Customer Reviews

Stella Deus

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Seeing the same 5 enemies over, and over, and over, with the occasional "guest appearance" is not my idea of depth, or replay value.
The battle system is well thought out. (even if it hasn't changed since Hoshigami) Instead of a move and then an action like every other TRPG out there, you have 100 AP (action points) to spend every turn. You can either use some of this to move and some to for an action in the traditional way, or you can move just a little bit, but not enough to place your next move after the enemy, and then basically get a free quarter turn. Also good is that you can attack as many times as your AP will allow. Some characters, if not moved, can get in upto 3 attacks a turn.
Now I will say that there is some depth to customizing your characters, but not nearly enough. Maybe if the game had come out BEFORE Final Fantasy tactics I'd have been fine with it, but it can't hold a candle to FFT's job system. To say nothing of Disgaea and Phantom Brave.
The whole item combination system is nice, but the recipes are a little too arbitrary. That is to say there's no logic as to why you would get any specific outcome. (cloth armor + herb = lance???) It's trial and error and that's it.
The quests are similar to Final Fantasy Tactics but even in that simple regard the game comes up short. The quests give either a fight or some info.
The big problem here is that after playing games with insane amounts of depth like the aforementioned FFT, Disgaea, and Phantom Brave...
Well this game just doesn't measure up.
Not only that, but those same 5 enemies you see over and over? They're also what your mercenaries look like.
Whoohoo.
Also there's a blue haze over the screen during battles and it gets annoying. Yeah I understand that it's the 'miasma', but I'd still like to see the games visuals sans blue fog.
So. Solid but not something you can really sink into.

Fans of Atlus' PS1 Tactical RPG Hoshigami are doubtlessly going to find alot to like in Stella Deus.

It's very much stylistically similar to Hoshigami with a few interesting tweaks such as Fusion - combineing two items to make 1 unique item (think bow + axe = cloth shirt?)and much more indepth character developement.

What i really liked about Hoshigami was it's unique twist on turned based combat - the ability to speed up a characters next turn by taking no action or little action. Stella Deus brings the same kind of strategic depth by also utilizing the same feature.

Another important point to make is that so far i've found Stella Deus to be one of the more difficult tactical RPGs i've ever played. Despite spending a fair amount of time leveling up i've had to resort to cheap tactics in a few battles. (such as getting a boss to chase one character while pumbeling him with arrows for an hour from an elevated position)This does alot to hurt the overall experience.

In short there are alot of other tactical RPGs for the PS2 i would recommend over Stella Deus (such as Disgaea Hour of Darkness and Growlanser Generations)but if you especially liked Hoshigami or want something a little different then Stella Deus is definately worth checking out.

I've always liked SRPGs, but they're just aren't enough of them. Especially for the PS2. FFT is the best I've played, but I'd proprably put this right after it. Disgaea was fun with outrageous levels, but I wouldn't want to do that again. {2 much work} Lapucelle and Phantom Brave didn't really do much for me. The reason I instantly liked Stella Deus more than the nimon ichi {don't know how to spell it but u know who I mean} games is because of the story. Its no FFT, but at least its worth hearing. Disgaea was comedy driven, but Phantom Brave insulted me with its kiddy simplistic story. Stella Deus gameplay wise, is solid. Its not as complicated to learn as the others, but it isn't shallow either. Instead of set turns, its all a matter of AP.
Example: The more armor you wear, the more weight, hence the more AP will be spent on each action. The only promblem I have is the afore-mentioned lack of enemies. Cool bosses, every now and again, but mostly the same old enemy classes. Unlike FFT where you didn't see certain classes until later in the game, Stella Deus decided to show you all of them pretty much right off the bat. Also, {and for some reason none of the reviewers seemed to mention this} the graphics are the best I've seen in an SRPG. I know thats not saying much, but its true.

I love a good RPG with a decent story and not to off-the-well as many games from Japan have been in recent years. Having just recently finished Stella Deus ("SD") I feel as though I, most certainly, got what I paid for.

SD is a very simple tactical RPG with a three dimensional chessboard, to which the players attack in turn based upon their speed. Like other tactical RPGs, the players gain experience based on attacks, skills, and spells used on other characters (friend and foe alike) and raised higher based on the level of the target. The story revolves around a world dying from a miasma and the several factions of the planet fighting over which method is better. Some prefer to wait for their "peaceful end," others wish to fight to the death, others dare to seek an unlikely prophecy to save the world (guess which one you end up choosing?). You play Spero, a young and courageous soldier trying to find a way to save the world, he meets a beautiful woman, they fight together, they go an an adventure, yadda, yadda.

That is the game in a nutshell.

SD held my attention for 50+ hours but not because the story was overly-intrigueing, or the fact that the artist put a 'bounce' effect in the female movement animations, but because before you know it you have put over 12 hours in the game and you want to finish what you started. Before I knew it, I was at 30 hours and then 40, 50, etc. Most RPG gamers do not like leaving a game after putting so many hours in and I am no exception either.

I spent a good deal of time leveling up in the always-accessible "catacombs," where the player can level up as long as they prefer and unlock more sub-levels as they progress through the game. After all, they can't have you go all the way up to 99 in just over 20 hours now can they (I did it in 47). This would be great if leveling up wasn't so darn time-consuming. It can take well over thirty minutes to an hour to finish one catacomb level and you'd only level up maybe 1-2 levels. My average time per catacomb level was 20-25 minutes. Now, multiply that by 99 and you'll see how long it takes to level up to maximum.

The only solace a player can take in this is that, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, a character accumulates skill points with every action. Unlike "FFT", however, skill points can be used to raise character attributes typically in incriments of one. However (AGAIN), like experience points, skill points take a while to accumulate to an amount necessary to raise the aforementioned attributes.

So, in all, the combat system needs to be tweaked to allow faster leveling otherwise a person will spend waaay too much time trying to level and for an almost miniscule amount of increased stats per level. It just takes too darn long.

The next gameplay option if the item fusion system. This is an excellent and a horrible addition at the same time. Great that you can make much better items and equipment (including weapons) than are available at shops, but horrible in how the setup is made. My biggest problem with the fusion setup is that you can only make one item at a time even if your goal is to make two or more of the same item. This is not a problem until after chapter five when you begin constructing the best equipment in the whole game. It is frustrating because you have to start with level 9 items to make level 16 ones and, more often than not, you need to make up to 10 of one item in order to get there. This means you have to scroll, almost endlessly, through item menus every time you make an object. This makes the process take forever. It took me two hours just to make the best swords for ONE character. Oh yeah, and it is expensive over time as well since level 9 items are not cheap and cost almost as much as a round in the catacombs, requiring more time. You literally have to cheat or find a money glitch (which there is) to eliminate that process.

Atlus should have simplified things by allowing mass production of fusions. This means when they ask you to confirm item fusion, you should be allowed to make more than one. It would have made making the best equipment that much more faster so I'm only limited by how much money I have.

My next beef is with the secret character recruitment. It is annoying that you have to do certain things in order to get them to begin with, but it is made worse that many of these recruitment processes happen towards the beginning of the game and it becomes too late to fix it. This has occured with games like Suikoden, but those games didn't take over 30-50 hours to beat (more like 8-20).

There is also little replay value as only the hardest of hardcore gamers will ever want to retry SD, especially with NO new game + option. I felt obligated to finish the game just so I can say I finished it and could move on to another RPG.

Lastly is the voice acting. Well... I've rarely heard decent voice acting from a Japanese RPG so I really shouldn't be surprised but SD just doesn't cut it. The only voice actor I recognized was Viser, who I've heard time and time again in other games including Shadow Ops, X-Men Legends, and numerous anime (I swear, they literally rent these guys from a rent-a-voice-actor center or something).

Despite all the negative remarks I have, I do have some positive remarks.

The first is the game is addicting albeit not in a good way. It kept my interest for a little while but I will not be playing SD again. You complete it out of obligation and not out of interest.

The next is the simplicity of the game and lack of weirdness. Too many times RPGs have some really abstract things including a flambouant male playing the saxaphone as a weapon or a hero who looks more like Meg Ryan than a glorified soccer star (I am not making any of this up). SD eliminates most of the weirdness albeit with some female characters with revealing clothing and a prince who looke more like an Alice without a shirt on.

All in all, SD is a solid RPG from Japan and holds it's place in my collection of RPGs and will remain there. It is a great game if you need a cheaper alternative to the more expensive ones out there and want to be addicted to a very long and cumbersome game but otherwise it is a case-filler.

70%

-15 for time-consuming and, often times, frustrating leveling and advancing
-5 for non-user friendly fusion interface
-5 for poor character recruitment
-2 for lousy voice acting
-2 for lackluster story and ending (It could have been better)

There are a lot of classic tactics games - Final Fantasy Tactics series, Disgaea series and the whole lot of Nippon Ichi iterations. Stella Deus is by Atlus, with the same Atlus style graphics and interesting gameplay. But it just couldn't match up with its counterparts in the Tactics Camp.

This doesn't mean that it is a bad game. It is a very decent game but the flexibility it offers and the replay value of the game are not as high as many other Tactics game. First about the job classes. In the Final Fantasy Tactics series, the number of jobs that you can try is just silly - silly in a good sense that you can play with so many combinations that you just enjoy watching how your newly created job works on the battle field. However, in Stella Deus, jobs are preset. You can class up but with a limit and you need certain items to class up. So after a while you are already just using the same character again and again. Also the design of the generic classes are not that interesting either. So that really affects the gaming experience if you need to drill through 100 levels of generic dungeons.

The story characters and optional characters are really well designed. However, it is just very difficult to get the optional characters without a walkthrough. Example, you will not know that you need to overkill them several times to get them and also at the beginning of the game it is very difficult to overkill your boss enemies. So by the time you found that out, it is already too late. However, if you managed to get all the optional characters, the team becomes very interesting with all the variety of skills you can have in the game. That is a plus for your effort.

The game tried to provide different ways of keeping your interest in it. For example, the 100 levels Catacomb, Missions and Alchemy Fusion. But then after a while they are just more or less similar. Also certain missions don't come up without certain characters in your party and sometimes they can get ridiculously difficult to achieve the goal. For the Alchemy Fusion, they are very random. Random not in the sense of you don't know what you will get, but in the sense of you don't really understand why two swords fused together could become maybe a potion. So there is a lot of trying through the menu and after all the trial and error you will just go straight to the online walkthrough.

Story wise it does have a very good story - and make more sense than the Final Fantasy Tactics series. It is much darker and certain cutscenes are beautifully drawn. Other than that you have a lot of time scrolling through nicely painted character boards with sometimes really annoying voice over. Also the graphics are not as pretty as a lot of other tactic games. The special team attack skills are well drawn but for all the other skills you can see their budgetness. It's just not pretty to look at while you consume your MP to perform them. In the end, I just hack the enemies to death most of the time.

The game didn't provide a game save option to gamers who finished the game but strangely enough the final boss will still give you good items. That makes you think 'what is that for if I can't use it at all?' I think Atlus really need to think about this in the future. With no game save, it is very unrewarding to replay the game. All Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Disgaea and Fire Emblem have game save options to unlock more stuff for the game and that makes it more replayable.

In all Stella Deus is still a solid game put together but it is not a game that will tempt you to spend more time than you need to finish and replay it.

Stella Deus is one of the few decent tactics games available for the PS2/X system, produced by a company with a reputation for tactics games. Personally, I rate it near the bottom of good tactics games, but it makes the list.

Sound is average, graphics on the higher end for tactics games, and special attack animations are on the long side. This makes game pacing slower than Disgaea, but not as slow as La Pucelle. General Viper, a sub-boss in the early game, has the worst English voice actor ever, but I liked the voices for Echidna and Spero. This isn't a big deal (at least the characters have personality). I set message speed to fast, and quickly clicked through annoying story scenes, reading the text before they finished voicing (I read fast, heh).

Personally, I find the heart of a tactics game to be the difficultly. In Stella Deus it is variable. You have two ways to play -- challenge yourself or blowout. The game becomes remarkable easy if you venture into the catacombs and level. Stella Deus has no random encounters, but you can always go into a fixed dungeon from town, and therefore can easily level your party until they reach level values equal to the basement level of the catacombs. If you do this, story mode is a joke. However, if you choose not to use the catacombs at all, this is perhaps the most fiendishly difficult SRPG ever! I can't think of a more ringing endorsement than that, for those of us who love these games. On the minus side, it is impossible to recruit certain characters in the uber-hard path (you'll be lucky to defeat enemies, much less overkill them).

This game would have been wonderful with higher enemy variety and faster combat. You'll want to run the catacombs eventually for the postgame bosses waiting at the end, and slogging through them is extremely tedious because you'll be fighting stupid enemies with bad AI. In my opinion this game is perfect when your party is about two levels lower than all enemy units. It is impossible to maintain that and see all the game has to offer though.

My recommendation: buy Phantom Brave, Disgaea 1&2, and Makai Kingdom first. If you've solved those, Stella Deus is nice next choice for a tactics game.

Stella Deus is a tactical rpg from Atlus. The game plays very similar to past tactical rpgs like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogres, and Disgaea. Unlike traditional role-playing games where the hero character, and the supporting NPCs who join him, can roam the roads, forests and lands between cities and regions freely, tactic games pretty much just linear road-links which takes a character icon from one marker to the next signifying a cities on the world map.

Like all tactics-based rpgs, Stella Deus uses job classes which can be levelled into much stronger ones, with class name changes included. This is done through constant battles and the exp gained from successful attacks (melee, ranged and magic), supporting actions, and use of items. Stella Deus has a way of creating high levels gear and weapons from current inventory which is pretty exhaustive in the amount of combinations can be used. Though some combinations just doesnt make sense in that some powerful weapons and gear can be made by combining a weak low-level item with a medium-level one while combining two high-levels can get a player a useless low-level item. As fun as the item creation system is this small flaw can make things frustrating at times.

The voice acting in Stella Deus is one the worst I've heard in games, so far. The people who did the voices for the hero, the supporting characters and some of the npcs I can only sum up as being below-par and just downright amateurish. It sounds as if the actors hired were just reading what was put in front of them without any sort of emoting required. It doesn't help that the story itself is pretty dull and uninteresting.

The gameplay itself is pretty much your standard tactics-style grid battle where the player positions his party as strategically as possible to gain an advantage on pre-positioned enemy units. After a few battles its really simple to figure out just how to position your party so that you pretty win every battle with little or no trouble.

All in all, Stella Deus doesn't match-up to the great tactics rpgs like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre and Disgaes. It doesn't even come up to the same level as the second-tier tactics rpgs like La Pucelle, Makai and Phantom Brave. I'd recommend this game as a rental, but even then I'd only do so if a person really wants to try it.

The strategy RPG genre is a very difficult one to get right. Not only is actually making a quality game a complex and difficult process, the bar for it has been set very high with entries like Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea. Stella Deus does not make that mark.

Don't get me wrong, it is a solid game. The story is compelling and interesting, but the actual battles do not hold up in the shadow of the two I mentioned above. They feel unbalanced. It's really hard to put my finger on it exactly but it seemed like I was always steamrolling enemies are getting slaughtered. But I believe this fault lies with the item crafting system.

The item crafting system is horrible, one of the worst I've ever seen. It offers you absolutely no guidance, not even the decency of letting you form a list of recipes. This will result in a lot of duplicate items, a lot of junk you don't want, or a lot of reloading your save and trying again. Often, especially in the early parts of the game, it is not even worth using since unless you wish to sacrifice a rare item, you won't get a piece of equipment worth using.

To compensate going into battle under geared, you must grind. I like grinding. Disgaea, the king of grinds, is probably my favorite series running at the moment. But the grinding here just isn't fun.

I also found the visual style to be very lacking. The whole game feels dusty with everything using such muted or washed out colors. The game uses sprites, which is fine, I love sprites, but they're poorly detailed and rather ugly to look at. Some color would have gone a long way to make the game more pleasing to play.

All in all, it isn't bad, there's just better out there. If you don't mind studying an item combination guide on Gamefaqs, you may be able to get over the crafting system, which was ultimately caused me to give up on it. I believe if you can overcome that hurdle and the visual style doesn't get you down, you'll be able to enjoy this.

Granted it's not FFT yet it's the best Strategy RPG out there right now. the gameplsy is just fun, the grphics and the art design are pretty smooth and accomplish well on getting the player in the feeling of the game. The story is not as complex as FFt but its still pretty good, being far more serious than that of games like Disgaea or Phantom Brave.

i fu like SRPG's I highly recommend it.
a review from a fan to fans.

This game was a great disappointment. I am a huge RPG fan, and have been unhappy lately with the offerings. Everything is "action" RPGs...real time combat, so many movies your sould screams with impatience, lots of button-mashing tricks to perform, you can beat a game without ever learning a strategy deeper than "hit the attack button." I have been pining for a decent RPG with turn-based combat that forces you to THINK. This game was not it.

The Plus:
No random encounters. Random encounters can be fun, but many games just have TOO many. I swear, I've played games where you beat an encounter and then fall into another one less than two steps latter. That can be frustrating, especially when you're trying to solve a puzzle or advance an interesting part of the story. Stella Deus eliminates that frustration. You fight when you want to fight!

Combat scenarios are great. Not the best animation, but I like the AP concept. Cool movement, especially use of the terrain.

Fusion. Other games have similar concepts, but this is REALLY easy to use. Intuitive.

The Negative
This could have been made over a decade ago. Non-interactive environments (actually, no "environments" at all, except in combat!). Fairly weak storyline. Easy to beat. Side quests are short (some less than a minute) and boil down to one or two quick battles or, even worse, you pick a quest and the game seemingly randomly tells you if you succeeded or not. BOORING!

I figured out an easy way to level up. Take a weaker character (not too much weaker, or the other characters will dodge all his attacks). Put him in the first level of the catacombs with a bunch of more powerful characters. I have found that a character killing a character two levels higher will earn about 50 exp. You can level up pretty quick. On the first level of the catacombs, after a few levels, you can ignore the opponents (they always miss) and just concentrate on having your party murder one another. Spero can die in the catacombs without ending the game (as long as one of your characters survives). You can level up pretty fast this way. Even if your characters are the same level, you can still level up faster by just murdering one another in the catacombs than just about anywhere else.

If your levels are five or more higher than the bosses, strategy is no longer required. You'll pound on 'em!

All in all, a poor effort. One star.