Up to this point, I’ve been very complimentary of Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, but honeymoons have a way of ending, and the tiny little cracks that were once minor irritations become major hassles. I chose the “veteran” difficulty, which is “normal” according to Fell Seal, and one of its many disabled difficulty options pertains to weighted hit chances. Basically, a true 90% chance to hit never feels like what you’d expect from that probability because it’s easy to take for granted how many characters you have attacking. It becomes easy to view 90% as “almost 100%” and mentally round up, inevitably becoming frustrated by how often your attacks miss. That’s why modern Fire Emblem games roll your attack twice so that high hit chances almost always land and low hit chances almost never do, and Fell Seal‘s weighted hit chance likely does something similar.

But I’ve played a lot of strategy games that don’t have weighted hit chances, and Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark‘s non-weighted hit probabilities seem weirdly balanced in opponents’ favor even on those terms. It feels like enemies have an unerring ability to inflict my characters with status effects, whereas mine struggle mightily to inflict them with less serious debuffs. The problem is that this doesn’t increase the difficulty so much as the time investment required to reach that victory. The pacing of largely melee battles is great, but when opponents start disabling your units’ special moves, sticking them in place, and inflicting poison and bleed, you have to waste time fixing that before you can engage your opponent. The cherry on top is that even when opponents are defeated, they can be resurrected to stretch out combat even more. Unless you defeat them with a highly specialized strike or have a necromancer resurrect them as a zombie ally, enemies can spam resurrect to stretch out simple encounters.

More often than not, the best strategy is to hang back in a position you can defend and then rush forward with no regard for your units’ health once you’ve depleted your opponent’s ranks. Characters don’t die when defeated in battle. Instead, they receive injuries that reduce their stats until you’ve finished a combat encounter without them. In theory, this incentivizes you to hire new characters at the guild, but in practice, you have no reason to do that because of how you can only bring 4-6 characters into combat. Anyone you hire will just sit on the sidelines.

I’ve found myself patrolling one of the early map nodes instead, completing an easy battle to get everyone back in top shape. It shouldn’t be faster to throw your characters away and then grind out a quick map to heal them. Unfortunately, the status effects and resurrection items enemies sometimes spam (and sometimes don’t—I restarted the map in the embedded video after having enemies resurrect 3 different characters, only for them not to raise a single person once I started recording) harms the pacing so badly that viewing them as disposable is practically required.

My hope is that later classes unlock status immunities. Without more ways of avoiding specific statuses, Fell Seal is going to become a grind.

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark – Day 3: Cracks are showing first appeared on Killa Penguin