What are you playing right now?

[Cespenar]

Just finished the Banner Saga 3. Overall, I think the games are good, but there are a few major niggles that annoyed me somewhat:

1) The combat is neither deep nor interesting enough to be satisfying when you play all three games back to back--it's OK for a few hours, but not for the roughly 15-20 it takes to do all three. This is particularly so in the penultimate chapter, which seems to have more battles than the rest of the game put together!

2) The story concentrates too much on the macro while ignoring the micro. It doesn't give you enough reasons to care about the characters. True, there are a *lot* of characters here, but one of my main heroes dying should do more than just annoy me because of the wasted resources that went into building that character! It doesn't help that all character portraits always have the same expression, so the text at the bottom can be telling you that the person in the picture is spitting feathers, but their face has the same neutral expression they have at any other time...

3) While it may be true to life that you can't really tell ahead of time what's a good decision or not, it doesn't stop it being irritating when a seemingly innocuous statement in a conversation results in a third of your roster deserting!

Overall, they're still good games and the story is excellent, I'd really like to see more developed games set in this world.

I agree in the general sense, though my experience might have been a tad different:

1) I think the combat was among the interesting ones in the genre, but the pacing is definitely not meant for a full 3 game playthrough. When played in the "default" 8 hour intervals with some months (or year?) thrown between, it holds its magic better, I've found.

2) Partial agree. I don't think the game is bad in creating memorable characters. It's just that there are so many of them. It's like Game of Thrones. Since pacing has to be a thing, most secondary characters often have one or two moments in the spotlight, and then recede to be part of the background.

In general, though, I enjoyed the characters. I agree though that at least the main characters could have used a couple more expressions.

3) That, as we spoke earlier, I agree on. In a game of a certain style, that sort of vague options could be made to work, but here, when the focus seems to be on making the hard choices, the choices at least need to be clear enough for you to take the full responsibility of.