Fell Seal has good visuals, music, and characters. It gets a lot of things right and could make for a pleasant, fun gaming experience. But this depends on two factors: either a lowered difficulty setting or certain advantageous character classes. If you want to play the game on "veteran" difficulty or above, expect to be forced to play it a specific way. The game is strangely unbalanced. When trying to grind for experience, conquered levels you re-enter to patrol are often much harder than the main levels, forcing you to waste time finding cheap ways to jack up experience. The game throws a massive slew of spells at your characters, anything and everything done to weaken them. Silly class combinations mean every enemy has god-like powers. And your own attempts to weaken the opposition are fruitless, as your opponents heal any bad status effects instantly. Dead enemies are brought back to life, sometimes multiple times, at later levels. I jacked up my characters to deal with the main quest more easily, and was cruising along as I should have been, but then I did a side quest and found it pretty much unbeatable. I reduced the difficulty setting to "casual" and still barely prevailed (yes, with jacked up characters). That's unbalanced and ugly level design. Not to mention, there are one-hit kills that can be used against you and WILL be used against you, causing you die by falling into water (huh?) So why is the game acceptable? Because you can adjust these settings to make the experience more reasonable, and because the main quest is often easier than grinding on the conquered levels. My feeling is the developers lost touch with the balance of the game, and overcompensated with silly, overblown enemy tactics for fear it would be too easy. This is a lazy, amateurish move that definitely weakens the overall product. But still, the game is worth buying if one understands its flaws and works around them, and it should make a fine addition one's strategy game library.
