When comparing The Banner Saga 2 vs Emily is Away Too, the Slant community recommends The Banner Saga 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best indie games on Steam?” The Banner Saga 2 is ranked 38th while Emily is Away Too is ranked 83rd. 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 Low system requirments
This game only requires 512 MB of RAM to run. Total file weight is 100 MB.
Pro Evokes a sense of nostalgia
Pixelated art, Windows XP-style game interface, early 2000's versions of Facebook and Youtube featured in the game, as well as numerous pop-culture references (including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Eminem, and Red Hot Chili Peppers) will make players (given that they're old enough) nostalgic.
Pro Heartfelt story
You take the role of the protagonist who unexpectedly gets contacted by his school crush and gets caught up in a love triangle. Seeing the characters interact, holding back their feelings, voicing their regrets, and figuring out what love is makes for a heartbreaking experience.
Pro Your actions meaningfully influence the story
Emily is Away Too plays out differently, depending on the choices you make. The relationships can evolve in different ways, your actions can affect the situations other characters are in, you can discover different details about characters depending on how you approach the situations, etc.
Pro Features in-game apps, such as retro versions of Facebook and Youtube
This game builds upon the original Emily is Away game, but introduces some new interesting feautures, like profile customization in the chat app and new in-game services, like Facebook and Youtube.
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 Boring, repetitive gameplay
This game revolves around narrative much more than action. The gameplay mostly consists of typing one of the pre-recorded answer templates into the chat app.