Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

I'm giving this 5 stars: if there was a finer grain system I'd give it 4.5, but am rounding up due to how much work the two-person team behind this game has clearly put into it. I'm reviewing this as someone who never played Final Fantasy Tactics, so I have no preconceptions about the genre. Unlike some RPGs with open worlds, this game gives you a series of battle maps in which you enter combat with a range of enemies. You can repeat the same maps to gain more exp, and to help make that less repetitive, the game changes up the enemies, your starting locations, and the enemy locations, so the 2nd and 3rd battles don't feel like a carbon copy of the first. You can progress at any time to new maps with interesting layouts. There are a large number of classes and skill trees to explore, and most of them are unlocked once you progress far enough in your main class. The combats are fun so far. I'm writing this about 8 play-hours into the game, but there's been a nice progression of new abilities to explore and new tactical considerations and new enemy abilities to react to. The balance has been nice: it's challenging, but in a good way, on "Veteran" level. The art style is a little JRPG. It's well done within its style. Even the in-world characters facial features etc match the 2D portraits. The story is good so far, but i haven't finished it yet. It's suitably mature and dark without being overbearing. All told a lot of love was clearly put into this by the very small team which built it. It's absolutely worth picking up if: * You like tactical combat * You enjoy exploring skills and abilities * You don't mind a little bit of reading. * You like supporting indie games. It might not be for you if: * You want an action game rather than turn based. * You want Pillars of Eternity levels of artistic polish and constant voice acting. Summary: 4.5 out of 5 stars, but rounding up to 5 on GOG for being a tiny indie studio pursuing their passions.

The title says it all. This game has the look and initial feel of Final Fantasy Tactics but none of the heart. The story is leagues behind FFT. Their are twenty "regular" classes overall but all have an annoying tendancy to be redundant and overlap...a lot. Whereas in FFT, each class was unique and completely different to play, Fell Seal: Arbiter's classes vary little between say a wizard and a druid, or a knight, templar, mercenary, beserker...which all possess many of the same abilites instead of unique ones. They are more or less grouped into three roles: spells, melee, ranged. Gameplay is far inferior to FFT. Instead of real choices on which damage dealing NPC to target first and how to do it, Fell Seal focuses on overlapping extreme amounts of buffing and lopsided character afflictions. Fights become slogfests as you attempt to dispel and then kill enemies; all the while, they're using items and spells to ressurect their teammates while hitting your team with every curse under the sun. There's no worse feeling than seeing a double spell casting druid with the abilities of one of the many classes that posssess charm, take over two teammates at once. Where FFT was hard with respect to complimentary classes working together, Fell Seal's class mixing causes frustrating fights that last 30 min longer than they should have. Tactics don't really apply to the game either. Elevation, line of sight, and most positioning is useless. Oh, and the cheapest ability of them all, pushing attacks into water insta-kill players. I have no idea why they thought dropping a character in water would immediately reduce someone to 0 hp was a thing but yeah...it's in this game. Also, there are so many enemy monsters that exploit this ability that you will want to pull your hair out. Beware every frog monsters' kick flip!

I picked this title up in early access on Steam, it's an amazing title with a reasonable storyline, entertaining characters, deep mechanics and an interesting world. It's nice to have a title like this again and much like FFT I'm likely to get this one across many different platforms. There are only a few downsides to this game really, the first big one is the camera is fixed. It just feels awkward at first and at times with the geometry for missions you can have enemies that are hidden by the environment which can always be a little annoying. Having a rotating camera set at 8 or 16 points around the map would be extremely helpful. The second is the controls, there are places where the D-pad is used rather than a thumb stick, or just easier to navigate with the bumpers on a controller rather than using the thumbsticks or D-Pad. This is again a small thing. I haven't completed the whole storyline as of yet and I'm honestly hoping for a Switch release in the future. With that I'd recommend this to anyone who was a fan of Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. This meets their quality bar for the feel of the game which makes it utterly fantastic.

This game plays fairly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. There is a nice degree of tactics and the story is fairly engaging. I really enjoy the character customization which allows you to alter the appearance of your warband and class composition. There seems to be endless variety in how many different warbands you can create. There are some small things that bring this game down such as a poor Mouse and Keyboard UI and limited animation. However these are relatively small gripes. Great game!