Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mask is a tactical RPG that takes a lot of inspiration from final fantasy tactics. The game has a lot of classes and a lot of variation to choose and unlock from. Honestly, I didn't think the story was all that great, but I enjoyed the gameplay. A lot of levels needed strategy to beat, and you can't just steamroll through the game for the most part. For example, there is a fight where an enemy uses an ability to teleport your characters onto water, and they will instantly die if you don't equip correctly. At times the game does feel a bit slow, especially grinding some non-boss fights... but I didn't mind the pacing for the most part.

Overall, if you enjoy FF Tactics, you'll probably like this game. I would recommend picking the game up on a sale, as it goes on large sales quite often (it is <$10 quite often).

Really enjoyable tactical RPG once you get passed the art style. The class system is surprisingly complex and interesting to plan around, the fights are decently challenging (on "normal"), and the story is engaging enough (though, it starts stronger than it ends).
Overall, I struggle to find complaints with this one. However, there was one thing I found frustrating: the injury system. If a character falls in combat they get reduced stats until they sit out a combat encounter. This was frustrating for me just from a time perspective - it incentivizes you to go back and play an easy random battle. You can have plenty of back up characters on your bench, but it is quite easy for these characters to fall behind in level to where you always feel penalized in an annoying way with the injury system.
It doesn't help that it seems quite easy for the enemy to down one of your characters (maybe I'm just bad at the game). They are good at focusing, often doing very high damage in quick succession, and are annoyingly good about finding OHKO opportunities with environment effects (drowning, lava, etc.). If you revive the character and they go down again, they get an additional injury. For example, if they went down three times in one combat they'd need to sit out 3 combats to heal all of their injuries.
HOWEVER, the injury is not really an issue because you can very easily tone down the injury system (just an experience malus) or turn it off entirely. Once I toned down the injury system, I started having a lot more fun.

I have tried to like this game three times. I have stopped myself from reviewing it twice. I think I really am done with it now and I guess I'm going to leave a review.
It's not FFT (Final Fantasy Tactics), and that's not a good thing.
There are some things they did well. There are no more random encounters. Monsters have classes with their own skill trees. Maxing a skill tree rewards your characters with permanent stat boosts. They introduced a different item system that encourages consumption. Tons of cool stuff. But now onto the bad.
One word: scaling. This game butchers a concept so badly that it taints the entire experience. If you're new to FFT, there are a bunch of jobs (or classes) that each character can become. Unlike a traditional RPG where most (or all) classes are available up front, FFT locks these jobs behind leveling other classes. The trade-off is that every character can change their job at any time, and this has some interesting consequences.
Leveling a character with a terrible job role (FFT equivalent would be Chemist or Squire) means that they don't get impressive stat increases. Changing a job will affect new levels on a character, but the stat bonuses that were awarded when the character leveled remain the same. As a result, leveling a character 50 times as a Wizard will make them a TERRIBLE melee class no matter how hard you try to make it work. This sounds straightforward, but experienced players immediately know the problems here... If I HAVE to play a wizard to unlock a good class that I want, then the levels that I gained when I was a wizard will forever make my character weaker. Now I either have to choose to not unlock the best classes to have a perfect stat character OR just accept that my character will deal less damage, have less health, and just suck more overall.
Well Fell Seal developers clearly did their research, because this has an identical system. So what's the issue? Same system, same results. Right?
Well the catch here is that FFT had a super unique solution to this problem. They had booby traps! Sometimes you would play a map and step on a tile and something bad would happen. Maybe a bomb goes off that hurts your character... OR... Maybe a trap decreases the character's level by 1. That's an interesting trap... Isn't it?
FFT's solution to this is just delevel your character. Step on that trap a bunch of times and you'll have a fresh start. But there are additional bonuses to this solution. If I level my character as a tanky class (a knight) and then delevel them as a squishy mage (Oracle), then I will actually be left with MORE HP at level 1 than a fresh level 1. This solves every problem ever as far as difficulty goes. If you're willing to grind out job points on the bad classes to unlock the best classes, grind out character levels on the best scaling jobs, delevel characters on the worst jobs, and repeat this process forever, you can create characters that will absolutely dominate the battlefied. They move 3-4 times for every one move an enemy takes. They have max hp, damage, and resistances. It feels so freaking cool and created one of the best gaming experiences of my life.
FFT had so many clever design choices that allowed the player to feel like they were exploiting or just straight up breaking the game all over the place. And my favorite part about FFT was when you started to realize that the enemies do that too. Taking your demi-god units into a fight with actual gods in the game felt like both sides of the table were breaking the game in all the right ways. It wasn't an easy game, but it gave you plenty of room to figure things out.
Fell Seal fails to execute on this vision. Their solution to resetting levels is to pay (A LOT) of gold to reset a character to level 1. And when they're reset, it's just a fresh level 1. Period. Every enemy you'll ever face will be scaled PERFECTLY as if they were always the class that they selected. The problems here are self-evident. I obviously want to unlock all jobs/classes. I obviously want to continue playing the campaign as I do this. But now my Mercenary/Knight/Scoundrel/Mender/Wizard main character just can't keep up with level 20 or 30 characters with perfect scaling. The stat differences are just too high. To make matters worse, FFT ALWAYS allows you to reset levels on your characters (for free) and gain new experience and job points. Fell Seal does not allow this. Resetting always costs a ton of gold, and if you're too high a level for the missions you have unlocked, then you just don't gain job points anymore. So what the hell am I supposed to do if a character just wasn't levelled well?
This issue may not sound like a big problem, but it's freaking abhorrent. Basically choose a class early and saddle up for the whole game (and completely miss the point of a FFT clone) OR change classes a bunch of times (and experience a FFT clone as it should be experienced) and be brutally punished for those decisions. It's a bad system that rewards the wrong inputs.
And that single issue basically describes every other problem with the game. Enemies get newer, better equipment, skills, stats, and everything else all the time. Even if you get enough gold to reset all your characters to level 1 somehow, the level 1s you'll be fighting will have better everything. So enjoy that.
Difficulty, as a result, is typically derived from stats just being so insanely imbalanced. I can't honestly claim that it's too difficult... It's just annoying. Imagine playing Pokemon but your party's max level is always 10 less than the current Gym Leader's level. It wouldn't make the game unbeatable or anything, but it would definitely piss you off.
The injury system is... Insanely dumb. In theory it encourages you to create more characters that level alongside your party. In practice it just makes you take dumb combats every time somebody dies on accident so you can clear their injuries.
I'm also really, really, REALLY not a fan of custom difficulty modifiers in strategy games. I want a tailored strategy experience. I normally just play Divinity on the hardest difficulty, so that's what I chose here. I can't say I was happy with it.
I could go on and on and on. There are a ton of things I didn't like about it. So why am I giving it a thumbs up?
Because this is an extremely under-served market. I don't think this meets the expectations that a FFT or TRPG fanboy like myself would have, but I can't honestly discard the entire game. I like that your loadouts can have way more skills than FFT. Having two class passives with an additional two custom choices is pretty cool. I wish there were more classes that heavily modified combat (like FFT's Arithmetician) instead of "here's a new magic spell that basically does the exact same thing but it looks different." I liked the monsters' skill trees. I wish I could ride monsters or interact with them in more meaningful ways (once again like FFT).
Overall I guess I would say I'm just split on this game. I really want games like this to succeed and expand on these ideas, but I think they fell short in a lot of areas.

Its a Final Fantasy tactics clone, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The story is way weaker, FFtactics was mature and gripping with main story characters dying left and right, this is PG rated and the story amounts to "We have Final Fantasy Tactics at home, son".

With that said the bones of the gameplay formula is here, and its good enough. the music is faithfully SNES too

This is impressively polished for an indie studio. A fun SRPG (if you don't know what SRPG is, think Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem). This game has a marvelous soundtrack. The final boss music really has a "yes, this is where everything comes to an end, for better or worse" vibe.
The combat is hard. Sometimes even frustrating. The enemies adjust to the player's level. The build mechanics are quite enjoyable, offering a satisfying depth; though some combinations are a touch overpowered (I'm looking at you, Dual Wielding). It's delightful in experimenting with different variants and mix-and-matching abilities. At least in the early-to-mid game, before certain powerful combinations inevitably come to dominate.
The story is also interesting, with quite a bit of twists and turns. And weight. The first quarter of the story is pretty standard RPG plot. Of course, the FBI of this fantasy world has issues. And to be honest I gave up the game at first after around two hours of fumbling. But the story picks up the pace at around a quarter mark. The tension is especially palpable in the 3rd act after returning to the starting city. You know the world is to be saved. This is an RPG after all. But the story is constantly reminding me the cost and what comes after; that ... maybe it would be a bit more complicated than a happily-ever-after?
Sure, only the core group get character building, and some plot twists are almost blatantly obvious. Yet, given the length of the game, I still think the story is foreshadowed and paced well enough. And there is something I thought was an Easter egg and a bit of meta narrative joke, which later turned out to be very plot relevant. Surprising!

The gameplay is good, there's a pretty scant number of games in this genre, so I do suggest playing it for the mechanics, but the story is....bad. It builds on some things from the original tactics, as well as games like Tactics Ogre, with a hearty roster of classes and ability mixing to choose from.

Spoilies next. At best, it's thoughtless writing, at worst, an endorsement of the police state. Stuff happens, for sure, but characters don't learn or grow. That's not a great choice when the framing is "noble police versus objectively wrong rebels". These people live in a dystopia run by immortals - rule legitimized by half-true history - who choose successors via violent hunger games style pilgrimages which sends at least six people (against their will, often) to almost certain death. Corruption is seen as an aberration in this system, rather than the default. The main character only ever follows the law to the letter, which conveniently has any loophole that would let her do exactly what she wants to do anyway, which creates strange messaging such as: "police are allowed to hunt and kill in self defense" "threat of execution and press-ganging are okay and cool" "rebels are just misguided" and "law enforcement is supposed to interpret the law and mete out justice as they see fit." All of these ideas could work well in a game with this setup, but since the protagonists are perfectly good and noble paragons of virtue, their actions are communicated as perfectly good and noble.

Now of course not every game needs to have some kind of anti establishment message, but the implications of this world are grim. I would recommend playing it for the game play, but by the end I was really just hoping to get through the slog of a story which did bring down the overall experience.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a competently made turn based tactics game. The story is decent, is somewhat basic. The same can be said of the combat. Where this game truly shines is in the deep, nuanced jobs system that lets you put together a small army of combatants, with no two of them playing quite the same. The ability to master multiple jobs, mix and match abilities, perks and skill sets, and then deploy these highly customized units in patrols, hunts, large battles and missions provides enough variety to keep things interesting for hours and hours.