Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a game made by just two people, which is an explaination - and probably also an excuse - for its shortcomings.

Allow me to do the one thing this game never does, and keep it brief:

It's a tactics RPG. That's Fire Emblem for the kids and Final Fantasy Tactics for their lonely uncles. You manage a veritable fleet of characters in a series of battles, pruning stats and specialities all the while like rosebuds to help them florish into beautifully be-petalled killing machines.

Imagine being tasked to take down a wall brick by brick, but there's someone on the other side replacing each brick as quickly as you can remove them. That's what a tactics RPG feels like when enemies can fully heal themselves at a moments notice, indefinitely. Winning is down to finding a way to do 1% more damage than they're able to heal. And even then, there's the potentially infinite revives to deal with. Basic 6v6 battles can thus take half an hour, most of which is spent on actions that are immediately undone.

The story, characters and all that is gathered under the umbrella of "writing" are atrocious. No ifs, no buts: astonishingly bad. On its own, however, this does not really matter, but what it does do is turn your attention to everything else, which, given a keener eye, ain't in great nick.

There's no need to go into specifics here because I would go on forever; instead, here's how it reads:

Fell Seal: Arbiters Mark is the result of a project to make a T-RPG. Not a particularly good one, not aparticularly innovative one, just a "one." It succeeds, the devs should be proud, etc. etc., but I don't care. There is no inspiration, charm, genius, or, on that note, much in the way of intelligence. I challenge players to spend a moment looking at any of the game's parts without figuring out a way of doing it better. This extends from its writing, UI, job system, world, progression, cutscenes and skills to its name. It's all there, it all kind of works, it's just so dispiritingly mediocre.

If I'm coming across too much "the bitter wind of user feedback" it's because, on top of everything else, the game's a bit frustrating.

Start here: "Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark"

While Square Enix is leaving the Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre sub-franchises dormant, some indie devs are like yeah we can take a shot at it. And this is what we have with Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a kickstarter backed game that is a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics in many ways. The turn-based grid combat and the class changes, it keeps a lot of the systems from that game and expands on it.

Even if it's inspired from games that were released 25 years ago, it's not quite easy to match a AAA budget of then even with the tools we have today. The first thing that stands out is the character art and animation which leaves a little to be desired, while the environments are pretty well designed there's just something that is off about the art of the game in general but you do get used to it. Other than that the storyline is decent but not amazing, it's not something that will keep you gripped on what happens next. But for a new studio, I think they did a fair job at creating a new universe and possibly franchise.

The gameplay is where it's at. If you are fiending for that classic SRPG feel, this game surely delivers. The battles are excellent with a good variety of units, from front-liners, long-range units and spell casters. Each of your units will have a main class and a sub-class, so you can create all these odd combinations like a Knight Wizard or a Gunner Warmage. After you've mastered a class through ability, your unit gets a permanent passive bonus and can apply some passive (or counter) abilities learned to his next class. There's some pretty powerful combinations to create, and you'll want to learn the more classes possible. There is a total of 20 basic classes to learn, but there is more when you add unique story characters and classes that are learnt through the item badges. Overall this creates a lot of management, after every battle you will want to apply your ability points to each of your units so that they learn new abilities and progress your class. Another interesting concept is the item system, you are able to re-use your items for each battle but only have a limited amount of them. You can craft new ones (or improve them) with components you find from defeated enemies.

The game is all fun and dandy for the first half (20 hours or so), and it's not that the game falls apart after that, but it's mostly the same repeating for the rest of the game. This is not a problem specifically with this game in particular, most long RPGs do have the issue of keeping things exciting and non-repetitive when reaching the later parts of the game. It's very rare that an RPG is able to elevate its gameplay near the end, so not really sure if it's something that can be blamed here. There's a few flaws that come up as you spend time with the game, the injured system for one is a really good idea on paper but since you can just re-do the easiest patrol to get your injured units back in shape... it eventually just becomes a waste of time that you need to do over and over again. When the battles get too difficult, you can either try to improve your strategy or lineup, or you can just grind out a few levels and additional classes and usually will do the trick to progress further. Again perhaps not a major flaw but it's somewhat removes the challenge to do, but requires a lot of hours of doing redundant battles.

All in all Fell Seal is an excellent game if you can get over the art and the little flaws here and there. I surely had a good time with it and perhaps not quite as good as the all-time Final Fantasy Tactics classic, but it's definitely a worthy spiritual successor. I enjoyed unlocking and mastering all these classes, and it's really got a good battle system that can definitely whoop your ass if you aren't careful. So for fans of the SRPG genre, it's a game that I would recommend looking into.