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).

Because your unused characters get some AP after every battle, it's almost always beneficial to have a slightly larger roster than you might be used to with other FFT-alikes, as it will open up classes more quickly and give you better flexibility to deal with different battle conditions.
A large roster is also helpful with how Injuries work. If you have a character fall in battle, they will become Injured, which gives them a stat penalty until they heal, and they can't heal until they sit out a battle. On higher difficulties, Injuries can stack and even become permanent. It's never a bad idea to have three or four characters on the bench, ready to go, in case you have a handful of your team knocked out in a battle.
Keeping your levels on pace with the story missions is important, but the battles are a lot more reliant on you having a strong strategy and a good mix of classes that will deal with any stage's particular challenges. Don't discount buffs and debuffs, they don't last long but they can save your hide.
Poison effects show up early and stick around for a bit, and the continuous damage can be punishing. Healing it quickly, prioritizing taking out enemies that poison you, and equipping poison-resistant accessories will all help with some tough early-game battles.
The storyline characters in your roster are good, and should be used in Patrol battles if/when you're leveling up, as they'll be required characters in a lot of battles. That said, for various story-related reasons, you may not want to hinge your entire battle strategy around them or specific class builds for them.
Magic resistances and weaknesses can contribute to a huge difference in how much damage your spells do, it pays to keep an eye on them when choosing your roster for any given battle.
Ranged weapons and attacks do not use line of sight, so you can safely shoot "through" your own teammates and obstacles.
Even though you can and will have two active classes (like Mercenary/Mender), you will ONLY gain Ability Points (which unlock skills and passives for that class) for the primary class. Your Mercenary/Mender can use the Mender's healing spell as much as you want, and you won't gain any progress at all towards improving your proficiency with Mender.
If you want to actually gain Mender AP, you'll need to use the Class Change (which isn't as permanent as it sounds like) to switch your primary class to Mender. There is another way - you slowly gain AP in a class based on what your other active party members primary class is. The game calls that Vicarious AP. Your Mercenary/Mender won't gain any Mender AP itself, but if you have a Mender/whatever in the battle, your Mercenary/Mender will gain about half the AP the sum of all the Mender/whatevers are gaining.
This means that you'll probably want to frequently make use of Class Changes to prioritize what you want to be learning.

If you like Final Fantasy Tactics, Divinity, Baulders gate, icewind dale, and other games like this then I highly recommend this game. I beat a lot of these kind of games as a kid and the key is always patience. I do however have a few qualms with this game I'd like to address, but I like to start with the good.
The game runs amazing on my Steam Deck, the combat is a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics and with my limited time in the game I can definitely tell they improved on all the aspects of the game tremendously. I love the spell system, the injury system is also ingenious in my opinion. The different way to build your team is also definitely a treat. If you want a challenge, I know this game can offer one. I have almost no issue with the gameplay itself since I just wanted a final fantasy tactics system and this definitely delivered.
Now for the bad. The animations are pretty much garbage. A few frames of reactions, you can definitely do better. The graphics could do with some improving as well, I can tell they use 2D style over 3D but there is a reason we all don't play Atari anymore. If they added some cool animations then I'd definitely find myself wanting to play this over Wasteland 3. When I cut someone with an axe, I want to feel like I cut them with an axe. I want to hear a cry of pain, see blood, see them kneel over and think about their life choices before challenging me. Instead, I get 2 frames and an "oof". Even final fantasy tactics did better in that regard and for a $30 game, I expect more. I think this aspect is what you guys need to focus on the most. The cry you get in Final Fantasy Tactics PS1 when you kill someone, I want you to surpass that. There was nothing better than hearing that sound to me as a kid. If you guys improve that, you got yourselves a best seller. Not the combat, not the graphics, not the balance. Just the feeling you get when you slice, kill, and blow up your enemies. That's all I think this game needs. That's the sauce this game was missing for me. To see an enemy just fade away when they die is very disappointing.
The music is a solid 10/10 though. Don't change that, it's perfect.
I want the option to speed up animations as well. I'd like the character change screen to be faster. I'd like more voice overs and just overall more polish. The graphics itself is great though and I'm not asking you to remake the whole thing. That would mean making a second game and I promise you this: I'll buy it. Make that shit 3D if you do. Just look at how well Risk of Rain did when they sprinkled some 3D on that game.
Now you may be curious is this game grindy? Yes, it can be. Is this game extemely strategic? Oh yes, it can be. I'm a veteran on these kind of games and I can already tell I can play this like a Spartan system. Spartans used to stay close, move in slowly, and keep all their flanks covered at all times. Even at the very beginning I caught myself making mistakes in this regard and taking unnecessary injuries in characters I don't want injured. Ask yourself who do you want to have injuries and the game becomes totally different.
This game is beautiful, simplistic, and utterly relaxing. I smoke some legal weed, I spend some time playing it.
If you are new to these kind of games, play it on easy and breeze through it. I know it's going to be fun for you and enjoyable. Once I beat some other games like Wasteland 3, Boulders gate 3, and Divinity 2. I'm probably going to come to this game and beat it too.
If you beat Final Fantasy Tactics or just loved the game, buy this game full priced. I beat almost all the tactics games except for the GBA game. I got like halfway through it. If I had to rate this game just for it's Tactics system appeal type of games, this game is literally the best hands down. I'd say this is probably the most balanced kind of strategy game you'll find and I did spend a good hour researching it.
Buy it, play it, or don't. But if you actually read my review, it means you want this shit.

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

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.

This game is clearly a love letter to FFT and Tactics Ogre, and I've definitely enjoyed my time playing it.

That being said, an honest review of this game would be a 7/10 unless you're a HUGE fan of strategy RPG gameplay, in which case it's probably an 8/10.

The gameplay itself is fun, with a lot of depth and variety of playstyles, and is absolutely the most engaging part of the game.

Unfortunately, the story writing is very flat so far (almost done with the main story at this point, not expecting it to be any better from here), which is a shame. The characters aren't particularly interesting or well-written, and there's never anything compelling to keep you hooked on what may come.

The graphic style is definitely polarizing, although I've come to kinda like the sprite work. The discrepancy between the character portrait style and the sprite style is kind of jarring though, and some of the portraits quite frankly look out of place and not that great, while others seem to be more polished and well done.

The music isn't horrible, but it's also not very interesting outside of a couple tracks.

So basically, if you're looking for a great tactical RPG gameplay experience with not much else AROUND that experience, this is a great game.

I wouldn't recommend paying full price for it, but I think it's an excellent pick up on sale, and I hope the devs continue iterating and try to improve the lackluster areas for a sequel / spiritual successor.