Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark Review (PC)

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a love letter to Final Fantasy Tactics fans, although it does improve on Square Enix's masterpiece in some aspects. The game shines when it comes to tactics and strategy, but it's definitely not perfect story-wise. Looking back in retrospective, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark does a great job in allowing players to discover the intricacies of settings up various character builds and the pleasure of taking on powerful monsters.

Even though Final Fantasy Tactics fans will feel right at home in the world of Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, the game is much more than a #ThrowbackThursday. For starters, the plethora of classes that you can unlock in the game if amazing, but, more importantly, you'll be able to hybridize your characters to match your playstyle.

Unlike other XCOM-like games, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark doesn't require players to specialize their characters in a single class. Hybrids work great in Fell Seal and the amount of customization is the core of the game. You can experiment with about two dozen classes that can be unlocked throughout the game, although some are hidden behind achievements or side quests, so if you want to unlock everything, you'll have to keep your eyes peeled.

Besides almost unlimited customization of your characters, players have an entire arsenal of weapons and items they can use to gear up their team of fighters. The item system is exceptionally easy to use and allows players to focus on the core aspects of the game, such as building their characters and winning the battles.

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In Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark you won't have to gather an impossible number of resources to replenish the items you're using in battles. The item system has been smartly implemented so that all items you're using during battles will replenish at the end. The catch is that you can only use an item a limited number of times during a battle, which makes perfect sense.

But it gets even better, as you can use resources you find in the world of Fell Seal to upgrade the item system to allow you to use certain items more than once in a battle. Be it healing potions, rock or any other item-specific ability, everything can be upgraded if you find the required materials.

Now that we've talked about some of the most important aspect of the game that are meant to prepare you for the battles to come, let's take an in-depth look at how the strategic part has been implemented.

You start with a small team of characters who are also part of the main story, but after the first few missions you can recruit many more to replace your wounded fighters. The main character of the game must always be in the party, but there are missions where other characters are required as well.

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It's very important to try and build a fairly large army from the beginning of the game since every time a character is downed in battle, it will suffer an injury that will lower most of its stats until it fully rests. Fully resting a character means that you must bench it for the next fight, so you absolutely need a suitable replacement (or you can avoid having of any of your characters die in a battle throughout the entire game).

Of course, you can choose to add injured characters to your party since many of them will be much more effective than a brand new character even if their stats are lowered. The bottom line is there's enough room for experimentation, not just concerning the build of your characters, but also when it comes to the composition of your party.

What I found a bit confusing is that allowing characters to get abilities from just about any class, it's almost impossible to determine what combos are the most effective and what classes work well together. It's true that you can experiment, but the amount of combinations is absolutely huge, so you might end up with a very solid party or a very weak one.

Not to mention that you'll have to gear up your characters to make them harder to hit or better at dealing damage. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of cosmetic options available that will allow you to make your characters unique, especially the new recruits that don't have a background story.

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Speaking of story, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark starts quite slow but the plot thickens after several hours. A little bit of advice though, don't get your hopes to high when it comes to narrative. The story is quite cliché and some of the dialogues are a bit childish considering the dark plot.

As far as the graphics and music go, I've found the developers' decision to adopt a more retro art style quite suitable for their project. The tunes are nice but become repetitive after a while, so a little bit of variations would have been nice. I'm quite sure that some will find the graphical style too retro for their tastes, but it's almost a perfect match for a Final Fantasy Tactics spiritual successor. The one thing where I think the game needs more work is animations. Such a good game deserves better spells animations than just a tad of pixels erupting on the screen.

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