Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark Review for PlayStation 4

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, by developer 6 Eyes Studio and publisher 1C Entertainment, is a turn-based tactics game that takes place on a grid. In it, you play as an agent of a council of immortals that has grown corrupt over the years.

As opposed to other games where you can select your units in the order you wish on your turn, in this game all units, both yours and enemy units, follow a turn counter. This means that not only can you not choose the order in which you move your units, but also that the enemy will most likely get to move some of their units before you have finished moving all of yours.

Each unit has 3 parts to their turn: movement, action, and facing. The first 2 parts, movement and action, can be used in whichever order you desire (i.e: you can choose to have a character take an action before moving). “Movement” is moving your character from one panel to another. “Action” is using either a standard attack, a skill, or an item. “Facing” is the direction a character faces. Facing is done after a character has used action and movement.

The direction a character faces is important in this game. While attacking a character from the front does regular damage, attacks from the side do bonus damage and attacks from behind do even more damage than an attack from the side. As such, a useful strategy is to have your heavy hitters flank the enemy to maximize their damage output.

Each character can equip a primary class and a sub class. Characters that participate in battle only earn experience points for their primary class while characters that are on the sidelines will earn a smaller amount of experience for any class they posses that was used in the battle. For example, if a wizard class is used in the battle, all sideline characters that have access to the wizard class, regardless of whether it is their class or sub class, will earn experience for the wizard class. Characters only have access to 2 or 3 classes to begin with, but can earn access to others by leveling up the classes already in their possession.

Aside from story characters, you can recruit your own custom characters from any town with a guild in it. The amount of customization is actually rather extensive. I was able to recreate all my friends as custom teammates. These custom characters can start with any class that you have unlocked with another character (although there are some classes that, for story reasons, are only usable by the story characters). You can even choose the level these characters start at, though as you’ve probably guessed, higher-level characters cost more to recruit than low level ones.

It is possible to enter combat at any area outside the cities. When you choose to do this, you will face enemies that are around the strength of the enemies that appeared there the first time you went through it.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game. as such, I think a fair rating for it is 9/10.

Check Out the Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark Trailer:

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam.