Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark

That Fell Seal was ‘inspired by’ Final Fantasy Tactics is blindingly obvious, but I’ll go farther and say it’s closer to a simplified remake of it. I’d say ‘consolized’, but the original was a console game so….

Classes have less skills to learn, magic is cast instantly, item variety has been massively reduced (and universalized so that every unit can use them, albeit a limited number of times per battle), cover no longer exists, there’s only one type of water tile and you can attack while submerged, there aren’t any ground/weather effects, height-based damage requires a specific skill, evasion is now a universal stat that works against both magical and physical attacks, AP points are awarded after battle in a lump sum based on enemy level, battle maps are static and can’t be rotated/tilted, and the world map is smaller with less locations to visit.

Expect to reach the low 50’s if you skip the few sidequests and low 60’s otherwise (you can grind to level 99 either way if you really wanted to though). If you plan to master all the classes the playtime can run into the 80+ hour range, while just sticking to the main story quests will probably end up about half that. The main thing to be aware of here is that, though things are much simpler and there aren’t any unfair main quest battles like FFT‘s Wiegraf fight, every single battle features enemy healers.

Anyone who’s played FFT will recall that some of the most annoying fights are against units with instant healing abilities (e.g. Yellow Chocobos, Chemists) and in this game every character is a Chemist and every battle features one or more healer classes. So unless you’re playing with lowered difficulty settings or cheesing things with double-casting Quickened Sorcerers even the most simple battle will take several minutes to finish.

Still… the core FFT experience and storyline beats are there, and when you get right down to it the only other way to play FFT on a PC is with an emulator. So if you like that kind of game this one will definitely be worth picking up.


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