Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

I am a huge HUGE fan of tactical RPGs with FFT being my most favorite of all time I got Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark for that same reason, being a homage to the old games of the genre I want to first make clear that I acknowledge the care and love the devs put into the game That being said, I found the game to be very polarized, with either very good ideas, or very bad ones --Graphics The graphics are very well made individually, but once they are put together they clash so heavily it feels really jarring The spell/ability animations, while the sprite quality is really good, the animation itself looks like stock RPGMaker animations levels of bad Walking/Idle/Casting animations of the characters are good, specially Monster ones which look even more awesome --Sound Sound in general is good, the soundtrack is really good, and most sound effects are well made, except for a few ones --Story The story sounds a bit generic but not so bad, except somewhere near the end where it just takes a nosedive in my opinion --Gameplay The QoL the game applies over the old games is superb, things like the way consumables work, the way and rhythm your characters learn new abilities and level up, small things like being able to cancel your movement, etc, it has a TON of QoL upgrades Sadly, it also has some really questionable mechanics, like drowning Balance slowly started to degrade too, while it was fun at around levels 20-30, it slowly became a situation of either you bully an enemy to death or your characters get bullied to death You have plenty of classes at your disposal, which is good and fun to mix and match, sadly, many classes are outright useless and/or overlap with others I liked the Injury system....at first, until this bully or get bullied situation arose and almost on every battle at least one of my characters would die a cheap death, denying me of using them next battle I hope the devs learn from this game and make an even better game without the rough edges~!

This game oozes Final Fantasy with it's class system, music, and turn based combat. The graphics are decent. So far the story manages to be adequate with little bits of cheese here and there but nothing off putting. Some sections of the game are clearly defined and the game comes with a in game guide. However certain terms / status conditions aren't well defined so some experimentation is necessary. The reason for the minus one star is sometimes battles can drag on and certain features like injury system doesn't make a lot of sense and only prevents you from using the character in another battle. All in All if you turn based junkie like me I definitely would get this, probably the best impulse buy that I have done in a long time

Pros *Well-designed turn-based RPG mechanics *Wide range of classes and monster recruits *Beautiful character portraits *Fascinating character-driven story Cons *Skill icons are confusing Other thoughts I purchased the Missions & Monsters add-on, so some of this review may not apply if you only have the core game. If you've ever played the old Final Fantasy Tactics games, you'll feel right at home in Fell Seal. The turn-based grid combat with significant vertical obstacles and advantages is straight out of the FFT playbook. But this is no cheap rip-off. Fell Seal was lovingly created as a modern adaptation of those classic mechanics. You lead a squad of characters, some unique and some generic, which you can grow to small army. The leader is Kyrie, an arbiter (a bit like a sheriff) in a fantasy world where law and order seems to be paramount on the surface, but which is actually a place of chaotic banditry and corrupt officials. Kyrie's closest companions are her brother Reiner, a ranger-esque character with roguish good looks and a personality to match, and Anadine, a young trainee who is the daughter of Kyrie's late mentor who inadvertently acquires some amazing capabilities. The plot, while not the most original, is solid RPG entertainment. The characters are well developed and you find yourself emotionally invested in their path. Old school tropes abound, like the heroes urgently need to rush to their destination before the world gets destroyed, yet they can feel free to take a detour and hunt for buried treasure (whether that's a good or bad thing varies by player). There are plenty of side quests and special missions which your main characters do not tackle themselves, but rather dispatch squads of followers to tackle. If you take the time to really dig into the side quests, you can expect 80+ hours of enjoyable gameplay. The challenges somewhat scale to your character levels to keep things interesting. All-in-all, an excellent experience.

Hard to miss the nostalgia from FFTactics & FFTAdvance when Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark clearly plays its cards in a similar way. Well, if I did enjoy it overall, there are regardless a few debatable areas which make me think it didn't improve over them! Let's begin with the worst: story. The "epic and mature" advertising is ridiculous, it's another childish Chosen One antic. There are supposedly seven Chosen yet obviously it's all about the One you play. With big bad evil guy trying to bring dystopia to the world, whom I identified after going at most over a quart of the storyline, you can skip the already short scenes. Now, the classes system: you can use the skills of the selected class you play, and an extra set (actions only) of your choice. A single reaction skill & two supports of your choosing as well; sadly most classes feel redundant, you only train them for their permanent stats bonuses after unlocking all their skills. With some supports worth calling must-have, the redundancy is very present. As an example, dual-wielding weapons is the main way to go in dealing damages, except for rare targets! At least to get out of the dual-wielding loop, debuffs make the real challenge... for a time. Midgame (de)buffing & cleansing matters heavily, but endgame is about the gear - most damaging weapons with flying boots and an anti-all-debuffs accessory. DoTs also cannot kill! While you're not forced to send story characters into battle, they can't do any of the side real-timed missions, meaning side chars take them when story ones fight everytime. For this reason, DLC party monsters can be ignored (only one beast had little use for me); at least side chars get exclusive classes otherwise inaccessible to the story ones, which is a good surprise to diversify the gameplay! Despite all that, the formula works well in combat except in the very endgame. While I'd call it a good successor in the genre, its flaws prevent it besting its elders, still it's a good start!

Well, as many others allready mentioned, it is pretty similar to final fantasy tactics or disgae in terms of mechanics. I loved these games so I figured out I might like this one as well. Turns out, it is pretty decent gameplay wise. But hey Karf, why only three stars dude? Well, this is due to the atrocious storyline. Quote from the shop page: "Experience an epic and mature story"... seriously? I still don't get it but this seems to be a red line which appears in so many modern games. It happened to cosmic heroine as well. The core mechanics are pretty decent and while I do disagree on many of the design choices for the leveling and class system, I can still get behind that. But please, pretty pretty please hire a decent witer for future games. If this is a budget problem, feel free to steal from the vast ammount of open source pen and paper adventures out there. Since you got no moral issues to copy most of the mechanics, this shouldn't be a problem as well. Even if you don't copy the free source material, at least let it write someone who runs some kind of pen and paper in his spare time or someone who is a true fan of good storywriting. I am perfectly okay with creative arguing about mechanics and stuff and I also agree that tastes differ from person to person. But the story is by far the weakest point of the whole game. The story for final fantasy tactics was pretty stupid as well, but at least they didn't promote it with words like this. I wish you the best and I am looking forward to future projects. But buyers with a heavy focus on storyline should be aware that this might not be a good choice.