GOTG Review - Banner of the Maid

Banner of the Maid (Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC)
Release Date: PC - May 27, 2019 | Console - August 12, 2020
Developer: Azure Flame Studio, CE-Asia Co., Ltd.

Banner of the Maid is a strategy RPG cribbing a lot from classics of the genre like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. But it also has a lot of interesting ideas of its own that prominent SRPG developers like Intelligent Systems should absolutely learn from and incorporate into their future games.

Banner is set during an alternate history French Revolution, a time of political turmoil that has your character, Pauline Bonaparte (sister to Napoleon), being pulled in many directions by the different factions within France. There are the Royalists, led by King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the military-focused Feuillants, the citizens of Paris and more. Pauline is a rising young military general, but she is also thought to be a Maid, one of a number of women blessed with extraordinary abilities who could shape the future of the country. This makes you quite the hot commodity among the factions, and your choices on who to support can affect how you’re viewed and treated by the others…sort of.

While there is potential in this system, in practice, it’s quite shallow, with few actual choices to make. You’ll end up supporting all the different factions as you progress through the story regardless and your only rewards are tiny bonuses like getting the opportunity to buy slightly better gear or getting a bit more money from finishing missions. There aren’t really any drawbacks either. Even when the king is put to the guillotine (spoiler alert if you didn’t take a history class) your potential connection to the Royalists never once raises suspicion. Thematically, the idea is cool, but it could’ve gone a lot deeper.

Being an SRPG, the real focus is on the combat, which is…fine. While there are a number of different classes, they all fall into one of six categories. Line infantry are your basic musket wielders and are strongest when fighting together. Light infantry uses longer range rifles to attack from safer positions. Artillery fights from even further away, but can’t retaliate against close-range enemy attacks. And there are two types of cavalry, light and heavy: the first being faster while the other is bulkier. And lastly are support units who can heal or grant units the ability to take an additional turn.

If you’re familiar with Fire Emblem’s famous weapon triangle, it’s basically represented here, but more as a class diamond (you can see it in the top right of the image above. Light infantry beats line infantry, which beats heavy cavalry, which beats light cavalry, which beats light infantry. Artillery and support are their own thing, but that’s kind of it. There are no flying or naval units and attack ranges are quite short, making battles a bit dull and basic. To spice things up a little, on lower difficulties you are given a choice between two bonuses for each battle. Some of these can really break the game (especially the one that ups all your characters’ damage by 30 points), but it does provide some excitement for each skirmish, which I quite enjoyed.

The units you control are pretty cool too, with cute, anime-style boys and girls of every stripe being represented, from a lush with cannon, to a grumpy veteran, to a little drummer girl, to the damn princess of France herself. Each character has their own exclusive skill, along with slots for four additional skills determined by their class. Some of these skills are earned with level-ups, while others can be taught at the Ecole Militaire training school. Most classes are also able to promote to better classes, but the system is way more rigid than Fire Emblem, only allowing promotion when you’ve maxed out your level. The upgraded classes rarely actually change the abilities of your characters, instead just giving them some extra stats.

While the classes are largely uninteresting, the best part of Banner of the Maid is undoubtedly the weapon system, which has struck the perfect balance between strategy and fun. As much as I love Fire Emblem, I cannot stand its use of weapons with limited uses. I end up hoarding the best weapons so as not to “waste” them, but then never end up using them at all. Some Fire Emblem games let you repair weapons, but those opportunities are either very rare or very tedious (like in Fire Emblem Three Houses.) Banner of the Maid also has weapons with limited uses, but they automatically resupply after each battle. This makes for interesting strategic choices in the moment, but doesn’t bog you down with upkeep between maps and lets you enjoy your coolest stuff more often. I NEED this for the next Fire Emblem game.

What I don’t need is the presentation, which is, unfortunately, a little all over the place. The character portraits are quite pretty, even though most of the female cast is supernaturally and unnecessarily well-endowed. Their pixelated incarnations during battles are also very well designed, as are the maps themselves. What isn’t great is the lack of variety in animations. Each time a character attacks, there’s a slow, boring animation of one line of soldiers firing or charging at another with very little personality. While I keep combat animations on in games like Fire Emblem and Pokemon, I turned them off in Banner of the Maid as soon as possible.

The view is also just a little too far away in battles, with no way to zoom in or out. It’s not terrible when played on a huge, 70-inch TV, but in handheld mode, it can make it really hard to determine the attack ranges of enemies on some terrain types or how much health an enemy has left.

For all its rough edges, I’m actually really enjoying my time with Banner of the Maid. It’s a little odd to see a game with Chinese voice acting (Azure Flame Studio is based in China) and English subtitles that has a French setting, but it’s a weird mishmash that just kind of works. You can tell it was made with a lot of passion and a lot of thought, if not a lot of resources, but that’s part of its charm. It might not be revolutionary in the SRPG genre, but I really do hope some of its lessons take hold.