Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark

On the positive side, the game gives each character two classes, which means every character can be played in more than one way. For example, you can build a templar with healer skills, or mix roles in similar ways. The variety of items also adds to the fun, allowing you to customize your characters to fit specific playstyles.
However, while this game works well if you enjoy team-building, it feels a bit too plain overall. If you are an experienced gamer, you will quickly realize that some classes are overpowered, making it easy to complete the game by relying on just a few of them, regardless of variety. In addition, the enemies are quite boring, they mostly just walk around buffing or attacking. Compared to enemies in other games, their behavior feels very basic, which made the experience less enjoyable for me.
The story is decent, not boring, but not surprising either. You can predict about 80% of what will happen after the current events, and even when things don’t go exactly as expected, the plot is still too simple to feel impactful.
Well, if you are looking for a simple turn-based game to pass the time, this game is worth trying. But if you want deep combat and engaging gameplay, you may find yourself getting bored sooner rather than later.

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).

First off, let me point out that this game regularly hits 85% off discounts during Steam Sales, so yes, you can easily pick up this game (including the DLC) for $5.
Now, for the actual review, I'm going to open this with a short story: as a teenager in the early 2000's I was bed-ridden with chronic illness, so I ended up spending an absolutely ludicrous amount of time playing turned-based tactics games on my Gameboy Advance SP, and later my 3DS. Out of all of the many, MANY games I played, the one I loved the most and sunk the most time in (I'm talking well over 1,000 hours) was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the SP.
So believe me when I say that this game is a true and worthy spiritual successor to FFT - everything that franchise has done well in terms of gameplay, this game executes just as well, if not better. Granted, the story isn't as good as the Shakespearean that was the original FFT for the PS1, but the fact that it's even compared to a game that's widely regarded as having some of the best writing of any Final Fantasy game PERIOD is pretty telling, and it's definitely a cut above the average tactics game.
Now, I'm going to address some of these recent negative reviews, because honestly, they're completely whack, and I feel like arguing today :3
First, we've got one complaining about the game's "locked female protagonist."
Really?
This is not a silent, self-insert, name-your-own character protag who suffers from amnesia and/or a nebulous background - this is an actual character with a clear history and a well-defined motivation and drive, and those tend to be gender-locked.
I bet the only reason why this guy didn't complain about Expedition 33 having a female protagonist is because he didn't play the game long enough to realize that Maelle was the main character, and I doubt they know games like Trails in the Sky and characters like Estelle Bright even EXIST.
Next: complaints about the difficulty.
Veteran difficulty is just fine, and the difficulty the game is "meant" to be played at, as you'll see on the modifiers screen that everything is set to 1.0.
If you're having trouble at that level, I'm sorry, but you're just bad at tactics games, and would probably game-over within the first hour of playing any given XCOM game lol
Now the harder difficulties that are ACTUALLY hard, are meant to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ designed to specifically cater to absolute masochists. Complaining about THAT being too hard is like deliberately choosing to play Fire Emblem Awakening on Lunatic+, and then whining about how unfair it is that the all the enemies have over-inflated stats and unique skills with 100% activation rates.
This last one I'm going to quote directly, because it REALLY has me triggered, and is what motivated me to write a review in the first place:
--
"The design challenge for a high customization tactics game then is to achieve perfect imbalance.
Fell Seal fails at that. Most options are bland and the most OP option is the blandest.
Its mix between Final Fantasy Tactics progression and Tactics Ogre MP system and other battle mechanics falls flat for me as well. Most fights are going to include some wind-up (unless you use aforementioned boring OP strategies) so the pacing feels like a general slog."
--
I love how this guy has the gall to use the word "aforementioned" when they notably did NOT mention what said OP option even ALLEGEDLY was, especially since IF such a singular, boring build existed it would have only taken a single line of text to elaborate on what it even was (which again, they chose not to do, because guess what, no such boring OP option actually exists!)
>>> The rest of this review is going to be a TL;DR rant about mechanics, so you can skip it if you want lol
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tactics Ogre, the MP system this guy is referring to is that instead of starting with a full MP bar at the start of battle, everyone starts with zero MP and regenerates a fixed amount at the stat of their turn.
In this game, that number is 10 MP, BEFORE any actions can be taken.
For the record, most spells cost 8 MP, with only the really BIG ones costing more than 10, and the really OP ones that can 1-shot costing between 18 and 36 depending on what class your using. (12-24 if you've got the Economy passive from the Sorcerer class equipped)
The first turn is almost always going to be spent on positioning, because that's actually super important in this game, so there really isn't any real "wind-up" to speak of since you'll start your first real turn of actual combat with 20 MP.
The ONLY exception to this is the Zohl monster abilities that expend ALL of your remaining MP and deal scaling healing/damage based on the total MP spent, and Zohl's have the Mana Absorb counter baked-in to their kit so they can generate mana absurdly fast (basically Mana Absorb gives you free mana equal to the mana cost of whatever abilities you were hit with, so if you get hit by 5 big AoE spells that each have a mana cost of 14 in a single turn, that's an additional 70 mana in one turn right there instead of the usual 10 lol)
The only real "wind-up" build is is the Sorcerer/Gunner combo where you do Focus (deal double damage on your next action) into <insert huge map-wide spell of your chosen element here>, almost exactly like that silly Illusionist with Charge build from the FFT games lol. And again, that's only a 2-turn combo at most, and is arguably faster than regular builds since you don't need to worry about positioning at all and hit every enemy on the map at once.
- And as broken as a massive 2-turn map-wide, HARD hitting spell sounds, there IS counterplay to it that the AI DOES take advantage of. But first off, chances are it's going to be resisted or even absorbed by SOMETHING on the map, because for maximum impact you're probably going to be hard-focused on a single element type due to dual-wielding elemental rods to stack the boost on a single element (again this game is VERY much like FFT)
There's also counter ability called "Evade Magic," which straight up makes a character immune to all spells, so if the enemy happens to have that equipped in their Counter slot, that's an immediate whiff on that individual unit.
The AI also loves to open up with defensive buffs and the Thorns buff, and support buff classes have WAY faster initiative than Sorcerers so they'll always get them off (and if you try to make a fast sorcerer you'll end up sacrificing firepower, so the AI won't even need buffs to avoid being wiped) Now back to that Thorns buff I mentioned - it reflects damage back at the attacker regardless of the source or distance while bypassing all counters, so if a Sorcerer hits an entire enemy team that is buffed with Thorns, said Sorcerer WILL get absolutely MULCHED by the retaliation damage lol
Anything that even VAGUELY resembles a doo-doo-brain-dead OP build would center around the Warmage class, because that's the ONE class that legitimately doesn't have any real definitive counterplay when placed in the player's hands. However, Warmage is the final and most difficult to obtain of the game's 20 core classes, and most of what makes it so strong is how goshdang versatile it is in terms of dealing different types of damage, so I wouldn't exactly call it "bland." Every enemy has a weakness, physical or magical, and Warmage by itself has all the tools needed to exploit every kind of weakness except for light / dark element damage, and those can be covered by your choice of secondary class.
The only other one-shot cheese strat I can think of would involve repositioning enemies into the water to drown them, but that's fairly niche since maybe only one in every three maps has water tiles and half of the human classes can innately swim - the rest can get around the problem by equipping Flippers. (naturally most of the monsters that appear on water maps are going to be aquatic creatures or monsters that can swim)

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.

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.