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~!
The game's pretty good overall, it has some rough edges here and there which makes me give 4 stars The action in the game is pretty intense, but it becomes a bit repetitive with mostly the same enemies over and over The experience is quite surreal, the story, the setting, and some of the quirks of the game are a very unique experience The graphics are superb, with a lot of attention to even some slightest details Now for the rough edges, in addition to the kinda repetitive gameplay, the music is quite meh-ish save for a couple of parts. I also encountered some bugs during my gameplay, like Jesse turning invisible, textures getting blurry and constant crashes in the battle against the Anchor mini-boss
I played the second one first and wanted to give this one a go, while I didn't expect this to be as good as the seconds one, I didn't expect it to be so bad either The good Combat is still fun even compared to the second one Graphics also look really good The bad Story is kinda mehish Music is not really good Respeccing your character is really expensive compared to the second one's system The worst The game is absolutely riddled with bugs: The combat queue works like 10% of the time The combat music suddenly just vanishes and never plays again Attacking and targeting issues, sometimes the game just decides you should walk over to a point instead of attacking Companions have really bad pathfinding and hazard awareness, walking or standing right into traps Save issues, when sometimes reloading a file resets some combats The bugs eventually became way too much for me to continue playing the game
The game delivers what it promises superbly, a stealth based game against an AI that copies your behavior The gameplay is really good, it puts in positions of "what should I teach the Echoes to do next cycle?" using your whole moveset as a resource, you must be really mindful of not teaching them too much or else you will be having a harder time The game is hard even if you are mindful of your actions and does has an amount of "Trial and Error" as you get to know the enemy patrolling routes The graphics are really good and detailed, but too repetitive in my opinion, and also some lighting clash with some HUD elements, some areas are so bright you cannot see the "Saving" indicator, or the collectible scanning ping, which bring my next point Collectibles, Tuning Forks and Energy Expansion fragments, if you plan on collecting them, you will be using most of your energy on the Scanner, the layouts and graphics of the game conceal way too good these collectibles and you are forced more often than not to using your scanner to find them, thankfully, each area has more Tuning Forks than you need, so there's that The story is really good and the characters are well developed, also a really good idea to put all the lore dialog in the walking areas, otherwise it would be distracting during combat Overall i rate this 5 stars because despite its cons, the game's mechanic is very well developed in my opinion
--- Pros --- Beautiful graphics Charming characters Great story Good controls --- Cons --- Misleading genre Incomplete world-building Game could be named "Tilo and the Fetch Quests" with how many they are Too vague hints at times While the game has the artistic beauties of graphics and story, it lacks in other areas, starting for the misleading genre, this game is published as an Action-Adventure-RPG, and while i can clearly see the Adventure part and little bits of RPG parts, but i failed to see the Action part, i jumped into it with some expectations based on the genre that were just not met The world-building lore is fantastic, sadly it feels incomplete since you don't visit half the places noted in lore, i grown with the expectations to visit some of the places at some point with how well detailed and attractive to explore the game puts them, but it just doesn't happen The game has a lot of fetch quests in a somewhat reduced area, which despite encouraging exploring every bit of the map, can become tedious by how repetitive your routes are Some objectives are a tad vague in my opinion, like "Search for the Smuggler's Mark in the Sewers" when you don't even know what this mark looks like i would recommend this game if you are up for a bit more relaxed approach story game, since that's its big forte, more in a way i would recommend a Point & Click Adventure than an Action game
