the Banner Saga series finale feel as suspenseful as the story it tells.

Stately, vivid and tragic, this brooding epic finally reaches its climax.

A daring, exciting and bleakly powerful payoff that handsomely rewards your investment in its characters.

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

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 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.

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.

From the beginning, this series has very much been about the journey to the destination in both a literal and figurative sense, and now we've arrived at the end, it's clear that this was the strongest point all along. The development of characters and the gradual progression of the story naturally have less emphasis this time around, as this is the end of the saga, but what you do get is multiple endings with fitting outcomes. Now all that's left is for you to decide whether or not this game and series are for you, much like the many choices present within the games themselves.

Stoic's final game in The Banner Saga Trilogy is finally here, and for those that have followed these characters' stories for the first two games, The Banner Saga 3 will finally offer some closure.