[h1]Fell Seal is an earnest homage to old-school SRPGs, but fails to execute impactful classes, strategic combat or balanced leveling systems. [/h1]
Let me start by saying Fell Seal is not a terrible game. It actually does most things right, especially where it counts these days (ie, no gacha DLCs, no punitive or predatory live service, no performance issues or game breaking bugs, etc).
I’d go so far as to say Fell Seal is a decent SRPG, complete with an [i]alright storyline[/i] that left me guessing when I was actually facing the last boss, with [i] decent main character story arcs[/i] and the [i]allure of mixing and matching more than a dozen classes[/i], which promises the experience of making your own ultimate warriors.
And at the best of times, it is [b]FUN[/b] and [b]REWARDING[/b] to see your leveling efforts materialize as a character who can stomp equal level enemies in one turn. It has that [b]NOSTALGIA[/b] factor that made older SRPGs so memorable and innovative.
It’s just that those moments were far and few between for me. The rest of the time, it was a frustrating slog. Here’s why:
[h1]CRITICISMS:[/h1]
[list]
[*][b][u] Limited Enemy AI and Team Compositions[/u][/b]:
Despite the vast variety of classes, monsters and builds presented, it always seemed like I was up against enemy teams whose strategy focused on healing, cleansing debuffs and resurrecting their team members ad-nauseum. This team composition also appeared to be designed to focus fire low health, lown DEF/RES characters first, making tanking or defensive strategies very difficult to implement.
Predictably, by prioritizing healing, reviving and cleansing debuffs, they made it difficult for debuff/buff stacking classes to be effective or trigger combos that required multiple turns to set up. It made every combat longer and repetitive if you didn’t prioritize raw damage, range and movement speed.
[b]This is a fine strategy to face [i]occasionally.[/i] As it highlights the advantages of certain classes over others, and obviously made me think about the classes and skills I would need to counter such a strategy.[/b]
However, it seemed to me that this was the default strategy meta of the AI. So rather than needing to diversify a team of multiple different classes with different strategies, the only real counter-strategy then became front loading damage, range and move speed.
This monotony of strategy, really sets the need to create fast, potent, effective class hybrids, which the game design seemed to resist.
[*][b][u] Oddly balanced Class Abilities, Passive Skills and Weapon Proficiency[/u][/b]:
I spent a [b]LOT[/b] of time looking at each of the classes, excited to make my own hybrid combinations. And the experience was frustrating and disappointing for a few reasons:
[olist]
[*][b]Classes varied wildly in terms of usability[/b] It felt like some classes had just the right combination of features that enable them to have the best weapon proficiencies, the best stat growth rates, the best abilities and the best default skills. Meanwhile other classes were very niche and didn’t have a lot of passive skills or equipment to make them decent [spoiler]Peddler, Engineer,Assassin[/spoiler].
[*][b]Not all weapons were useful, or had Endgame level variants:[/b]
This was actually shocking to me. Any other RPG would have a wide variety of weapons to choose from within a specific power tier. I often wondered if the developers just quit building certain weapons halfway through the game.
By having certain weapon classes not have endgame variants, or not having attributes that really fit which hybrid or primary classes that use them, it made optimizing hybrid characters very difficult.
[*][b]Stat Growth dependent on Primary Class:[/b]
This was my least favorite design decision. It meant that not only did I have to painstakingly design a new class from scratch, but I”d have to occasionally just change to some other sub-optimal class in order to shore up one of the lower stats or to grow an additional stat.
[*][b]Mana System:[/b]
Another questionable design decision- mana starts at zero and goes up by 10 points per round. This meant many casters couldn’t use their spells every round, or had to go idle a few turns to save up for their most powerful spells. Admittedly, there were a few ways to sustainably generate mana every round, but then this took up the passive skill slots that could have gone to other spell casting passives.
[/olist]
In the end, it became clear that not all the content the game provided was usable in a practical capacity to match the strategic meta. Eventually I was forcibly funneled into a very narrow set of hybrid classes that actually worked, which varied in power from “sufficient” to “overpowered”.
[*][b][u] No Menu QoL or Loadouts[/u][/b]:
Additionally, I spent what felt like WAY too much time in menus: queuing and re-queuing DLC Guild missions, manually re-configuring skills, items, classes and load outs for each battle, for each mission, or having to switch a character to another class to grind stats then switch them back to actual play a mission.
In particular, I often had to switch items from one character to another and there is no streamlined way to do this. You must go several levels deep into the equip menu to equip an item, only to get a warning message that it is equipped on someone else, only to have to back out 2 levels, back down two levels on the other character, un-equip the item, then reverse the process to equip it to the originally intended character. Some modernization of the menu systems would have been lovely.
[/list]
[h1]TLDR:[/h1]
On paper, this is a decent game. It does a lot of things right, or at least satisfactorily. I think the developer wins points for having a bug-free, functioning product and for NOT having any predatory live-service BS, launchers or loot boxes.
But the mechanics themselves were curiously balanced and made creating my own home brew classes frustrating and disappointing. The itemization didn’t help.
The combat was repetitive, boring and uniform, seeming to force a single play style to make it manageable or fun. (I played on Veteran, so maybe that's my fault, but it was still disappointing).
And finally, altogether too much time was spent on micromanaging, fiddling with the menu system and load outs rather than actual, strategic game play.
If you can find this game on sale, I would suggest getting it. I think it may be worthwhile to support a company that is at least trying to do the gaming industry justice at this point. After all, the game did have genuinely good moments.
I just recall a lot of those moments were separated by [b]hours[/b] of time spent that was neither fun nor worthwhile in hindsight.
