Fell Seal: Full Recommendations

Terrible pun...just...just shameful.

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is a game that reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics, as it should. The whole game is a love letter to various games the two devs appreciate as much as I do. Fortunately, it all works well and even stands on its own. The classes, story, named characters, and world all function without outside influence. But, of course, let’s talk about things I hate.

This game is hard! I got frustrated and annoyed at so many things. I feel like every enemy character can, and does, heal frequently. Between items, magic, and various defensive moves, I’d often see my stuff be quickly null and voided. How many turns did I waste to be undone by revives, auto-revives, random auto-revive, full potions, etc.?  I felt like I was up against players. I saw so many cheese strats that I absolutely hated. In the post-game dungeon, I ran into a woman who floated and had a skill called cleave equipped, which allowed her to get two actions so long she got a kill. Not only that, but she loved to use Sabotage, a skill that swaps the user and target's positions, on my character, pulling them into lava. I had no effective counter to her other than massive DPS. I also ran into dual wielding gun users who can attack as many times as their allies do and more than enough reusable Critical: Rebirth skills. It makes me hate the game. I don’t, but I specialize in knee jerk reactions. I’m also not fond of the frequency of status effects this game has. So much poison, bleed, and cripples. Bleed and poison did as much damage to me as cold steel did.

I found many of the classes to be quite samey. There are four branches of jobs in the game: warrior, range, offensive magic, and curative magic. The magic users, especially, can feel a bit monotonous. All the black mages do similar damage, even when it’s pinpoint targeted. The same can be said for the white mages. A part of me wishes there was an ultimate job class for the routes. That way, I’d feel like it all went somewhere and would even open for more customization between my classes. I wanted to mix and match, but I always felt like I needed my basic jobs for reliable damage/healing. Advanced classes specialize, which is great, but they also lose needed utility. Sometimes I need AoE healing, and sometimes I need a single target option. I can’t reliably get that from anything other than the level one class.

But that’s all I didn’t like. And, even within that hate are great ideas.

The difficulty, for example, can be adjusted. When you boot up the game, you have several options. You can turn off enemy items, revives, and some reaction skills. You can weigh it in your favor or give your enemies an edge over you. I choose the annoying ones, but, honestly, it’s pretty fair. Why should I alone get to use Phoenix Ashes to revive? I do think having mindless beasts using potions is lame, though. I’d also have undead mobs he harmed by them, too. I like that aspect of healing and have helped a little when it comes to my annoyances.

When it comes to the classes, that just leads to more diversity. Ultimately, I think the game is designed to have 12-18 troops in your party. I turned the injury system off, so I never built that many. Because of the number of troops, you can have your units specialize and bring a general use squad into battle. You can know that your diversity can lead to someone being useful. I’m hoping that made sense... You can see you're enemies before the battle begins and everything about them, and you adjust accordingly. There are so many options, you might as well use them all! Also, I’m curious if all of my mods altered my perspective. I lost sight of default classes to mod classes. And speaking of mods, seriously, there are mods! You can add whatever you want, and it looks fairly easy with a basic understanding of coding. What’s stopping me from modding in that Ultimate Class?

Now for the things the game does great:
I liked most of the characters, Yates aside. Kyrie being a no-nonsense straight line knight in a world where she’s a dying kind is an interesting concept. She isn’t chosen by birth but chosen by her actions. She deserves to be the world saver by what she's done and not by her name. Anadine being a naive trainee isn’t a new idea, but there’s a lot of ways the game takes it, especially in the easy ending. She has her moments of doubt with the Council, just like her mother, but she sees the need for some governance in this corrupt world. I love how her armor has more growth than the characters in Final Fantasy XII. Both endings make me think the devs are planning a sequel, which I hope focuses on character development. That is the one thing that I felt was lacking. Kyrie remained the stoic leader the whole game, with barely any deviation from that. Law abiding citizens are boring. I’d also like to see more from Reiner. We see callbacks to his youth as a thief with his generalized ability to stay out of sight, track people, and live off the land. But we also the occasional ruthless idea pop into his head. He’s an interesting character and could be a driving force for something. A proper conclusion between him and his backstory would have been nice, though. The basics are there; now expand on them. I’m probably asking a lot from a two person dev team, so I hope no one takes this as a criticism. The overarching story is more than enough to blind me to my insignificant critiques.

I love fighting corrupt religions in games. I love it more when that corruption is explained with several impetuses. I like learning about mythologies and any potential explainable causes of it. This game has that. At the start of the game, you have several questions. What really is this great monster, The Maw? Why are the Immortals immortal? Why are they not actually immortal? All of these questions get answered.

There's character customization! Your characters may have one job, but you can dress them up in another. There are even a few you can unlock along the way. And each outfit, and headgear, have several colors to choose from to personalize them even more. Faces, hairstyles, beards, skin color: it's all interchangeable.

The music was fitting, but I wasn’t wowed by anything. I didn’t give anything the proper listen to at the time of writing, but the soundtrack is on Soundcloud, so it’s an easy fix. The graphics were great. Everything that needed to stand out did, and I never got my characters confused with NPCs despite my team not having a uniform color palette. The game was smooth, and you can make it faster in the settings.

With the combination of a great story, fun characters, solid battle system, character customization, gameplay customization, file customization, and the 50 hours I put into it, I can safely say that Fell Seal isn’t just a clone of FFT and Tactics Ogre. It's an unbelievably spectacular game, especially with only two full times dev. It showed up to the SRPG table, stole a chair, and Ricky Bobbied its way into the club, and my heart.