The lack of subtitles in the Banner Saga is rather lame, the explanation from dev/dev representative is there's a maximum of 10mn of speech without subtitle. Because of the short contents involved and other more important tasks in todo list (wonder which one as for now I don't see any problem in Mac version, except loading that seem a bit long for what they load but it's really minor) the fix of this problem could be delayed.
From what I have played I have fun. My main worry was about having strategic decision to do from dialogs and because of that to be a bit blind to make those decision. It's in part true, in part wrong:
- Dialogs choices often cover subjects with clear consequences even if you can't predict the amount involved you can product more or less the elements involved by your choice.
- The second aspect is as I had bet, there many dialog choices for which it's close to impossible to predict the consequences or all of them. It's not as bad than I expected, it works as accept them with fatality, sort of unpredictable consequences of your choices. I quoted the game tried few time use the Witcher 1 approach to highlight consequences of choices, not in an as elegant and efficient way, but with a clear effort on that on some occasions, good point.
Now those who play only "real" RPG this one is clearly in the category of Tactical RPG, but it takes some distance from the JRPG that used this genre, and do it in its own way even if there's many clear links with JRPG tactical RPG.
That made me remind the controversial Shadowrun return, I'd say it could be considered in middle of RPG and tactical RPG, but also in a way, its approach of Tactical RPG is a lot more original and it succeed better insert many more RPG features. For some other players, the main advantage of The Banner Saga is to use and implement choices in a stronger way and in a more clear way.
For the fights I'm not sure yet, I do enjoy for now what I play in the Banner Saga, but for now I have some doubt I'll get the depth and diversity of possibilities that offer SSR. Anyway for now The Banner Saga is a very satisfying play.