Banner of the Maid (Switch)

Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows

Banner of the Maid is like a game tailor made for me.  It's a strategy RPG like Fire Emblem, but it takes place in France during the French Revolution....but if the French army was full of waifus.  It's literally the most perfect game imaginable short of having Nazis riding dinosaurs as the main enemy.

You play as Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister, as she follows in her brother's footsteps as a French general.  What's cool is that Pauline Bonaparte was actually a real person, but Napoleon's sister obviously didn't actually lead French troops into battle, and if she did, it certainly wouldn't have been in a skirt.  Still, though, while it's most certainly not a historically accurate game, the fact that it's (technically) historical fiction is basically my favorite thing.  I absolutely love it when a game's setting is based in history even if an ABSURD number of artistic liberties are taken.

Gameplay is actually pretty much just like Fire Emblem for the most part.  Instead of a weapon triangle, you have a unit quadrangle; line infantry beats heavy cavalry, heavy cavalry beats light cavalry, light cavalry beats light infantry, and light infantry beats line infantry.  Why didn't call it light infantry vs heavy infantry instead of line infantry vs light infantry, I'll never understand, but it is what it is.  The whole game is awkwardly machine translated from Mandarin to English, so frankly, that's the least weird thing about the text in the game.  That's not to say that the translation is nonsensical, but there are a handful of lines in the game that definitely just don't flow right in English.

The game has three difficulty settings.  General mode is the hardest and offers a seriously brutal challenge.  Officer mode is "normal" and is a good challenge but not unreasonable.  Then you have Story mode, which is my beloved Bitch Mode.  I played on Officer mode, but I love accessibility and not that not everyone has the patience for the trial and error of strategy RPGs, so I always love seeing low difficulty modes.  There are a couple of free DLCs that add some side quests and a bonus character - a cool Asian pirate chick - but for the most part, the campaign is the whole game.  It does, however, offer a New Game+ to give some replay value, and you'll end up with more units than you can use at once, so you can always do a playthrough using different characters if you want to experience the game again.

The game differs from Fire Emblem in two key ways.  First and foremost - and this is something that modern Fire Emblem does with Casual mode - your characters aren't gone forever if they die.  If you lose a character in a mission, they'll retreat for the rest of that missions, but they're there ready to go in the next mission.  Depending on your difficulty, you may suffer a penalty to your rewards at the end of the mission, but that's it.  Second - and this is the biggest difference from Fire Emblem - is that weapon durability resets every mission.  You'll find some special weapons that have attributes making them super strong in certain situations but that only have a durability of 4; you can only use it four times in a mission, but it goes back to a full 4 out of 4 once you finish the mission and start the next.  Any Fire Emblem veteran can tell you stories of saving a strong weapon throughout the whole game in case you need like it's a magnum in Resident Evil.

Banner of the Maid definitely isn't a perfect game with awkward machine translation and a couple of difficulty jumps, but it's a very good game.  The story is good with some cool fantasy elements woven in with the historical setting, the characters are interesting and likable, and the gameplay is fun and addicting.  The art is fantastic, too, and that's always a plus for games that are slower paced like an SRPG.  All in all, it's a pretty standard entry for the genre, but the French Revolution setting definitely makes it stand out.  If you like SRPGs, definitely give this one a play.

My Rating - 3 Neps