Final Stardust: Cosmic Nexus is a new 2D card game set in an anime universe and based on the still-in-production manga, Ardent Tales. It’s under development and being published by Nour Saiana, and the build I was given is still in the early stages of development so things may change and be added in since the time of this posting.

Final Stardust: Cosmic Nexus plays a lot like the old popular card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh, and the mechanics are fairly similar. The objective is to reduce the other duelist’s points to zero, but unlike attack and defence stances, whatever card is in play must be defeated before being able to deal direct damage. There is also a nice extra touch with evolutions that can be performed during the game, boosting a monster card’s base stats to increase how much health they have and the damage they can dish out.

The animation is purely focused on the attack stage of each player’s turn, with an animated sprite representing the card performing a blast attack, but the characters are presented in a visual novel style and don’t have any reactions to show off.

Battle music plays throughout the game, but if you were to turn this off, it’s nothing but silence. At this stage, there aren’t any sound effects to accompany the animations and any narrative is delivered by text. This could all change as development progresses. After all, it’s still being made.

As a former Yu-Gi-Oh player, the core gameplay idea was easy to learn, but sadly, for those without previous experience, there currently aren’t any tutorials. Working out what monster could evolve into what was worked out through trial and error, slapping cards together until something stuck.

There are many other characters you can duel against, each boosting their special deck and having their own style of combat. One thing I am very much looking forward to is being able to build my own deck, and they’ve promised to not have DLC or microtransactions.

Not locking anything behind a paywall should keep the players happy, and while it is purely a single-player experience at this stage, Nour Saiana is looking for positive feedback and suggestions to add in the future, so hopefully we’ll see some form of online matchmaking.

The Early Access build is due to be released in two weeks, so I’m looking forward to revisiting it and hoping to see a few changes. When it does come out, players can look forward to creating their avatar and gaining experience as they embark on the story that is still being withheld at this current stage of time.

Final Stardust: Cosmic Nexus is an interesting new take on card games, and as a player who loved the old-school Yu-Gi-Oh, I am interested to see how this one pans out. The fact that they’re not planning any DLC or microtransactions already has me extremely happy about it. Even though it was a pre-early access build that did not feature many of the proposed systems, I am going to revisit it soon, and I’ll be sure to provide an update on what’s new and how it performs.

Written by: Shane Walsh