Fell Seal Arbiter's Mark Demo | Kickstarter Tactical Turn Based JRPG

Good mornin-afternoo-vening, dear Nonsensiacs and welcome to a quick video for a quick demo playthrough. Today I’m playing Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark a turn-based tactical JRPG which promises a crap-tonne of player, class and party customization, as well as an interesting story to dig into.

There’s a heavy JRPG inspiration behind the game that oozes from both its art direction - which is very manga-esque in approach - to it’s combat and game mechanics. But the first thing that I noticed, was the discrepancy between the profile images and the avatars you see on screen. The images are of a certainly higher level of quality and detail than what you see on the screen.

This is something quite normal in RPGs, the profile images in Shadowrun only resembled your character model’s face. On the other hand you usually don’t see your character’s face in-game anyway. They’re either minimalistically rendered, or simply to small to see, like in the cases of the Obsidian games.

In the case of Fel Seal: Arbiter’s Mark you can see the faces on your character models quite easily and they contrast starkly with those in the profile images.

Turn Based Tactical Combat Gameplay

Once you’re done placing your units on the available free squares, you can begin the battle.

Fell Seal, in pure JRPG-style, can also be played with a controller, which I did. Thankfully the game does accept third-party controllers, as opposed to both Immortal Planet and Dark Devotion however, I found using the controller to be a bit sluggish for my liking. Maybe because I didn't grow up playing this sort of games on a console - I've always been a PC gamer.

I also played through the quick demo with the keyboard and mouse as well and I can tell you that I considered that experience to be a much faster one than the controller, but again, it might just be I’m more used to using the keyboard and mouse.

One interesting combat mechanic is that you can push characters off of their spot and when there's something behind them, they'll maybe get extra damage or quite possibly in the future, they'll get status effects if you push them into a dangerous square. If there’s another character behind your target - be it friend or foe - that character will get damaged by the pushing as well, so it makes tactical arrangement and attacks that much more important.

The Kickstarter demo consists of two major fights but you can also see a much larger map at our disposal and it is mentioned that the game is quite story driven, which you can tell from the demo as well.

On the other hand this could also be less of a good thing since it means that it could make the game be very linear, and I am not a fan of linear RPGs.

I hope this won't be the case and that there are various exploration choices to make once the entire game is done.

Graphics and sound

I do also have to mention that the art style makes use of two different ways of illustrating the character models and the background. The models are illustrated with a different type of color or a different type of light on the colors, while the backgrounds look a little bit more subdued, like they're hand drawn and colored with pencils. It creates a particular type of atmosphere for the game and despite my earlier misgivings, you can tell that there is a lot of detail on the character models.

The sound design is good and the music is very nice and upbeat. I can only assume that it will work with the overall atmosphere of the game that they're creating.

The demo also shows us that we’ll be able to change the outer appearance of our characters, just from an aesthetic point of view, not related to what items they’ll be wearing and such. Also there’s the option of hiring other members to your party so at least from this point of view the game does seem to give you quite a bit of options.

The game will also feature crafting - which is always interesting if it’s done right - but the more interesting mechanic that the game features is that it will allow you to change your characters’ class on a dime. Which is a weird sort of thing to do since this will impact how they progress and your playstyle as well, so I am quite curious to see how that will work within the game.

So if you like what you see, don’t hesitate to download their demo and try it for yourselves, and if you dig it, consider backing them. I’ll post the Kickstarter link at the end of the article.

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Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/153039232/fell-seal-arbiters-mark-classic-turn-based-tactica

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