I’ve played Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark for something like five and a half hours at this point, and it’s kind of surprising how quickly that time has gone by. Almost every character unlocks a new ability in their current class after almost every battle, so each fight is followed by decisions about how to upgrade everyone’s skill trees. These skill trees are binary decisions for the most part and units get a stat bonus for each class that they master, meaning you’ll inevitably strive to unlock everything in each class regardless of whether it’s immediately useful or not, but the constant stream of new stuff helps Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark‘s gameplay to feel significantly faster than other games of this type even though it really isn’t.

I’m trying my best to avoid spoilers for the story, which is harder than it probably sounds because all of the characters have things happening to them almost constantly. Everyone is likable in their own way, and while the dialogue has a tendency to meander at points, it corrects itself quickly and has been a non-issue thus far. I’m still concerned about long-term plot developments, but the underlying politics between immortals and their pawns are proving to be more interesting than I expected. Many of the story beats and character dynamics are familiar jRPG tropes (like a string of successes suddenly becoming subverted by someone falling ill), but unlike in the jRPGs where they’re usually found, these events come and go quickly and are used more to set up later story developments than waste the player’s time. That keeps them from becoming grating.

Last time, the post title was “classy strategy,” reflecting my belief that each unit would fulfill a specific role and grow to be more specialized. In addition to being a tad on the clickbaity side, the “classless strategy” in today’s title reflects the fact that I wasn’t entirely right to think that. All of my units have become unique in their own ways, but everyone’s class experience is slightly shared between all of your units (even those not part of the battle), ensuring that everyone can jump into almost any available class. For example, when my rogue character mastered his starting class and needed to obtain a level 3 in the Mender class—each upgrade increases your class level by one—to unlock the Gambler class that I was aiming for, he had already obtained enough Mender class experience thanks to my dedicated healer that he started at level 2. Another cool thing is that he was still capable of doing a decent amount of damage as a healer; not only are stats largely the same after class changes, but you can also have two classes equipped at once. This allowed him to use all of his backstab and blinding skills while gaining Mender experience.

It’s an interesting system because while your characters are seeing experience thrown around left and right for all kinds of different classes, only being able to access the moves of a secondary class and equip some of the passive bonuses and one counterattack you’ve learned forces you to consider their current needs and what complements your play style. Effectively, units learn so many different things from so many different classes that you have the freedom to make them all play distinctly. I’m a big fan of that kind of customization, especially when it comes to sRPGs.

All of this has been very complimentary, so I’m going to finish with something that I don’t particularly care for: maps designed solely to make it difficult to figure out relative distances or see enemies. This “tall grass” level is especially irritating for no discernible reason, as you’re already being asked to defeat a fleeing enemy before they can escape. Tack on enemies with absurd defense against physical damage (as in, most of the damage you can do with your story characters unless you enlisted an additional wizard as I did) and tanky enemies who flank you from both sides and are almost entirely obscured by grass until they attack, and you have a recipe for annoyance. Hiding enemies is bad level design.

I feel similarly about the maps with large numbers of vertical elements. It’s always frustrating moving to a spot that looks adjacent to an enemy, only for the elevation difference to be just large enough to make a melee attack impossible. Bumpy mountainous areas can also be hard to read thanks to the camera angle, and they can cut off character movement ranges in unexpected ways that make traversing the area feel like Fire Emblem‘s desert maps (in which most units have to move square by square, slowly advancing toward enemies). This appears to be a sin inherited from Final Fantasy Tactics, but there’s no real reason someone couldn’t have found a more intuitive way of handling elevation in Fell Seal.

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark – Day 2: Classless strategy first appeared on Killa Penguin