Stella Deus - The Gate of Eternity

Cut down an enemy and it doesn't simply vanish. Its spirit lingers on the tile where it fell, a pale smear of energy that any alchemist in the party can absorb to fuel bigger magic. That one idea reshapes how you read the battlefield: positioning is no longer just about flanking and cover, it's about where the corpses are going to be, and who gets there first. Fights turn into small logistical arguments with yourself.

The rest of the structure is familiar to anyone who spent 2004 and 2005 working through the post-Final Fantasy Tactics wave. Isometric grids, a turn order governed by speed rather than fixed rounds, elevation that matters, classes that branch as characters level. Adjacent allies chain into attacks, which rewards keeping a tight formation instead of scattering across the map — a small pressure that pushes against the usual tactical instinct to spread out and snipe. Difficulty is uneven. Some maps fold quickly, others punish you for a single misjudged approach and force a full restart, and the game is not shy about ambushing a party built for the wrong range.

The fiction is bleaker than the art style suggests. A miasma is spreading across the world, killing everything it touches, and the alchemists who might reverse it are politically compromised and running out of time. Spero, a mercenary with no particular investment in saving anyone, gets pulled in by an alchemist named Linea. Shigenori Soejima's character designs give it a clean, slightly melancholy look, and Hitoshi Sakimoto's score does most of the heavy lifting in scenes the dialogue writes too plainly.

It arrived from a small team without the marketing weight of its competition, and it shows in the presentation — stiff cutscene staging, a story that tells more than it dramatises, menus that make you work harder than they should. What it doesn't lack is a design idea of its own. Most tactical RPGs of the period borrowed a template and decorated it. This one asked what would happen if death itself became a currency you fought over, and then built its combat maths around the answer.

An honest second-tier tactics game, which in this genre is a compliment: it plays like it was made by people who wanted to add something rather than pass the audition.