When comparing The Banner Saga 2 vs The King of Fighters XIV, the Slant community recommends The Banner Saga 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best single player games on PS4?” The Banner Saga 2 is ranked 59th while The King of Fighters XIV is ranked 94th. The most important reason people chose The Banner Saga 2 is:
Tactical RPGs can be really intimidating, especially if you're just starting out. The tutorials often blaze forward, causing you to miss important mechanics. Luckily, Banner Saga 2 tries to alleviate this by adding a trainer NPC who will give you challenges. These involve performing various combat exercises, helping you to solidify your understanding of the game and even learn something new.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Helps you to learn the gameplay thoroughly
Tactical RPGs can be really intimidating, especially if you're just starting out. The tutorials often blaze forward, causing you to miss important mechanics. Luckily, Banner Saga 2 tries to alleviate this by adding a trainer NPC who will give you challenges. These involve performing various combat exercises, helping you to solidify your understanding of the game and even learn something new.
Pro Solid tactical combat
Even though Banner Saga 2’s turn-based combat system is fairly straightforward. You and your opponent take turns in moving and attacking with units on a tactical grid. Each unit has its strengths, weaknesses, and set of unique abilities that you need to consider.
For example, archers can attack from far away but they have low armor, so you can’t leave them out in the open. Another example are the Varl, very durable and strong melee units that occupy 4 tiles as opposed to 1. This makes it trickier to position them since more enemies can stand next to them and attack them.
This creates combat that is not too simple but still has enough variety and strategy involved to feel rewarding.
Pro Great hand drawn graphics
Banner Saga 2 environments, characters, and animations are all hand-drawn. This includes your caravan as it marches over a snowy hill, passing trees and houses in the distance. The various viking-esque soldiers, centaurs and other mythological creatures, swinging axes and thrusting spears on a worn out bridge. Even the very detailed character sprites as they discuss matters with extremely serious expressions. Everything just feels like you’re watching an animated movie, which is something almost never encountered in a game.
Pro You're sure to find a character that fits your playstyle
KOF XIV has 50 playable characters, giving you many options to choose from. All of the characters have their own unique fighting styles, distinct looks, strengths, and weaknesses.
Pro Deep gameplay
KOF XIV is simple on the surface: pick a character, learn some special moves, a few combos, and go to town on your opponents. However, if you want true mastery of the game, it's going to take a lot of time and effort.
You'll have to learn things like cancels, where you stop a combo with a specific input on your controller, in order to continue in a different way than the game intends. Fighting games are often about who can break the game's engine the best, and KOF XIV is no exception.
On top of things like engine breaking, you'll also have to dedicate a large amount of time to learning your chosen character(s) in order to be truly great with them. Every character has complex combos that require precision timing and great reaction speed, and you'll have to get all of them down.
The fact that you can play this casually with a friend and just mess around for while, or practice as hard as you can and truly try to master the game really makes it fun.
Cons
Con HP damage based attacks cause one-dimensional tactics
A unit's current number of hit points equals the damage it will deal to an enemy. Because of this, the best strategy is always to hit all enemy units in a sequence, so they inflict as little damage as possible. Any other strategy is too risky and can backfire way too easily, limiting your creativity.
Con Incomplete story
To get a full and satisfying story, you’ll have to play the entire Banner Saga trilogy. Banner Saga 2 on its own feels like you’ve suddenly started reading a book from the middle. There are a lot of characters you know very little about, making it hard to understand their motivations. The on-going events are not explained fully. Even the ending is not a satisfying conclusion but just a setup for the next arc.
Con Incomplete story
KOF games are grouped in trilogies and KOF XIV is no exception. It's the first game of a new trilogy, so the endings leave most of the plot points unresolved. You'll have to play the 2 next games to get the full story.
Con Balance issues
In games like this, it's inevitable that some characters just have better skill sets, easier combos, or are just plain stronger than the others. The developers have put in great effort in balancing the game, but this problem does persist.