Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

4/10 Almost a meh game. Classes make no logical sense. Merc X3 (all-around stats) -> Knight X4 (Tank) -> Scoundrel X4 (Dodge tank/Offensive support) -> Ranger X4 (ranged Offensive Support) -> Gunner X4 (Ranged DPS) -> Assassin (Useless until assassinate, then you have to wait 3 turns to use it. Only unique ability is just a decent amount of damage (~50% damage on an enemy)... Yay. Damage their "OC don't steal" gets WWWAAAYYY before you will ever hear the word assassin.) Where does Knight come from?! Why does wearing plate armor and using a shield to protect your comrades make you a better shadow stalker? Now compare that with a much more thought out product like Final fantasy Tactics Advanced. A 16 year old game!!! Fencer X1 (melee dps) -> White Mage X1 (BASE Magic class for viera) -> Elementalist X2 (offensive support which lays the ground work for the magical debuff side to the class) -> Archer X1 (ranged DPS/Support) -> Sniper X2 (Ranged DPS/Support) -> Assassin (God tier mix of might and magic that hard counters any single unit in the game.) You could use the excuse that you could recruit an assassin straight from the guild, but you do still have to unlock it. Which means scrapping a character back to level 1 because their stats are completely shot. Cus grinding for optimization instead of it being a natural process is what..fun? No. It is just sloppy and annoying. Abilities. Most are completely useless. There are almost no unique skills. They are all just re-skins of one another. It makes the game feel stale and boring after only a few hours. Scoundrel- Dirty hit (0 mana): 80% dam with 62% CHANCE to blind target. PLUS weapon secondaries. Assassin- Blind powder ((6 mana) less range then dirty hit): 60% dam with 75% chance to blind target. Like I said, very poorly thought out. Assassin should do more damage AND have a higher chance. Assassin is an end game class. Magic is lame. 2 stages of zone magic followed by 1 stage of 1 tile magic that is the strongest. Again, it is almost the same as FFTA, but worse. Cus the mana and power are the same, but you lose 4 squares of damage... Speaking of mana... Not starting with full mana. Yes, A2 pulled the same bs. But it is a major nerf to magic classes. Magic in FFTA was completely broken. That being said, it is a misstep that only seeks to make the game more boring and less fun. Basically the first few turns are a buff/debuff fiasco then you throw 2 abilities onto one enemy, heal/buff debuff and repeat. Wow. Such fun. So amazing. Or, just run at them with 2 handed weapons+counter/ guns and ignore half of the game. The half of the game that requires waiting to play the game. A much better nerf would have been to make mp a permanent constant like in D&D. It regenerates over time, not at the end or start of battle. Considering your asinine mission timers; you basically already had a system you could piggyback on. Just take a second to think about what you are putting in your game! Why does mana only start accumulating in combat?! I would love to here your in game lore for that mechanic. There is none. Because it is just stupidity for stupidity sake. The story. Now... I am not a huge story guy. If the story is great. I am all in and I instantly love the game... fan for life. If the story sucks and the mechanics are great. That could still be a 10/10 game for me. If the story and the mechanics suck... Well... a 4/10 is very generous. This is hands down one of the worst stories I have ever had the displeasure of playing. Only beaten by symphony of war. And that is the nicest thing I can say about it. The story beats are all completely obvious and hollow. The characters are interchangeable, pointless and static. There uh... There is one particular character that I am assuming is a writers self insert... cus it is painful... Well, I could just stop there.... But it is kinda... sorta... painfully obvious. The rest are just empty vessels to be railroaded to the next ♥♥♥♥♥♥ story beat. The same forced drama is thrown in your face again and again and again. Even if it this was supposed to be a parody, it would still be pathetic. Games pacing is only a bit off, at least compared to the rest of the problems. Playing with the default settings the enemies will only be like... 4 levels a head of you at all times. So, by no means is it an insurmountable challenge. But what it does do is turn every single encounter into a total slog as each enemy character has 50 more hp then yours with 20 more defense then your MAX attack which will be artificially limited by your item selection. Turning every single enemy into an hp sponge. Again. This is really solid game design. Encounters suck. Enemies have access to late game classes and items from the word go. And you will never have the numbers advantage, or any advantage, to make up for this disparity. Unless you grind. Artificial difficulty. The game does not naturally supply you with the means to counter the challenges it presents to you when it would be appropriate to do so. Think Pokemon, you get the HM flash before rock tunnel. In this game enemies will be blinding you for 8+ fights THEN the shiny ring pops up in shops for 5000 gold. Oh, and you stop getting blinded around this time. Yes. You start with panacea... But the action economy is completely fried. Thieves. Sorry. Scoundrels. Calling them garbage would be an insult to garbage. You can't steal armor or weapons. You can't steal accessories. You can only steal money (like 15% of a skirmish payout), random items you won't need or random trash tier components you already have 12 of. And it is a hard-coded 50%. Is the enemy blind and disabled? Are you behind them? 50%. Dumb. Skyrim's bucket mechanic makes more sense. The sound design is trash. Every 4 seconds you'll her the sounds of fist clenching. It happens 9-14 times a cut-scene and doubles for some bow sounds. Maps are stupid and overly thought out. They will place a treasure chest somewhere you can't get it (remember the challenges without tools bit from before), forcing you to come back to the map (if you remember or care) for an item you probably can buy in the shop at this point in the game. The Swim mechanic, which I adore in theory, was very hastily implemented. Classes determine who can swim? Flippers turn a knight wearing a full set of golden plate armor ((lol. Imagine.) Which costs less then it's weight in gold btw. js.) into Michael Phelps? Um. How about the ability to not be pushed. Not flippers, but heavy boots. Would make way more sense and would make swimming an actual decision rather then an opportunity cost. Graphics are honestly pretty good. Character creation is really quite nice. For how simple it is, it just works. Items are the strongest mechanical part of the game... could still be stronger. But hey, at least there are unique item types that are fun to use and worth keeping around. The animals are pretty alright... But they are PAID DLC... So... not going to help you here. In fact... FFTA had a beast master class in the default game... a 16 year old game. That ran on a glorified calculator... So...maybe think about that. Again, the enemies use animals in nearly every fight. Kinda really dumb that you can't. Why can't I buy a doge from the guild? You people are sick. Yeah, I think that's about all the nice things I can say. At no point, so far, has it become enjoyable to play this game. I used to think after all the items and classes were unlocked the game would finally open up.... But I uh.... looked ahead and... Nah. It is just more of the same. This game gets a buy on sale if you are a die hard fan of FFTA AND FFTA2 and NEED a new fix cus you've beaten them both for the 50th time. Seriously people, I'm telling you right now. The 51st play through of FFTA OR FFTA2 will be better then the 1st play through of this game. 16 years and somehow ALL gameplay elements experience significant regression. I am genuinely impressed.

It's just... meh... Way to slow, no real pull. The story might be ok, but if you hid medium difficulty it's honestly really slow, maybe on the easiest just story mode it'd be ok only bothering with the main missions, but it's a slog feeling to play through. Not bad most of the time, but not good, nothing really hooks you. Core gameplay is a mixed bag, some nice ideas for abilities and varied things, ok core gameplay idea, kinda mixed execution. Every random enemy having any random skill means you must stop and constantly check every enemies entire list of skills and abilities at the start of most fights, a very slow and annoying process with the UI, lest one of them be able to say walk into water, then use a skill that could swap them with your own units location, who can't swim... causing instant death. Or have special knockback or other movement things that might one shot your units. Turn orders, health, and damage, also means in lots of fights you just might have the enemy able to do 5 moves in a row, and a few enemy types can literally one shot most of your characters who aren't total tank built up for defense, so sometimes they just all go at once and are fast/ranged enough to guarantee deaths on your side with no recourse. Cover isn't a thing, even with heights involved, so oh well. Then there's the finicky, like attack directions. If you are in front you hit the front, side the side, back the back, but if on a diagonal sometimes it's the side or front, or side or back... not always just sides from diagonals or something, seems random. So you can't predict how you'll take a hit reliably, and when knockback moves can one shot you... I've even had an enemy two boxes front, one to the side, attack me with a boomerang and knock me, not backwards, but sideways off a bridge... never figured out that one, seemed no contest he was in front of me as I made sure they'd be before standing there with my blockers up front. More than a few cases of me seeing say 37 damage on a hit, enemy has 24 health left, I attack, see 37 damage pop, yet they don't die... and can't pause and check their health/stats/rewind to figure WTF is going on, the game hates giving you info when you want it is how it always feels. And bugs like this, if not super common, are still a thing that happen I'd counted at least five times where it cost me a cleave I was banking on and pre mathed out for. Or a case were a crippled enemy (shouldn't be able to use skills), uses sniper shot, and doesn't get rooted from it (the downside to that one super powerful shot), despite no root immunity. Also main story missions like to screw you and break things, I plan out carefully how ot order my attacks to use cleave, a sequential move skill if you kill someone.... I go and kill the first target, then they start speaking, do a mini dialogue scene, and finally die... My turn ends, no cleave is triggered, now the enemy is down only one instead of 2, that 2 having the next turn, thus survives to stab my other character in the back and kill him and ya you can guess I was cursing pretty loudly. Stuff like this just constantly seems to happen where the game frustrates me constantly and doesn't feel like something I can learn, control, or take seriously. And without that.... ya, the game just feels hollow, story barely holds it ok at that point. Characters are decent for the most part, nothing super, but ok. Story has plenty of dumb moments you shout at your characters to do or say X or Y in a given situation but they don't of coarse... not as bad as some others, still enough to annoy though. Overall... there's good, there's bad, if you have nothing else to do and want to waste a LOT of time on this game (it gets pretty damn grindy and slow) then ok, otherwise if you have anything you might really enjoy, probably do that instead.

Nothing within this game grabbed my interest after playing it for 8 or so hours. I simply did not find the story or gameplay rewarding enough to continue playing. Another game left partially completed. To elaborate a bit, the story was simply too generic for my personal tastes and lacked characters that felt interesting or original. Combat felt very much the same way, generic and lacking a "hook" to keep me interested.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a competently made turn based tactics game. The story is decent, is somewhat basic. The same can be said of the combat. Where this game truly shines is in the deep, nuanced jobs system that lets you put together a small army of combatants, with no two of them playing quite the same. The ability to master multiple jobs, mix and match abilities, perks and skill sets, and then deploy these highly customized units in patrols, hunts, large battles and missions provides enough variety to keep things interesting for hours and hours.

This is a good tactics game with some unique class leveling and combinations.

I got all of the achievements and both endings. I really enjoyed! Would definitely recommend if you are into old school tactical turn based strategy games!.

Fell Seal is the closest I ever got to scratching that Final Fantasy Tactics itch I've had for the past several decades. As someone who really enjoys turn-based JRPGs but rather dislikes the Anime style, I unfortunately have quite a few choices of game picks. The only ones I can usually tolerate are the older ones since the aesthetics are much simpler, although they still suffer from that horrible, horrible Anime dialog where every character talks like a 14 year old. Ranting aside, Fell Seal is really great on the gameplay side of things. There are many jobs and hybrid options, every ability is thoroughly explained and shows exactly which stat affects it and there's fun exploration and extras which aren't super obscure and require a guide. Probably the best part is the difficulty settings which allow you to tweak so many things to make the game much harder/easier. With the difficulty properly tweaked, combat can be very nail-bitingly exciting. The plot is... well it's there. It is a very by-the-numbers fantasy story with zero twists or turns. This is where it falls short of FFT. The story and characters are adequate enough to keep the momentum going and at least the characters don't talk like 14 year olds (Thank god for War of The Lions re-translation). I would also like to point out the music which is not bad at all. Music is an important part of games without voice acting since it is what you hear for most of the game and I feel like it is over looked in more modern tactics games - so kudos to the game on that part. Overall I enjoyed this a lot and I highly recommend.

The story and character sprites are very amateurish, but this game was clearly made with a lot of love. If you love Final Fantasy Tactics, then this game is the closest I have found to reliving that feeling. In fact, I think the game's systems are better than FFT. The Ability Point grind is very friendly - you get a bunch for completing story missions, patrols, hunts, it spills over to your entire roster, you can idle grind AP/items/GP from the missions and monsters DLC - perfect for a gamer who doesn't have a lot of time. There is enough depth in the combat to make you think about your builds and what you are doing (at least, until you get Warmage afaik...), and even on the easy difficulty setting, if you play recklessly, you will get punished! Environmental hazards are meaningful and to be taken advantage of (or to get abused by...) Tons of improvements over FFT as well. Look at the map as you deploy. Re-equip and re-assign your units to counterpick before you deploy! No random encounters - you either want it and activate it, or you don't. The music is surprisingly good, considering my negative judgment of the story and character sprites. I cannot recommend this game enough if you like strategy tactical RPGs.