I think a lot of games are starting to reconsider death - the idea of restarting time after time is boring and tedious. I wanted to think of a new way of dealing with death in a game. There are two things to bear in mind here; don't think of it as death more as being incapacitated for a while. Why should you have to restart a battle? Why not just change the definition of a battle if you fall? But to have tension in fights you need to have some cost and if that cost is about something you've collected in the game such as experience or money then the battle will mean more to you.