Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark - Review @ RPGFan

Fell Seal: The Arbiter's Mark

"A truly magnificent game."

Fell Seal: The Arbiter's Mark is a strategy RPG by a small independent developer called 6 Eyes Studio, whose founding members were part of Studio Archcraft. You may remember Studio Archcraft as the ambitious indie developer that created Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled for the Nintendo DS back in 2009. Although I enjoyed Black Sigil, I concede that it was buggy in spots, had an obnoxious encounter rate, and lacked several quality-of-life elements that players look for in modern retro-style games. I am thrilled to say that the folks at 6 Eyes have grown more skilled in their craft since the Black Sigil days. Fell Seal is a lovingly crafted and smooth-playing strategy RPG that genre fans will love.
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It's no secret that I simply could not get enough of Fell Seal: The Arbiter's Mark. I must have sunk over 80 wonderful hours into the game, most of which were spent building up class levels to earn skills and see which classes I liked best for my play style. I tend to play games rather slowly and take ludicrous amounts of time to stop and smell the roses, so I believe that typical SRPG players could probably finish the game in 40-60 hours. Since it entered Early Access back in 2018, 6 Eyes Studio has been continuously improving the Fell Seal's aesthetics, balance, dialogue scripting, and various other minutiae up until release and beyond. They have also been extremely responsive to player feedback -- a strong indicator of how much they care. Their exhaustive efforts have yielded a truly magnificent game that SRPG aficionados simply must play.

Score: 90%

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Luckily what that guy suggests with the reckless stat resets and over-grinding isn't actually necessary to beat the game on max settings.

Grinding Crossroads is something you'll probably want to do, as is recruiting 10 characters (I do both those things), but don't bother resetting to Level 1 at Level 4. You don't lose enough AP fighting Crossroads at level 4 for that to ever be worth the money to invest in, and fighting them with your units at a higher level is how you avoid getting your face injured off (ie Permadeath). If you want a particular way to cut through the early game on Permadeath:

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Movements: When in battle, clicking on the map will act as if "move" had been clicked, which should reduce mouse movement on the screen when trying to move a unit with the mouse.

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Carnifex said:

I suspect there will be many more patches/updates for this game, as it's a rather recent release. The people behind the scenes seem to care a great deal for their product, which only serves to make the game the best that it can be.

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Been playing it for a few hours now, and I quite like the game. The job system is pretty fun and impactful, and the difficulty is pretty well adjusted, and not a dull walk in the park as most games in this genre tend to be. The art is beautiful in its simplicity and I quite liked that you have a number of customisation options for all your non-plot locked champions. You can choose between a variety of outfits/headgear/accessories for each of them, select their gender, input their name and even easily import portraits - all of which to me are kind of a big deal, and it baffles me that other developers can't bother or just choose not to do it sometimes.

AI could be better at times, especially when you have the usual "AI Ally" that just do their best to get killed in every situation while you do your best to protect them, but that's the smallest of negative things I can say. Can't expect to be blown off your feet either, it's a 2D tactic combat game with the usual "chase the villain" storyline (so far as I've played). But the things it does, it does them pretty well.

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