History VideoGame / TheBannerSaga

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: Sure enough, glory in battle is important for Varl society.

* AnAxeToGrind: Rook has one as his melee weapon, with a bow for ranged attacks. Many other characters have one as well.

* HornedHumanoid: The Varl all have horns.

* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: All of the Varl, who love battle a lot.

* AntiArmor: Characters have a health and armor stat. You can attack armor instead of health, making it easier to damage their health. As pretty much all Dredge have heavy armor, this is essentially a requirement to do significant damage.

* OldSaveBonus: Saves from the first ''Banner Saga'' can be imported into ''[[VideoGame/TheBannerSaga2]]''.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: As a SRPG with multiple parties, naturally the game has a lot of characters.

** And then utterly subverted in 3, when it's revealed by Juno that [[spoiler:the Valka]] are indirectly responsible for their angry suicide rage against the other races: [[spoiler:At the climax of the second Great War, when the Varka learned that the Dredge's homeworld was powered by a miniature black sun that supercharged weaving, they went behind the alliance's back and forged a peace treaty with the Dredge, teaching them weaving and creating females for their race to reproduce in exchange for access to the black sun. Unfortunately, one of their number went rogue and attempted an unstable experiment with the black sun. It caused the mutant apocalypse, and the Dredge homeworld was ground zero. They think it was a genocidal first strike and are hellbent on getting revenge]].

* AnAxeToGrind: Rook has one as his melee weapon, with a bow for ranged attacks. Many other characters have a one-handed version.

* AssholeVictim: Rafnsvartr, a drunkard from Skorge, ends up this way one way or another. At first he's causing trouble with his drunkenness, but when he frightens the caravan with a drunken joke about seeing dredge, you either banish him from the caravan or some of your people take care of the problem themselves. As the narration says, if he disappears, nobody searches for him or even cares that he's gone.
* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: Sure enough, glory in battle is important for Varl society.

* DoomedHometown: Skogr, which is abandoned when it's attacked by the dredge.

* GuideDangIt:

* OldSaveBonus: Saves from the first ''Banner Saga'' can be imported into ''The Banner Saga 2''.

** Humans of Raider class can get the Grudge ability, doing strength damage and knockback to all enemies around them, and 1 point of damage for each tile they are knocked back. Naturally, the damage per tile ignores armour making the move viable even if the initial attack doesn't do much.

* TheBackwardsR: A mix of fake and real runes are used on the map to make it look Norse. The real runes are often misused, however, such as Ur (ᚢ) being used as an N and [[RandomlyReversedLetters Lögr (ᛚ) being reversed]]. This makes the text more readable without knowledge of Germanic runes than with it.

[[caption-width-right:350:Only the sun has stopped]]

* BadassBeard: It's a game about fantasy vikings. So, of course, a lot of them will have epic beards to go with their battle prowess.

* CrapsackWorld: The copious amounts of ilore paint a picture of a joyless world that is downright hostile to life in most places, and merely survivable at best. And now that world seems to be coming to an end, as the sun freezes in place in the sky and kingdoms of humans and Varl are being overrun by Dredge [[spoiler: who, it transpires, were [[InvadingRefugees driven out of their own lands by some yet-to-be-explained creeping shadow called "The Darkness" by those few in the know]]. Oh, and what appears to be the World Serpent is roaming about, casually destroying ''entire mountains'' and complaining it was supposed to destroy the world instead.]]

* AlienGenderConfusion: The stone-like Dredge have such incomprehensible biology compared to the setting's other, mammalian races that they initially assume every combatant they encounter is male. It's only when they realize some of them have children strapped to them that they realize the Dredge army comprises both sexes and are actually InvadingRefugees.

* ViolationOfCommonSense: [[FullHealthDamage Base damage is equal to hit points]], in an aversion of CriticalExistenceFailure. The turn system has each side alternate moving one unit at a time, in a fixed order, regardless of the difference in team size (so long as both have more than one alive). Consequently, the best combat strategy is wounding all enemy troops before killing any of them (except the ones with powerful ability not based on strength, [[ShootTheMageFirst which should be killed immediately]]) and suicidally throwing your injured into the fray.

* ViolationOfCommonSense: Base damage is equal to hit points, in an aversion of CriticalExistenceFailure. The turn system has each side alternate moving one unit at a time, in a fixed order, regardless of the difference in team size (so long as both have more than one alive). Consequently, the best combat strategy is wounding all enemy troops before killing any of them (except the ones with powerful ability not based on strength, [[ShootTheMageFirst which should be killed immediately]]) and suicidally throwing your injured into the fray.

* CriticalExistenceFailure: Averted for once, as the unit's strength, whether allied or hostile, is equal to their health. The more wounded they get, the less damage they'll be able to deal, generally making them nigh-useless at low health (barring special abilities and armor breaking).

* DyingRace: Unlike the humans, Varls were individually made by Hadrborg but the lack of females meant that they had no way to repopulate after the death of gods. [[spoiler: The destruction of Grofheim--their major population and political center--along with the apocalypse meant that the Varls in your party would most likely be the last of their race]].

[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/banner_saga.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:250:Only the sun has stopped]]

The game can be described as a mixture of [[WesternRPG Western RPGs]], [[StrategyRPG tactical RPGs]] and ''VideoGame/TheOregonTrail''. Although the focus is on RPG elements, the choices the player makes (including difficult moral ones) can have a large affect on the story.