It’s easy to feel like every single mid-to-late-game map in Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is soul-crushingly awful, but in reality, only around half of them are. That’s still far too much gameplay that’s held back by busywork, especially since the explosion of status effects that most often bogs down Fell Seal‘s gameplay can cause the bad maps to last 2-4 times longer than the good ones, but there are glimmers of potential that shine through all the way through to the end. It’s just hard to give the game credit for the things it does right when the things it does wrong are so egregious.

There’s no reason for so many fights to throw endless enemy reinforcements at you or hit units with status effects designed to stretch out maps by forcing you to waste turns healing them. Sometimes, you’re handed interesting gameplay tools, only for enemies to begin showing immunity to those tools almost immediately. Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is so concerned with being unpredictable that you’re constantly coming across new skills and classes that mandate slowly scrolling through enemy skill lists in order to avoid being caught off-guard halfway into a map. Strategy RPGs are at their best when they feel like puzzle games with a range of possible solutions, allowing for creative answers to the questions their mechanics pose. Fell Seal is more like a puzzle game that’s constantly changing its rules solely to stretch out the amount of time it takes to finish.

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark review navigation (click to jump to section): Story review | Gameplay review | Bugs and issues | Visuals and music review

Fell Seal‘s story is one of those straightforward “janitor of destiny” ones

The story goes that long ago, a group of seven heroes defeated an unfathomable evil and became immortal as a result. They created a council and began to put the world back together, but their limited numbers forced them to rely on “Arbiters,” human stand-ins who act in their name and are granted a great deal of authority as a result. Main character Kyrie is one of the few incorruptible Arbiters, as is her brother, Reiner, and protege, Anadine. When one of the immortals steps down and needs to be replaced by a new immortal, however, the trio (and some friends they make along the way) gets swept up in the chaos, with one of the immortals nominating Kyrie for the position. Forced to visit various temples and deal with the attacks of various bandits, wild animals, and other immortal nominations looking to increase their chance of ending up on the council, the group is left with no choice but to fix what’s broken in each of the areas they visit, eventually saving the world in the process.

I don’t know that I’ve ever actually explained what I mean when I describe a story or character with that “janitor of destiny” bit. Basically, it’s the kind of story where something is broken and the character/s fix it with very little struggle or trouble on their part. It’s the kind of story where problems are mopped up almost as soon as they appear, and your characters are always perfectly equipped to handle the situation without anything spiraling out of control.

That’s not inherently a bad thing—I always prefer capable characters over inept ones—but it can also rob the storytelling of stakes and feel more like a guided tour heading toward an inevitable conclusion than a bona fide journey. After all, if your characters can overcome everything that comes their way with little trouble, any later attempt to curb their competence and place them at a disadvantage comes across as an arbitrary limitation designed solely to hobble them for drama rather than arriving naturally at that dramatic moment.

And that’s Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark‘s storytelling in a nutshell. Every problem that arises is quickly fixed until you reach the “bad” ending—the only ending you’re likely to see unless you’re glued to a guide while playing—and realize that a perfect victory isn’t in the cards anymore because the game wants to be dramatic and push you toward the labyrinthine, arguably nonsensical series of steps required to obtain the “good” ending. Most of the characters are perfectly likable, but the limits of their skill aren’t established well enough for their shortcomings to drive the plot naturally, forcing Fell Seal to create drama by making Kyrie too stupid to read the room and ask followup questions at key points. It could be handled better.

The gameplay has positives, but also status effects and difficulty spikes

Gameplay-wise, Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is a strategy RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, which means lots of menus and mountainous terrain that can occasionally make it difficult to tell how far a character will be able to move on their turn. Games like this are less about the per-map strategy of unit placement and teamwork than they are preparation, and that preparation comes in many forms; each unit can equip a weapon, some armor, and a handful of accessories, some of which grant bonuses, inflict status debuffs, or protect againts specific statuses or magical elements. Each unit also has to choose a class, and these classes unlock new attacks, abilities, counterattacks, and passive bonuses. Once unlocked, a unit will benefit from all of the passive bonuses and abilities (but not counterattacks since you can only have one equipped at a time) of their selected class, and they can also carry the abilities of a secondary class with them, along with two passives from other classes.

To put that more simply, characters learn and benefit from their current class, but regularly switch in favor of a new class, often trading short-term competency for long-term flexibility.

Some of the class and skill combinations you can stumble across are incredibly powerful, though you’re generally looking for four things: the ability to push enemies a block back (useful for pushing a unit that can’t swim or float into a body of water or lava for an instant-kill), a skill that inflicts a status effect (it rarely matters which; it’ll be healed almost immediately either way, so this is mostly to waste an opponent’s turn), a long-range attack (because enemies tend to be more mobile than you toward the end of the game), and a skill that heals either HP or statuses (to speed things up).

If you’re looking for a game where each unit can fulfill a very specific purpose, think again; enemies tend to gang up on your characters, and thanks to some pretty severe difficulty spikes, it’s possible to lose a character or two before they even get a second turn. That is, unless every one of your characters is flexible enough to do a little of everything. The gameplay in Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is much like its storytelling—perfectly fine in theory, but inconsistent enough in practice to screw everything up. One of its biggest problems is the abundance of status effects. Before long, you’re constantly getting hit by statuses that disable all of your skills, disable your magic, make it impossible to heal HP, deal damage over time, cause your character to fight on behalf of the enemy, and a bunch of other things. There are so many status effects and so few equippable slots for countering these effects.

All of Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark‘s decisions are designed to waste your time

Okay, I just checked my screenshots: there are 15 different status effects you can be hit with. Enemies at the end of the game have the super fun ability to shrug off status effects after a single turn and/or inflict them onto you instead, too, so status effects are balanced more in enemies’ favor than yours. That’s doubly the case when you factor in injuries. Fell Seal doesn’t have character permadeath, but characters who fall in battle become injured and have their stats lowered by 10%. Injuries can stack, as well, and the only way to heal injuries is to finish a battle without that character in the group. Since main story maps tend to be battles of attrition that require every one of your most powerful units, you’re bound to instead “patrol” a cleared map node filled with easy enemies and spend 5-10 minutes dealing with that to heal your characters. Before you unlock gun-using characters, you can expect to obtain 1-2 character injuries per map, which then requires clearing pointless optional maps that many times to get everyone back in fighting shape. The injury system, like so much else in Fell Seal, serves no purpose but to waste your time.

Enemy item usage is also designed to waste your time. Taking out the hardest enemy on the map is difficult enough that watching someone use a resurrection and full-heal item on them almost immediately afterward is draining. Game mechanics don’t benefit from being Sisyphean. I’d gladly give up my ability to resurrect units if it meant enemies couldn’t.

Speaking of things that I don’t care for, it takes a truly embarrassing amount of time to unlock gun-using characters despite enemies having access to that class toward the early-middle part of the game. Guns have the greatest range in Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, so you’re constantly at a disadvantage while you grind through other classes trying to figure out how to unlock them. Once you do, the difficulty is trivialized; sometimes, the map clear screen shows an “MVP” character who did the most, and that was my gunner 100% of the time once I had them in the party. No one else could keep up.

There’s nothing—and I mean nothing—that bothers me more than Fell Seal‘s map node system, though. I’ve played games like this where node colors actually mean something, but the node colors mean nothing in this game. Blue nodes are sometimes towns, but they can also be completed events. Blue nodes sometimes trigger battles, as well. Green nodes are usually completed fights that can be patrolled to trigger an optional fight, but they can also be events or main story fights. Red nodes are usually the next story mission fight, but they also have an annoying habit of being nothing but cutscenes. Any node can mean anything. The hardest map in the entire game is an ambush that hits you in a blue node. A game that centers around preparation making it impossible to prepare properly for anything is game-breakingly counterproductive.

I do like the visuals, though even they can cause a problem or two

Fell Seal‘s art style is actually pretty cool, all things considered. Its “drawn” look comes with the tradeoff that you can’t pan the camera to get a better look of the battlefield, which means figuring out which spaces are adjacent in mountainous terrain can be difficult, and there’s one map filled with tall grass that exists solely to hide enemies in a very cheap way, but the colorful art ranges from fine to excellent most of the time. I’ve heard some people gush about the soundtrack, too, but I came away feeling that it’s only slightly above average. Part of the reason for that is that all of the “battle” tracks are similarly bombastic, and since 90% of your time will be spent in these fights that refuse to end, the soundtrack starts to sound a bit same-y. I do have a deep appreciation for the music that plays in the troop menu, however, and with a better story that allowed the soundtrack to reflect more interesting and specific circumstances than “everyone fighting again,” it’s easy to see how it could have been excellent.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ -- 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark review – Wasted potential first appeared on Killa Penguin