Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

Invariably, this game will be compared to Final Fantasy Tactics, which is fair. I'll start with the positive. -Mechanically, the combat is arguably superior to FFT and Tactics Ogre (I would throw in Disgaea as well, although that's apples vs. oranges and open to personal taste). The Mercenary starting class is the perfect evolution of Squire/Soldier from their respective games, and I was using its kit as a secondary ability on one of my recruits until the very last chapter. The Mender (healing mage which is this game's answer to the FFT Chemist) has an excellent kit that I was using as a secondary up through the final encounter, but there are alternatives. The Mender does not have a monopoly on good healing, unlike the chemist and/or the calculator/arithmetician from FFT, but it's still an end-game option. To be frank, there are no totally useless classes, and the game previews classes that you have yet to unlock once their prerequisites are all obtained. I could go on about the mechanics all day. They're top notch, and frankly surpass their inspirations. -Monster design is also, in my opinion, better than the inspirations of this title. -Game balance feels excellent on Veteran difficulty. The difficulty spikes are mild, up until the penultimate chapter when the difficulty takes a jump. However, it wasn't unbeatable. It was just harder. FFT's first chapter is arguably the hardest, other than the infamous fight gauntlet at the end of Chapter 3. Fell Seal's difficulty feels more like it climbs as the game goes on, as it should. Now for the negatives, relatively speaking -The human characters don't look so great. Kyrie's design is strong, but everyone else looks pretty generic. The non-story characters have customizable aesthetics, which is nice... but few of the outfits really pop the way the previous Tactics games did. -The 2D maps can be hard to read at times, which was never a problem in SNES Tactics Ogre. Some maps look pretty, some look not so pretty, but it can be hard to tell perspective at times. -The art style in general does have a 'mobile game' look to it that I wasn't crazy about. -The soundtrack was no Final Fantasy Tactics, nor a Tactics Ogre. -The writing is no FFT, either. Tactics Ogre also had excellent writing. Fell Seal does not, to be polite. -To save myself more nitpicks, the presentation is much weaker than the games that inspired it. So the combat mechanics, which are the core of the game, are 11/10. Presentation overall is like 6/10 at best. But if you love games like this, you owe it to yourself to play this game.