You know, for a game that knew exactly what to emphasize and avoid early on, Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark makes a whole bunch of bizarre, arguably amateurish decisions later in the game. This time around, the problems are levels that infinitely spawn enemies who exist solely to pester you, an unexpected boss fight/ambush that’s significantly harder than anything before or since, and enemies who have become so much better at healing and damage-dealing than my units by this point that they can kill a freshly-healed character in a single blow. Also, there are counterattacks that teleport any attacking unit to a random point on the map; I’ve said it a million times when covering strategy games, but positioning is sacred. When abilities can move units around, all of the strategy afforded by clever positioning is lost and you’re left with tedious attrition warfare.

This boss fight shouldn’t have taken me 50 minutes to beat, but its attack pattern is designed to waste your time. First, it inflicts the “root” status effect that makes it impossible to move. All of my units had a counterattack that gave them the “fleet of foot” buff (which increases their movement range and removes the root effect), but it seemed like this didn’t always trigger. There are so many things to keep track of at once that I never figured out why that is, but I’m tempted to believe that the counterattack doesn’t trigger if fleet of foot is still active on that character, allowing them to become stuck in place since root is only removed when fleet of foot is initially activated. That becomes a problem because this boss does a high-damage lunge everyone very much needs to avoid. Not only that, but it follows up said lunge by spawning a tanky enemy unit.

There are three of these bosses active at once, too, all of whom can do this at any time, so it doesn’t take long before you’re so busy defeating summoned enemies to avoid becoming overwhelmed by their numbers that you can barely muster one or two attacks on the actual boss.

It’s not possible to skip past dialogue that occurs mid-battle, so the above video will have some mid-battle spoilers that I tried to skip past quickly. I wouldn’t normally have included this video, but it’s a significant difficulty spike that comes out of nowhere. What happens is that the story has you double back around to where the game first started, which has been a safe blue node for 13-14 hours, only for this node to trigger an ambush.

If you opted not to save between levels in the mistaken belief that it’s safe to head there and buy some new equipment, you’re basically screwed, as you’re ambushed by high-level enemies. Not only that, but a boss shows up after a few turns and he can teleport around (including out of most characters’ attack ranges) and do some real damage. You’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your opponents will use every dirty trick you’ve seen up to this point to extend the fight until your units start dropping like flies. I won with only two characters still standing, and even they were at or near 1 HP by that point thanks to the boss inflicting the “bleed” status effect (damage over time that can’t knock out a unit) as a counterattack.

Unexpected battles that you’re inevitably unprepared for are annoying. Bosses who join the fray out of nowhere and upend your current strategy are also annoying. Isn’t the point of strategy games to present an escalating challenge and then leave you to find a way to leverage mechanics and overcome it? Things always go predictably sour when strategy games get hung up on finding ways to surprise the player in the mistaken belief that more difficult enemies and win conditions aren’t interesting enough on their own. It’s kind of like if someone found chess boring and developed a chess game where random, unmarked spaces transformed pieces into other pieces. That would certainly be surprising, but it would also completely undermine the underlying strategy of the game. Fell Seal‘s surprise-based gameplay is basically that, and I hate it.

The video above consists of two separate attempts to make it through this map, both of which ended in ragequits. I did eventually get past it (after grinding an easy map to fix the injury that kept me from bringing along my trap-based character and abusing aggro ranges to lure enemies to my group one at a time). This map makes it easier than ever to see the gap between what enemies can do and what my characters can do, though.

Their healing spells are significantly stronger, their damage output is significantly higher, their counter abilities are significantly better (some enemies have the ability to gain a buff that resurrects them as soon as their health becomes critical, meaning the only way to defeat them is by taking their health down to around a third of its max and finishing them off with a single big blow), and their classes are advanced enough to give them more strategic options than I currently have available. This would be easier to overcome if there were more ranged classes available, but most classes can only use melee weapons, so even the best of my ranged units eventually have to move into a melee class to learn new abilities.

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark – Day 6: Surprise bosses first appeared on Killa Penguin