The Top Shelf: The Second Round 016: Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

I probably don't need to point out that spending an hour with a SRPG is hardly sufficient for grasping the full width and breadth of everything it has to offer. After all, games of this type are usually still adding new mechanics and characters 10 or 20 hours after you begin. I made an exception for Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity because it was a game in which I'd managed to make a decent amount of headway back when it was new, but bounced off it for reasons I can't recall. If I had to guess, it was around that time that I burned out magnificently on turn-based SRPGs that offered a lot of side-content courtesy of Nippon Ichi Software's prolific output - the combination of La Pucelle, Phantom Brave and the first two Disgaea games was all the SRPG nirvana I could withstand. Stella Deus is a little more traditional for the genre rather than the large paradigm-shifts that were the NIS games, establishing itself as a spiritual successor to the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics and Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth with a combination of tactical considerations such as height and flanking, and the use of optional training dungeons and mostly automatic side-quests where you lose access to members of your retinue for a few days as they go off to complete assignments.

The story of Stella Deus is a familiar one that plays on common JRPG themes of rampant environmental disaster and the perils and conflict that comes of dogmatic absolutism. The world of Solum is threatened by a mysterious toxic fog known as Miasma that destroys all life it touches, from trees and plants to humans and other fauna. Humanity's remainder has coalesced around sites of minimal Miasma, but even these locations are threatened daily by the Miasma's encroachment and dwindling food supplies. From this apocalyptic harbinger two major religions have formed: the religion of Aeque ("ay-kway") posits that the Miasma is the work of God and the goal of humanity is to, essentially, lie down and wait for the end. This helps to assuage everyone's fear, but has also devalued life and free will with the result of a largely apathetic and aimless population. The other religion is more a manifest destiny sort of thing, as big bad Dignus (which I keep typing as "Dingus") rises up to proclaim himself Overlord and goes about conquering the non-resisting pockets of humanity. His will becomes a "religion" that all who serve him must follow. In the middle of all this is Spero, a young swordsman looking for purpose, and Linea, the princess of a shamanistic tribe who feels she is close to understanding the source of the Miasma.

The concept of Miasma's a fairly common sight in JRPGs like Final Fantasy IX or Tales of the Abyss: the idea of a toxic fog that destroys and mutates all living beings it comes in contact with isn't foreign to a country that suffered from the effects of nuclear fallout for decades. Nor is the Japanese skepticism around organized religions such as Christianity all that uncommon in video games with familiar religious institutions, given how late it was introduced to that country. I'm not a sufficiently knowledgeable scholar of Japanese culture and history by a long shot, but seeing the same themes pop up again and again in JRPG fiction can be telling. Stella Deus's presentation is fairly decent for a mid-lifespan PS2 game: while the CGI cutscenes have aged considerably, the 2D animations for the sprites and the portrait character art is top notch. The latter is brought to us by none other than Shigenori Soejima: the lead artist for many of Atlus's more recent games, including Persona 4, Persona 5 and Catherine. A long-time employee of Atlus (which co-created Stella Deus with an obscure studio named Pinegrow), this game was the first where Soejima took on the role of art director. The game's post-apocalyptic setting mostly follows a medieval theme of the plate armor and swords variety though there's a surprising amount of creativity with the design of the enemy units that serve Dignus: many have unsettling masks and lacquered mail, inspired by the samurai, while others look almost inhuman with the bizarre metal accoutrements they're sporting. The soundtrack, too, is fantastic: my old favorites Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata, the composer team behind the soundtracks for Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII and Vagrant Story among others, provided a suitably martial orchestral score that stands with their other collaborations.

Getting deeper into the mechanical nitty-gritty now, the game functions much like a lot of SRPGs from this era. Placement is of paramount importance, as hitting an enemy from the side does more damage than from the front, but at the same time moving units too far ahead puts them at risk of getting overwhelmed. You end each turn selecting the direction your character will face, you get a little readout on the accuracy and damage of your next attack in case you want to reconsider your options, and an action point system that allows for a versatile mix of movement and attacks: stationary characters can attack more, and ending a turn with leftover AP will cause that character's next turn to come sooner. The game has some distinct ideas too, like a secondary "SP" (skill points) resource from defeating enemies that can be spent on buying supplies or boosting specific stats that the player wants to focus on in order to cover weaknesses (or, conversely, min-max) as well as a team attack option that can drag in as many friendly units that are in the vicinity for a single huge damaging attack. This allows a whole team to lay into a single enemy unit and completely ruin its day, but only the allied unit that instigated the attack earns any XP and SP. In that vein, you have to choose who to use to finish off enemies for the bigger XP rewards that result, allowing stragglers to catch up with your primary damage-dealers by coup-de-gracing weakened enemies in a manner similar to Fire Emblem and a large number of other strategy games. At some point you'll end up with more characters than you have slots on the battlefield to accommodate them, and must determine whether to regularly cycle out non-story-critical members for a versatile spread of combatants or stick to a preferred party. There's a few other neat little ideas taken from various sources too, like hidden items placed on squares across the battlefield that your character must end their turn on to find, or spending time in the multi-floored bonus dungeon to keep your team honed and prepared for the next major story battle.

Honestly, playing only an hour of this game long divorced from that SRPG burnout that turned me off it originally might actually be more difficult than I thought. With another 26 PS2 games to look at this month, my intent was just to refresh my memory sufficiently enough that I could properly judge the game when it came time to determining my final shelf selection, but I might consider sticking around and making more progress whenever I have some spare time. Either that or coming back to it in October when The Top Shelf is ready to wind down, choosing a number of "Shelftember survivors" to give another whole week to before we begin the battle royales and final deliberations in November and December. It's not the most spectacular SRPG I've played, but between its distinctive art direction and the warm FFT tingles a lot of its mechanics and soundtrack is giving me, I think I may have unfairly overlooked the game.

Result: Progresses to the Final Round.

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