The Banner Saga 2 picks up soon after the climactic events of the first game, and it expects you to remember what you did there. Stoic’s sequel, published by Versus Evil, carries your choices forward: who lived, who died, and what that costs you now. It is the second part of a trilogy, and it plays like one — bigger fights, more moving parts, and a story that assumes you are invested.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
The Horseborn Arrive
The Banner Saga 2 builds on the turn-based combat of the original rather than replacing it. Stoic added new units, new talents, new enemies, interactive objects and new objectives. The headline addition is the Horseborn, a centaur-like race that joins a roster already stocked with returning heroes from the first game.
Choices carry weight in both directions. What you decided in The Banner Saga determines who is still standing in The Banner Saga 2, and the sequel widens the range and scope of decisions open to you — in combat and across the narrative. Several heroes from the original return as playable characters.
That expansion answers a real complaint. In a 2015 interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Stoic writer Drew McGee said players often knocked the first game’s combat for being slow and short on variety. The team responded by putting new enemies and enemy types first, handing them new abilities and buffs and adding more win scenarios and variations in combat.
The choices you made in the first game will affect who is alive and who is dead in this exciting sequel.
The fix is the right one. More enemy types and more win conditions do more for a tactics game than any single new unit, because they change how you think about a board rather than just what you place on it.
A Trilogy With an Ending in Sight
The Banner Saga 2 arrived in 2016 on PlayStation 4, Android, PC, iOS, Mac and Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch version later. It is a tactical role-playing game with strategy, simulation and adventure in its bones, played from a side view in single player, set in a fantasy world with historical themes.
The trilogy’s future was settled by its audience. A crowdfunding campaign for the third game concluded on March 7, 2017, with 8,086 backers raising $416,986 of its $200,000 goal. The Banner Saga 3, which concludes the trilogy, was released in July 2018.
What the Middle Chapter Costs
| Release | Platform |
|---|---|
| 2016 | PlayStation 4, Android, PC, iOS, Mac, Xbox One |
| Later | Nintendo Switch |
| July 2018 | The Banner Saga 3 |
Middle chapters have a structural problem: they inherit consequences without getting to resolve them. The Banner Saga 2 handles that better than most, because its carryover system makes the inherited mess feel like yours. The Horseborn and the wider choice set are welcome, but the returning cast and the weight of old decisions are what hold the thing together.
The combat still has slow patches. Adding enemy variety does not erase the deliberate pace Stoic built into the first game, and players who bounced off that pace will find familiar friction here. What has changed is the number of ways a fight can end, and that matters more than raw speed.
The Banner Saga 2 is a sequel that improves the right things and leaves the rest alone. The series as a whole is award winning and BAFTA nominated, and the craft shows here in how cleanly the second chapter carries a save file’s worth of grief into a new campaign.
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