Banner of the Maid has been my constant gaming companion over the past several weeks. In short, Banner of the Maid takes place in an alternate fantasy version of the French Revolution. Napoleon has fended off a British incursion and is now in Italy fighting against an Austrian invasion.
Almost all the important NPCs existed in our reality, but in the game reality, there are the Maids — heroes imbued with divine powers whose powers arise when France needs them. The first, most famous Maid was Jean D’Arc. With France consumed by revolution, new maids have arisen.
Chief among them is Pauline Bonaparte, sister to Napoleon and closely associated with the future Empress, Josephine, of the Château de Malmaison, a high society faction in revolutionary Paris. This association allows Pauline to mingle with the various Parisian factions without becoming so associated with one or another that her ability to fight for all of France is imperiled.
Other Maids are Julia, who paints prophecies (and has painted her own doom), Antoinette, who make peoples memories her own (and expects to be killed for it), and most especially Queen Marie, who has the Maid power of mind control, and is using that power to hold the various factions of Paris together.
This eventually becomes impossible — King Louis XVI is beheaded, Queen Marie and her daughter Therese disappear, the royalists who remain loyal to the crown abscond from Paris and join up with the English and Austrian coalition troops, and Pauline has to struggle to balance the factions enough so that she is allowed to fight and does not find herself beneath the guillotine’s blade.
That’s where we left off in the last post.
Under the cover of night, Pauline crept into the famous Parisian sewers and met Leclerc, who opted to join her cause rather than continue to support the monarchists and bandits who called the sewers their home.
Leclerc would find himself the sacrificial lamb for many battles to come, as I’d gotten tired of grinding levels on new recruits and had decided to just push forward with those that had already reached the max level of 30.
Pauline needed to get to the military school to access necessary supplies; luckily they had the use of the very hot air balloon that Pauline and Desaix had used to escape a high society party turned deadly.
Once there, we found the Marquis de Lafayette — the very same that was such a great friend to Alexander Hamilton during the American Revolution. Unfortunately, he has been entranced by the Queen, her power now revealed to all. His former aide, Charlotte, tries to remind him of his greater loyalty to France and the revolution while Pauline desperately tries to get through his forces and use her power to overwhelm the Queen’s and awaken Lafayette.
The win condition was for either Charlotte to kill Lafayette, or for Pauline to kill his two commanders (placed on opposite sides of the map, of course). What I did not know at the start was that Lafayette would eventually stop listening to Charlotte (or maybe she’d run out of things to say), and would attempt to kill her.
Charlotte was in no way able to kill him first, but she had bread for health and was able to stay alive — just barely — until Pauline killed the second commander.
I’d thought I’d had plenty of time to focus on secondary objectives. I was entirely unready to find out I had to complete the battle in just two or three turns.
With Lafayette once again on our side, we rushed outside Paris to try the to awaken one of the Queen’s other victims, General Rose. She’d seemed to take our protestations seriously before, but her loyalty to the crown runs deep.
We defeated her armies and convinced her that we had no ill feelings toward the monarchists themselves, just to the cursed power wielded by the queen, the power of the blue diamond.
Rose joins us in the final fight against the Queen. Her power broken, she has put all her hopes on the blue diamond, which has the power to stun, confuse and weaken our entire army, at the cost of her own health. We suffer through this power once, then Pauline uses her own Maid abilities to take control of the blue diamond and power up her own Maid ability, the divine ability to inspire her allies to amazing feats of martial ability. We are untroubled by the blue diamond after that.
Long time gadfly Nivernais waits for us at the gates to the palace. We quickly dispatch her, then come face to face with the queen.
We fight briefly, but drained by the blue diamond, the queen slumps to the ground and dies. Pauline, similarly drained, also falls unconscious.
When she awakes after many days, she finds her brother Napoleon has returned to Paris, and needs her help to defeat the commanders of the British-Austrian coalition army that now seeks to take Paris.
Napoleon takes command of half of Pauline’s army, while she takes the other half and together flank the forces of the enemy and permanently defeat Generals Anne, Bridget and Leonore. The fight will continue, but this is the end of Pauline’s story — for now.
Since I’d restarted the game in “Story” mode after bad decisions had made it impossible for me to continue with the “Normal” mode, I actually can’t continue with a NG+. I’d have to replay the game on Normal mode to unlock the NG+.
I don’t really see that happening.
Banner of the Maid is a very good tactical battle game, but there’s a few flaws that keep it from greatness.
- All the voiceovers are in Chinese. This is just weird.
- There is a standard rock/paper/scissors circle of strengths in play, but it is nearly impossible to tell the light cavalry from the heavy cavalry and the light infantry from the line infantry from the heavy infantry, and where the artillery fits into it all. All the class names are in French, and you’re going to have to write down which is strong against which. When facing an enemy, it’s the same thing, except the Austrian forces are all written in German, and the English forces in English. Finding out which is which requires clicking through the stat screens of each similarly-named unit.
- Almost every map is set up to support the rock/paper/scissors arrangement, but the default arrangement the game gives you rarely is set up correctly.
- You cannot freely change the unit classes — they are more or less linear, with perhaps one choice to be made with their promotion.
- You cannot autobattle through the grind missions.
- The characters and especially the Maids lean heavily into anime styling. Some of the characters (Paulette, Rose, Queen Marie, Laure come to mind) are very sexualized. Pauline and several of the other Maids are dressed more modestly. It doesn’t affect the game play and none of the women are anything but competent commanders (well, maybe except for Paulette, who is mostly drunk) and all are well-respected by their male colleagues. I feel this was meant as a draw for male players who would probably be disappointed to find that the characters are mostly concerned with the revolution and the war.
I’ve played a few similar games over the past couple of years. Here’s how I’d rank them:
- Final Fantasy Tactics
- Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
- XCOM-2
- Fire Emblem Houses
- Banner of the Maid
- Tactics Ogre: March of the Black Queen
This doesn’t mean by any means that this is a bad game. It is very tactical and quite hard. The other games make it easy to completely outlevel the challenge. Banner of the Maid characters are limited to level 30, so while it’s possible to rip through the first 3/4 of the game, the last quarter will be a challenge even if you have put in the grind time. The most powerful units come at the end, but unless you step back and grind up their levels and abilities, they will not be very effective.
I put about 55 hours into this playthrough. I’d be a lot faster if I did it again. It cost me $20 on the Nintendo Switch store and I feel I got my money’s worth. The eStore has the first DLC, the Oriental Pirate adventure which includes (from what I understand) just one battle (although presumably it has some extra plot and characters). It costs $4.99, which I consider overpriced.
You can buy this on Steam for $16.99, so a little cheaper, and then get a free five mission DLC not available for the Switch version. The Oriental Pirate adventure is the same price in both stores. The Steam community rates it as Very Positive, and I agree — I wouldn’t have restarted it and finished it if I weren’t enjoying it.
