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Missions and Monsters DLC - New Gear
Hello everyone!
This week, we'll go over some of the new gear that is being added in Missions and Monsters, and explain the overall design approach we took while creating them.
First, in terms of scope, we're adding a hefty 60 new pieces of gear. About half of that is weapons, and the rest is split amongst armor and accessories.
There were two main driving factors for the new equipment: adding new and unique gear and filling some more niche archetypes to give the adventurous player more options when crafting their dream team. Things like a shield with bonus atk or spell range, more elemental weapons options, cloth armor or deadly staves for the brawling healer, etc.
We're also adding a bunch of more complex pieces of gear, with many unique properties. Here's a few examples to showcase what you can expect:
That's only a small taste of the new equipment, but showcases some of the more unique ones.
There's also this beauty that promises potent destruction raining on your foes...
At this point, most of the new content has been created and it's looking good. What remains now is polishing, testing, testing and more testing! We want to make sure the balance is as solid as it can be after all!
We have a big update planned for the base game as well, with a lot of new features, UI improvements, bug fixes and modding options. I'll save the details of that for the next devlog though!
I finally got around to completing this game, after it was recommended by some here on the Codex. Some thoughts:
+ This is definitely a spiritual successor to the original Final Fantasy Tactics game. The character classes are quite different, but it still has the same sort of job system and combat is quite similar. I loved FFT, and I really like this game.
+ Multiple characters that can be added into your growing party. You can also build your own characters and you are not forced to play the story characters.
+ Turn-based. Tactical. You can revisit areas and several optional quests are also present.
+ The storyline is pretty straight-forward. It doesn't get convoluted or confusing. The characters in your party have believable and understandable motivations.
+ The geography of each level can be taken advantage of in combat, so that you can have your enemies bunch themselves up between obstacles so you can drop area of effect spells on them, or take advantage of heights so that your ranged attacks have better effects.
+ Some neat unique classes that only particular characters can attain.
+ The enemies are varied, and each of special attacks and defenses which forces you to change your approach against them. A fire spell might be nearly useless or heal a certain enemy, making you choose a different attack. The game constantly throws fresh challenges at you.
+ There are a lot of secrets of the game, and I didn't discover all of them. For instance, I was able to find a way to create the lich character class, which had some fun skills and abilities.
+ Mixing up your skills from the various character classes you've played is a whole lot of fun. As soon as you max out a class, you'll want to change to a new job. Mixing assassin skills with the gunner class has a lot of possibilities, as does mixing the knight "One-For-All" skill (which lets you strike any enemy your allies are attacking that are within your range) with a class with a ranged attack.
+ Game was very stable. LeClerc knows how to code.
- Level-scaling. Damn level-scaling. The only positive is that some levels you can revisit level scales within a fixed minimum and maximum range.
- Water is fatal to a ridiculous degree. There is one ability where you can knock an opponent one space back and into the water and if they do not have a swimming ability, they automatically take max damage and die. Early-on, this makes for a lot of fun and you have to be careful where you position your characters. Later, however, you start running into enemies that can teleport your fighters over a pool of water and automatically kill them. And the majority of the key fights have small fountains that bosses will teleport your characters over. Yes, your character will die from being teleported into a small temple fountain. The game forces you to equip your characters with swim gear and play wearing flippers. It gets pretty old and stupid fast.
Besides that last frustration, the game is a lot of fun. I definitely recommend for those that like turn-based tactical games and a job system.
Update 1.2.0 - Player AI, more autosaves...
Hello everyone!
We're happy to release update 1.2.0 today. It's probably our biggest update yet and it adds a lot of nifty things! Here are the highlights for the update:
Highlights:
Player AI: Player units can now be controlled by the AI. Go to the system options and select "Player AI" and set the AI you want on your combatants. Their setting will be saved and remembered.
Autosaves: Adding autosaves at the very start of battle, so the player won't lose all their work preparing their units if things go sour. The autosave will keep all pre-battle setup, but otherwise start the player right before the battle was triggered.
UI: Lots of UI improvements all around for cleaner and clearer information in menus, in combat, everywhere! More options in menus (sorting, unequipping the whole army, etc.).
Controls: Various updates to mouse and keyboards controls to improve upon them.
Balance: A fair amount of balance tweaks across the board.
Bug fixes: Lots of bug fixes on anything that's been reported by the community and from our testing team.
Modding: Adding the Stores.xml file to the list of moddable files and a lot of improvements to many of the systems.
The patchnotes are too large for a Steam update and will be split into two updates (bug fixes and modders notes will be in a subsequent announcement).
As a note to our other users:
- the GoG update should come about by the end of the week.
- the Ps4 And Xbox One updates should come about next week (or early the week after).
- the Switch will not be getting this update for now. It will be getting the next update (the update for the release of Missions and Monsters). This is due to added delays on Nintendo's side, tied to the current Corona virus crisis, and is outside of our control.
Missions and Monsters Expansion:
We're finally fully done with the programming and asset creation for the expansion. Currently, we're busy testing, balancing and tuning for the absolute best experience!
While we don't quite yet have an exact release date, we know it's going to end up being in June rather than late May after all.
We want to release on all platforms at the same time and unfortunately, with the current world situation being what it is, some of our console partners are going to need a lot more time than they used to in order to review the expansion, which is creating this delay.
Fell Seal Milestones:
We passed 2000 reviews this week!
Thanks so much to everyone for the support, it's been truly incredible!
Patch Notes (1/2):
05/06/2020 - Version 1.2.0
New Features:
Player AI: Player units can now be controlled by the AI. Go to the system options and select "Player AI" and set the AI you want on your combatants. Their setting will be saved and remembered.
Autosaves: Adding autosaves at the very start of battle, so the player won't lose all their work preparing their units if things go sour. The autosave will keep all pre-battle setup, but otherwise start the player right before the battle was triggered.
Enemy Turns: The player can now press the System Menu button during an enemy turn and as soon as their turn is over, the System menu will open, allowing the player to load/quit/etc.
Unequip Everyone: Adding a button to unequip the whole roster at once from the troops menu equip screen.
Turn Completion: When pressing the "details button" in combat, each unit will display their turn completion amount as a percentage next to their health bar. This should help the player make better decisions when it comes to abilities that delay the turn of units, etc.
World Map: Various updates were made to the controls on the world map to make keyboard only user more at ease (ie. users not using the mouse at all, but just the keyboard).
Difficulty Settings: Adding a new difficulty setting to control if the AI will use drowning mechanics on the player or not.
AI: The AI will now use the map's natural teleport points if it deems it a good idea.
UI: Many different additions to give better information to the player.
Balance:
Gear: Updating the list of what can be sold and not sold. In general, making more unique gear unsellable and more rare gear sellable.
Story Characters: Some story characters have small static bonus to some stats upon creation. Now those will be stored in a different way so they are kept if the unit has its level reset to 1. This change is not retroactive and will require a new game. Also slightly changing those bonuses for some characters.
AI: Various small improvements to the AI.
AI: There was a chance the AI would cast Dispel 2x in a row on the same target with Double Cast. Fixed.
AI: AI wouldn't always make smart use of Focus and Hallowed buffs. It'll now be smarter.
Axes: Increasing vertical range to 4 (was 2 before).
Healing Staff: No longer triggers Chilling Touch and other such passives.
Defensive Hit: Now counts as a regular attack.
Reanimate: Summoned zombies of tier 2 and 3 will now have "Counter: Poison" rather than "Counter: Critical Rebirth" since summons can't be affected by any Revive or Rebirth abilities.
Counter: Thrash: Increasing damage dealt to 1.2x (from 1x).
Chaos Slice: Increased dmg from 0.85x to 0.9x.
Marked: The class's last ability won't be locked by the story anymore but purchasable like other abilities.
Marked: The character that has access to this story class will now learn a special passive through the story (Penumbral Mastery).
Exiled: The character with access to this class will have access to a bonus passive as well (Stampede).
Avenger: Bonus will now be applied per allies that is currently fallen, or has fallen before in the current battle (and isn't protected against injuries). The net result is that reviving allies won't remove the bonus (unless they have injury protection).
Story Battles: Made a certain NPC assisting in the fight in a certain city map more likely to drink potions if their health gets low.
Pektites: Adding an element to their regular attack.
Sleeping Targets: When the target is asleep, a bonus to accuracy will be given to attacks on the target (25%). The target's evasion was already ignored if it was asleep, so this is mainly a boost to special attacks with a low starting accuracy (like Wild Slam, etc.).
AI: AI won't be as eager to get Hallowed Mind by slapping some nearby allies.
Scoundrel: Increasing slightly the odds of Steal Item, Buffs and Gold.
Wrathful Burst/Holy Burst: Increasing the vertical range to 4 (from 2), to match other Burst abilities.
Wood Staff: Will no longer increase the casting range by 1. Other staves remain unchanged.
Thorns: Increasing damage dealt by Thorns to 30% of damage dealt (was 25%) is reflected. Thorn damage is subject to defense, so it is not as high as that amount.
Hellmuzzle: Increasing attack value slightly.
Silver Rapier: Now grants increased MND, like other Silver weapons.
Rapiers: Increasing their MND bonus a tiny bit. Rapiers now grant a bonus to accuracy as well.
Ebony Dagger, Quarreller, Crimson Scythe: Now have a bonus to MND.
Reflectotron: Lowering MP cost to 4 (from 6).
NewGamePlus: A certain secret character will now remain on the player's roster when starting a NGP, rather than needing to be acquired again.
Barrier: Will not be removed anymore from a target if the target was immune to the effect that was used on them. So, for example, an enemy immune to Poison won't used up its Barrier buff if Poison is casted on them, since they were already immune.
Badges: Now, when the player finds a badge, the class it unlocks will be shown in the class wheel with its information, even if the player doesn't mean the requirements. That way the player can start planning their progression better if they want access to the class rapidly.
AP Gained: On maps where the player's 6 main units are much higher level than the opposition, the AP is reduced by 33% (up from 25%).
Stealing: Being afflicted with Blind will now reduce the chance of Stealing in half.
Cleansing Blade: Reducing damage bonus from removing a debuff from 0.45x per debuff to 0.35x per debuff.
Fellblade: Changed most Slices to a line targeting rather than diagonals.
The Highlands: Updating the level range of the area to be lower in general and provide an option for the level 20-30 range.
Story Characters: Story characters that join late into the game have had their starting AP increased a tad.
Bonus Character: Reducing slightly the AP costs of abilities for a certain special character that likes to buzz around.
Reavers: Gaining access to Mauls and losing access to Swords.
Thorns: Thorn damage will no longer remove Charm from the recipient.
Enemies: Should not spawn with Countershot anymore if they don't have a ranged weapon.
Enemies SubClass: Changing the way the odds of an enemy having no subclass are calculated. They will now be based on character level and tied to Difficulty settings, rather than a flat 20%.
Magic Bullet: Now counts as a Regular Attack.
Quick Fingers: Will now allow the player to activate a chest/gather point/ladder/etc after taking an action and a movement if there is one in range.
Worms: Can no longer spawn with boots.
On-Hit Passives: Changing the proc chances of Deep Wounds, Chilling Touch and Sunder to all be 75%.
Dreadmaw: Increasing chance to hit from 50% to "regular odds".
Flippers: Enemies will never spawn with flippers if the map doesn't have water.
Blazing Bolas: Blazing Bolas will now only try to place traps on valid tiles. Which means that a well targeted bolas, with many invalid location for the traps, will only land on valid tiles, and thus more likely to spawn directly under the target.
UI:
Troops Menu: The screen could feel less responsive for KB M users if the user was moving the mouse around while pressing keys. Should feel better now.
Troops Menu: The currently selected unit will show "Deployed" on its portrait (like in the battle placement screen) if the user is in battle the unit is deployed.
Gear Description: Slightly increasing the size of the description of gear in their main description box.
Abilities Equip: Some of the descriptions wouldn't shown until after the player had made an actual change to their loadout.
Visuals: Various small spacing improvements to the UI.
Visual Customization: Made the experience using both mouse and keyboard at the same time better.
Troops Menu: Spaced out the units in the troops menu. Also made the troops menu layout better (less units covered by the UI) when using a small resolution.
Abilities Description: Clarifying and updating a few descriptions.
Worldmap: The worldmap will now center on nodes as a road is drawn to them. This will be especially useful to people using low resolutions since the new nodes are easier to spot.
Title Screen: The game should reach the title screen just a bit faster than before.
Unit Number: When pressing the "details button" in combat, each unit will be assigned a number based on their order in the turn bar and that number will be shown over their portrait and sprite on the map. This will help quickly seeing whose turn is coming soon by looking at the sprites only, as well as differentiating any sprites that might have the same portrait.
Damage: The damage prediction box will now show "-0HP" rather than " 0HP" when an attack would do 0 damage, to be more consistent. Heals for 0 will still show " 0HP".
Patrols: Adding a tutorial explaining a few basic concepts about the patrols, including their level range. It will trigger the first time the player selects the "Patrol" command on the world map.
World Map: The right stick will now pan the map.
World Map: Pressing and holding the mouse button will allow the map to be panned with mouse movements.
World Map: The keyboard will now control the world map cursor as if it were a gamepad, so the mouse won't be required at all with mouse and keyboard. The directional buttons won't pan the map anymore without pressing and hold the "Pan Map" button or the mouse.
Gear Description: Making the layout of the gear description box a little smarter if there aren't any on-hit effects or buffs attached to the equipment piece. This will make the description section better.
Weapons Description: Now showing the shape information in the description for weapons with an AoE.
Weapons Description: Will now show the base on-hit chance of debuff in the weapon description panel.
Delaying a Turn: When an attack causes a delay in the turn of the target, the word "Delayed!" will be shown using the Debuff colors.
Item Potency: Will now show the increased numerical amount in the item description box while browsing items in combat, rather than just in the prediction box.
Damage Prediction: Will now show the amount of turns a debuff will last in the prediction box.
Credits: Will now use less memory. It probably won't be noticeable by anyone really, haha.
Class List: The list now has a sort option (default, a-z, z-a).
Class Wheel: The wheel now has a sort option (default, a-z, z-a).
Prediction Box: Will now show "No effect" instead of "not showing any effects" when Dispel or Panacea wouldn't do anything, for clarity.
Prediction Box: Buffs will now be shown in "healing color" when being added and "damage color" when being removed, rather than the reverse. With this change, all "good effects" are "healing colored" and all "bad effects" are "damage colored".
Abilities, Weapons: The base chance of debuffs will now be shown in the description of the ability.
Descriptions: Changing the format of many descriptions from 0.5x to 50% if it would be more intuitive for what they do.
Help Screen: Adding numbering to the help tooltips to make it clearer how many tooltips there are on any given screen.
Sabotage: The % chance will be shown in the prediction box. It's always 100%, unless the enemy is immune to displacements. This should make it clearer the enemy can't be displaced at a glance though.
Spell Speed: Effects at the end of the turn (like Renew, Poison, etc) will be shown faster if the player has increased the spell effect speed (they were already shown faster than regular spells, but now they will be even faster if the player spell speed is higher).
Tutorial: Adding a mention about being able to add custom portraits to the game to the customize tutorial.
The level scaling feels so weird and stupid. Having it scale to the highest character seems like an understandable tool to make you switch around party members. But then they force you to use the main character for most missions which causes her to be quite overleveled compared to the rest. Just why?
Other than that and the lethal water this has been quite a fun timesink so far.
edit: Oh, it actually scales based on your 6 highest leveled units. Not that it helps the original problem very much tbh.
this is pretty fun so far. animation is a bit funky and stuff, but the combat is pretty fun. writing is bad, the characters barely have any personality or just really 1 dimensional so far.
Class system is pretty good, definitely scratching that ff tactics thing after finishing Horizons Gate. I hope the end game classes are as awesome as horizon's gate. Stuff like warpblade in / gatekeeper was so cool.
this is pretty fun so far. animation is a bit funky and stuff, but the combat is pretty fun. writing is bad, the characters barely have any personality or just really 1 dimensional so far.
Is it me or the endgame classes feels kinda underwhelming? It's still fun, but most of the active skills are pretty samey with some differences.
The passives from advanced classes are alot more useful like dual wield, or economy from sorcerers, but moat end game skills are either too expensive to be used (like ranger's snipe use 36 whole mp and root you) and something like lay waste is only useful in certain situations while a high level wizards with economy passive would deal more damage with locust level spell than using lay waste spell.
I found some classes utterly useless like gambler or peddler. Basically the more advanced class from rogue tree feel useless unless it's assassin or ranger. Gadgeteer can be useful but have bad stat prog and you mut gather the tools so it will be too long to make it really useful while fellblade, alchemystic and mender can do th same job with less investments.
Some of the combo is kinda cool tho, like dual wield + infusion edge (or dual wield anything espeically gunners) is pretty powerful.
Voidspire/ alvora / horizon classes are alot cooler like gatekeeper, warpblade , ignis knight etc.
I haven't got much of the emblem classes, only unlocked werewolf and vampire, but class like werewolf is also mainly useful for its weakness II Passive combined with weakness I that it stacks.
The endgame classes and the emblem classes seemed to have the most optimal stat growths mainly. There were some really great passives (like the "real" double cast from Princess), but I don't feel any of the skill sets they had were that powerful in comparison to the other classes.
Yeah, classes like sorcerer have the have MND growth, reaver for for its STR and such the pasives are good to amazing but the active abilities are really so-so.
I found Lay Waste pretty powerful tbh, it was clearing maps for me endgame. I didn't use it with economy, I'd stack a bunch of multipliers. Staff of darkness, counter that buffs element, hit unit with darkness for 0 damage, buff mind, then BLAM, get auto crit from slaying a unit, then BLAMX2. Later on I'd be able to throw Focus on them too with Reynard's totally balanced buff sharing skill.
Gadgeteer was carrying me for a while with the sleep gadget and +15% status chance passive.
Templar kit just seemed OP in general. Attack buff, massive single target, great passives, bunch of other useful things.
Bugman was by far the most OP in the game though. Charge is retardedly good with the spellcaster kits, and he's got some amazing buffs and offensive spells available. I probably could have solo'd a lot of lategame maps with him. And he just kept getting crazier, right up to having the suicide Lay Waste. That combined with charge and the buffs I mentioned for lay waste was one shotting the entire map fairly often. And then he wouldn't get xp for it so he didn't over level.
I just don't know why. It's pretty for tactics game, system is interesting enough, combat is good... But somehow final product is boring as fuck for me.
I would like to see another game from the developer, since this was already quite an impressive effort from basicly a team of two. Ditch the dogshit tier writing and the awful level scaling and I'd be pretty happy. And the lethal water. Or even with that I'm fine if there's more ways to counter it than equipping fucking flippers on all characters that don't get swimming from their class.
Definitely want more. Water is really dang annoying but at least your enemy can cheese it as much as you. The AI is smart enough (at least in hard difficulty i play) to know this move, so in one battle we drowned several people in each other's team.
Otherwise yeah, they really got solid thing going on, and an improved sequel both narratively and mechanically will ne brilliant.
Missions and Monsters - Completed!
Hello everyone!
A short and sweet update today: Missions and Monsters is finally fully completed!
At this point, it's mostly waiting, as the game was sent to all our partners and it's getting a final review/testing phase going.
We expect to be able to announce the official launch date in our next update, so stay tuned!
Otherwise, our last update mistakenly disabled "error logging" for mods, so we'll be doing another quick update soon to restore that feature. Otherwise, the next expected update should be when the DLC launches. Afterwards, we'll keep an eye on the forums for any bugs and balance feedback from the community and make adjustments as needed, as always.
This has been quite the adventure for us and we're very happy for all the support we've been getting during the whole process. Thanks again!
Developed by 6 Eyes Studio, Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is described by its developers as a turn-based tactical RPG with a focus on storytelling and strategic battles. What this actually means becomes obvious the moment you see the game, as it wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Fell Seal is positioned as a spiritual successor to such games like Final Fantasy: Tactics and Tactics Ogre, which were essentially the Japanese counterpart to Jagged Alliance and X-Com back in the day.
Now, I think I should mention here that when I tried playing them, the console-centric approach of the above-mentioned Japanese games felt incredibly limited and even constricting to me. It’s safe to say I wasn’t a big fan. But seeing how the western branch of the genre stagnated over the years and was eventually streamlined into something barely recognizable, I was open to giving its main competitor another shot with Fell Seal.
Story and Gameplay
The basic premise of Fell Seal is extremely simple. Basically, it’s a JRPG without any of the boring parts. So, forget about endless grinding, annoying random encounters, a combat system where your characters do squats on the edge of the screen while you tinker with some menus, or a vast open world with no road signs but one very specific place you have to go to advance the story.
In Fell Seal, you get a reasonably short dialogue-filled cutscene, then you get a hand-crafted turn-based combat encounter where your characters do battle on an isometric battlefield. When that’s done, you get to upgrade your squad and repeat this loop. Apart from that, you also have occasional bonus story events and the so-called patrols.
While all the story missions are represented by a node on the game’s overworld map, after completing them, you can revisit those locations and fight some random monsters there. You do this mostly to level up some extra squad members, advance the game time while your main guys recover from injuries, or to get some loot you missed your first time through that particular map.
The game’s story is also very much of the JRPG variety, which means you don’t get to control it in any way. You’re just a passive observer, watching it gradually unfold through a series of brief dialogue boxes.
Fortunately, the game wasn’t actually made in Japan, so its levels of over the top melodrama, teen angst, and spiky hair are relatively manageable. At its core, it’s your run of the mill fantasy tale of an ancient evil returning, schemers of all shapes running wild, and some chosen individuals rising to the occasion.
The story does feature some side quests and even a fairly well-hidden sequence of things you have to do in order to get an alternative ending, but it seems to have no idea when it should end and by the very end, manages to mostly fall apart.
However, the actual moment to moment writing possesses a certain quality that makes things pretty engaging and fun. I guess it’s just very earnest in what it’s trying to do, and I can definitely appreciate that.
As you might imagine, a game like this supplies you with some pre-made characters that are all thankfully pretty good at what they do. However, you can also expand your character roster with a number of mercenaries. You can freely customize these mercs and if that’s your thing, Fell Seal features a pretty robust character editor for an isometric game.
As your squad grows in size, it can actually become fairly unwieldy to individually upgrade all your units and supply them with appropriate gear after every battle. To help you with that, the game has a button that automatically optimizes equipped items, but as far as I’m concerned, using it is admitting defeat. Why even play the game if you don’t actively engage with its systems? I just wish that it had a better UI, one that wasn’t created with a controller in mind.
Rushing slightly ahead, I want to say that overall, I had a lot of fun playing Fell Seal, but all of that fun happened mostly despite the game’s horrendous controls and unwieldy UI. Whether you’re using a keyboard and mouse or a controller, by the time you’re done with the game, chances are you’ll be feeling mighty frustrated by its controls.
Controlling a game where you have over a dozen characters, as well as robust class, skill and crafting systems, without context-sensitive mouse controls is a huge pain. For example, in order to unequip a piece of gear, you have to mouse over it, and then press T. And don’t even get me started on all the right-clicking you will be doing just to back out of seemingly endless menus and sub-menus.
The exact sequence of actions to get free control over the combat camera and then inspect individual enemies, their current status effects, and their abilities is so arcane, it’s probably tucked away into some distant corner of the Necronomicon.
Maybe this is my lack of experience with games of this kind talking and for someone who’s been playing them since the 90s all of this feels perfectly natural, but to me, wrestling with the game’s controls oftentimes felt like trying to juggle with one hand tied behind my back.
Combat and Character Building
Now that you’ve been warned about Fell Seal’s controls, let’s finally get to the game’s main attraction - its tactical combat. First of all, I want you to temper your expectations. You know how in something like Jagged Alliance you have these huge open maps with lots of cover, line of sight blockers, and multistoried buildings? And how you can split your squad and attack these maps from multiple angles in order to pin your enemies down and put them in a disadvantageous position?
Yeah, forget about that. In Fell Seal, an average battle arena size lies somewhere between one and two full screens, and you can only deploy your squad in a couple of pre-determined positions. On the flip side, these arenas are extremely dense. Verticality is very important as well. All your characters have a jump stat that decides how quickly you can traverse any given map. On top of that, skills also have a height stat, so you have to consider not only how far your target is, but also the height difference between the two of you.
If I had to describe Fell Seal’s combat system in as little words as possible, I would compare it to a less elegant but more varied Into the Breach.
And in general, this particular take on the tactics genre still feels less feature-rich than its western-styled counterparts. You don’t have anything like attacks of opportunity, few things apart from some debuffs affect accuracy in any way, ranged units don’t have any penalty while fighting in melee, and in general your toolset is more limited.
But at the same time, what Fell Seal does, it does really well. Both your characters and your enemies are fairly fragile, which puts you in constant danger of overextending and forces you to carefully consider your moves at all time. Your enemies have access to the same tools as you do, and generally have better positions at the start, leading to some tense moments.
More often than not, both you and your enemies need a few rounds to get enough mana to unleash the more devastating abilities. This creates this dynamic of a careful dance, where early on you poke and probe at one another, trying to get the upper hand before going all in. You add to that some optional objectives, like chests with rare loot hidden off the beaten path, that force you to divert some resources away from fighting, and consider that each of the game’s arenas was carefully designed around some central idea, and you’ve got yourself a neat little exercise in tactics.
Due to the game’s smaller arena size, battles generally don’t overstay their welcome, which greatly helps with Fell Seal’s pacing. Instead of one more turn, you want to play one more fight, and before you know it, it’s 2 a.m.
The game’s consumables should also be mentioned. A lot of people these days seem to struggle with the so-called too good to use syndrome where they just hoard all their consumables thinking they’ll need them later, and then end up never using them. To help people like that, Fell Seal makes its consumables per-encounter. So, if you drink all your potions and throw all your rocks in a single fight, you’ll get them back for the next one. In fact, there’s even a class primarily focused on using consumables and making them stronger.
The overall difficulty level of the game is up to you. Fell Seal does this thing where you have some difficulty presets, and then you can manually customize them to your liking, which is pretty great. The default Veteran setting starts off extremely easy, but after a few fights kicks things up a notch, forcing you to put at least some thought into creating a functional party.
This last part brings us to my absolute favorite thing about Fell Seal - its character building system. The game has a total of 20 basic classes that range from Knights and Rangers to Peddlers and Plague Doctors, some special classes for story characters, and a number of secret classes you can unlock by finding or crafting special badges.
Each class has a unique skill tree consisting of a combination of active skills, passives, and counters. The first two are self-explanatory. Counters are triggered automatically when the character takes damage or reaches a critically low level of HP.
You unlock new classes by reaching certain levels in their prerequisite classes. This creates this intricate weave of unlocks that can be a bit overwhelming early on. But once it clicks, it becomes very satisfying to experiment with.
You see, each character can freely switch between available classes. This determines their stat progression and their gear options. But apart from their main class that gets experience, you can also designate a secondary class and have access to its active skills during combat. You also get two extra passive skill slots where you can mix and match passive skills from all of your unlocked classes. This leads to a staggering level of potential customization, and I’m all for it.
What you should also consider here, is that in order to unlock new classes, oftentimes you will have to go through multiple intermediate steps, in the process greatly limiting the combat efficiency of your characters. This puts you in a position where you have to weigh your desire to unlock a new class against having a party that’s actually good at doing damage. I really enjoy when games do this, and would honestly recommend Fell Seal for its character-building system alone.
On the other hand, the game also does this thing where at some points it takes your story characters away from you. I don’t think anyone enjoys that, and have no idea how that even got in.
And this leads us to the part of the review where I tend to list my miscellaneous gripes with the game.
While the combat is generally fun, the absolute majority of battles simply asks you to defeat all enemies. I would’ve preferred way more variety in objectives.
The game also has quite a few stats, but you don’t really get to interact with them. As your characters get levels, their stats grow without any involvement on your part, which makes having them in the first place kind of pointless. Why even give me stats if I can’t manually raise them?
There are also elemental resistances and numerous status effects that due to the game’s poor UI, most of the time you have no idea what they are and what they do. In order to learn more about them you can read the in-game Help Compendium or use a tooltip system that’s not exactly user friendly.
And finally, one last thing I want to mention here is the fact that after a while the game tends to descend into a bit of a feast or famine type situation. Veterans of multiple battles, your top dogs are living the life, throwing enemies around like nobody’s business. But due to how fragile most underleveled characters are, your B-team, and the weaker spellcasters for that matter, tend to fall over if a light breeze blows in their general direction. This makes it so you keep using your main squad while neglecting the rest of your team, dreading the next time the game decides to send one of them away on some story-related sabbatical, which thankfully doesn’t happen all that often.
Technical Information
Inspired by console games, Fell Seal’s options menu tries to pretend it’s a proper options menu, but it’s not fooling anyone. Raising or lowering the game’s volume feels akin to playing a piano. The graphics menu offers half a dozen options, none of which deal with the game’s graphical fidelity in any way. At least you can rebind keys and speed up combat animations.
Despite the limited options, the game’s visuals are vibrant and I would go as far as to say charming. The soundtrack is also quite enjoyable. At the same time, sound effects are pretty weak and fail to convey the crunchiness of blows and all the supposedly awe-inspiring swooshing of magic.
The save system is perfectly adequate - you have manual saves with multiple save slots and autosaves before battles.
During my playthrough, the game ran well, never crashed, and loaded pretty much instantaneously.
Those of you who enjoy New Game+ modes, should be happy to learn that Fell Seal has one, meaning you can replay the game while using your high-level and well-equipped squad.
Conclusion
It’s safe to say that Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is a game outside of my usual wheelhouse. I was coming into it with little expectations and no nostalgia goggles.
Despite that, after coming to terms with the game’s subpar controls, I had a lot of fun with it and would recommend it to anyone interested in turn-based RPGs based on its character-building system, fun bite-sized tactical battles, and pleasant visuals.
is the DLC something of a post game content or mid game content? i am almost finished with the main campaign (just beat the second tournament on hard. that was super fun)
is the DLC something of a post game content or mid game content? i am almost finished with the main campaign (just beat the second tournament on hard. that was super fun)
- Water is fatal to a ridiculous degree. There is one ability where you can knock an opponent one space back and into the water and if they do not have a swimming ability, they automatically take max damage and die. Early-on, this makes for a lot of fun and you have to be careful where you position your characters. Later, however, you start running into enemies that can teleport your fighters over a pool of water and automatically kill them. And the majority of the key fights have small fountains that bosses will teleport your characters over. Yes, your character will die from being teleported into a small temple fountain. The game forces you to equip your characters with swim gear and play wearing flippers. It gets pretty old and stupid fast.
No real need for a mod. It's more of an annoyance that appears in couple of levels than an overarching balance issue. It could be nice to remove it, but it shouldn't stop you from playing the game.
- Water is fatal to a ridiculous degree. There is one ability where you can knock an opponent one space back and into the water and if they do not have a swimming ability, they automatically take max damage and die. Early-on, this makes for a lot of fun and you have to be careful where you position your characters. Later, however, you start running into enemies that can teleport your fighters over a pool of water and automatically kill them. And the majority of the key fights have small fountains that bosses will teleport your characters over. Yes, your character will die from being teleported into a small temple fountain. The game forces you to equip your characters with swim gear and play wearing flippers. It gets pretty old and stupid fast.
Has anyone tried the DLC already? Will definitly buy eventually but I am unsure if now or later when it is discounted significantly for the first time.
