Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

[h1]Fail Seal: Off The Mark[/h1] Fell Seal is a class-building combat game, some would say in the vein of FF Tactics. You fight turn-based battles on predefined colorful maps that require tactics and strategy - well, maybe (more on that later). And in that it largely succeeds. The game has a wide variety of enemies, skills and classes across a variety of challenging encounters. But I just can't do it anymore. Fell Seal's story is one of the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of playing. It's not just stupid but downright moronic. I just can't tolerate the absolute misery of this tale to bother finishing the game even though I think I'm getting fairly close. I'm done. [u]What Works[/u] The #1 thing this game has going for it is the huge variety of classes and unlocks. Your character basically has a primary and secondary class, each with their own skills. As you play and use those skills, you'll level those classes and with the DLC there's more than 30 classes. Leveling certain combinations of classes, sometimes with certain required gear, will unlock other classes with yet even more abilities and skills. For instance, level up a Merc and you'll unlock a Knight. Level up that knight (along with other classes) and you'll eventually unlock a Gunner. Get a few levels of a gunner and you'll unlock an Assassin. So you really can shape characters and your overall party to play in many, many different ways. There are some builds that are markedly better than others but this class/leveling system is really the core of the game and it's really darn good. The combat, before it gets old, is solid. You fight on multi-level maps and positioning means a lot in this game. Putting together a squad with synergy helps and there are many different types of foes you'll encounter with different abilities to figure out. In short, it's a decent chess match with many different types of pieces. It's good....until it's not. [u]What's Meh[/u] But that's about the only thing that's really darn good. Leveling in and of itself can be clunky and the game doesn't really help you understand what might level up a particular class. Even after 20 hours I haven't figured out how leveling is determined. I get levels for classes that I'm not a part of or interested in all the time. I use skills for a main class and can't get a level up for that class, You'll also have many different NPCs on your roster so you can try out those different classes. But they really don't level quickly unless you take them on missions. But that means you're fielding a sub-optimal squad and each map can be very challenging, so that becomes an obstacle to taking them. What it really means is unless you manage that mechanic really well, you're just going to have to go back and grind out levels for characters you don't use as often. That's not really fun. It's bad game design. When you're level 30 and you have level 10 chars on the roster, there's nothing you're going to do with those characters. So you really don't get to try all of those cool classes because you won't want to go back and grind out battles just level characters to see what they can do. At least you can fairly easily respec your characters but that requires different gear and gold is limited. Speaking of gear... There are items and crafting in the game but nothing really drops on the maps besides components. What you can craft is limited and quite often not all that useful. You buy your main gear in the towns with gold. The more you level, the more gear is unlocked for you to buy but ultimately every shop has basically the same gear. And each new level is generally better than the one below it, so there's not a lot of though required here. If you have the gold, go get more gear. Rinse and repeat. The graphics are a source of some debate. Some love them, others hate them. I'm fairly ambivalent about them. They're colorful and they work but they're not beautiful. That goes for most everything - environments, characters, spell animations and the like. There's nothing bad but there's nothing really impressive either. I'd say the graphics are fine but not outstanding. I think the visuals are better than the sound. The music gets pretty old, pretty quickly. Combat sounds range from pretty decent (metal blades) to spell sounds that are more like a wet fart than anything else. There's no voice acting and I'd say the sound design is sub-par. [u]What Fails[/u] But where the game really failed for me - and the reason I'm bowing out after 20 hours - is twofold: I'm bored and the story is imbecilic. The game has combat encounter after combat encounter. That's the entire game. Win a fight, open up the next node on the map, go into the map, watch a brief moment that forwards the story and then fight again. It's fine but after 15+ hours I was dreadfully bored. Each new map started to feel like a grind and not an opportunity. And here's the rub - the devs must have realized that so they put in the ability to have your characters controlled by the game. Which means they put in a way to bypass the main game play of the entire game! That doesn't say anything good about that game play. I'm actually glad they did it though because for the last 5 or so maps I've just leveled my squad, picked my characters and let the computer auto-battle it out. It's actually pretty dumb - I had to intervene on one map because the AI didn't understand what the objective was and would have never won that encounter - but it's there. That I ultimately ended up turning off the main game play of the game isn't a good sign. But I wanted to see where the story ended up and this is why I finally stopped. It actually started very strong and I was into it. Nice setting, interesting universe, a contest to become an immortal, a But what's absolutely maddening is you'll defeat a main baddie and then you'll just let them walk way to progress the story. And then you'll see them 2 maps later. And beat them again. And watch them walk away again to see them 3 maps later. It's utter tripe from a story standpoint. I think I've beaten one villain like 4 times now, only to watch him toddle off to the next encounter. Whoever wrote this tripe should be ashamed of themselves. The main game play are the battles and the devs put in a way to not play those because they knew that they'd grow old. Then they wrote a story that started off pretty strong and just got dumber dumber, with the "baddie of the hour" repeatedly getting defeated but somehow walking free to set up yet another battle on yet another map. Without the story to drive me along, I don't even have the desire to watch the AI auto-battle itself. Fell Seal isn't a bad game but it ultimately loses momentum, focus and turns into an idiotic grind-fest. If you buy it, get it on a steep sale and you'll probably get a dozen or so enjoyable hours out of it before it starts to sour. But because there are better games in this genre, I really can't recommend it.