Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

A great mix of jrpg and adventure puzzle solving. Not that easy too! Has secrets many secrets and hidden, very few dead ends with no treasure... Not easy to get bonuses as all the good old games had. Played it, finished it... Had fun the whole time. Cool story, cool animation, satisfying explosions and combat that actually requires strategy. A bit lazy ending but fun story-wise... If I could I'd give it 4,7 because of that. And another bad thing is... The game ended at all. I would've liked more (oh it's not short, but still...) You just have to know to install the right quick time and then there is no video nor conversation glitches. I played with it back when it wasn't so well prepared as it is now and made it, so you can too. Cool equipment system, you can never afford everything so you have to choose... Great storry, high coolness, I can just watch the guys run around all day, Fighting's even better. :) Overally... Verry good, extremely well made and thought out game and a must for everyone who likes fantasy/jrpg and puzzles. Just... Cool beyond words. Oh also unlike most jrpg's the combat system is quite self explanatory and understandable so you don't have to wonder "hmmm is 6 attack a lot?". For this price? It's the best buy you can make. Seriously, other than the fact that the game ends at all and the old quicktime version to install this game HAS NO DOWNSIDES!

When I was 19 years old I used to regularly visit my game store and often saw this on the shelf. I's pick it up over and over considering the purchase, but it was 30 quid and I was a poor student. I was a HUGE JRPG fan back then, and I have to admit I REALLY wanted to play the game but never got round to it. After a while it went forgotten. Then last year the game popped up in a steam sale and I thought that 99p was a fair price to pay to indulge my curiosity. Bugs prevented the game from loading and I never actually got round to playing it. Recently however, GOG released an update and it all works very well on my Arch Linux system. The storyline is a nice sci-fi adventure, there's a really great world that has been constructed, and your character motivation is a good one. While the storyline sucked me in, the combat spat me back out. It's VERY much of its time. Borrowing heavily from Chronotrigger is no bad thing necessarily, but the pacing of the battles is pretty tedious. The variety in enemies also leaves a lot to be desired, with only about 20 differnt enemy types, and everything else just being a recolouring of these sprites. Still, the game has kept me entertained for a solid twenty six hours so far, and I fully intend to reach the end, despite the fact that occasionally I need to refer to an FAQ to find out exactly what I'm supposed to do at any given time. Throw away your rose tinted glasses and take the game for what it is; a turn of the century sci fi RPG game with turn of the century game mechanics and a reasonably interesting story. For 99p you really can't go wrong.

One of the best game. Fantastic story, game-play and atmospphere. Anime or manga based of this game should be perfect.

When I first started playing Septerra Core, I found myself immediately engaged. The game begins like a point-and-click adventure with combat, and the stakes, with only one low-level character setting out into the badlands, were just right. Many, many hours on, I can easily say the adventure elements, though sparse, are well done. Most of the objectives and puzzles, though simple and usually inventory-based, are clearly explained; the voice acting was VERY good for the time, and is just fine even now (many of the voice actors were also hired for the Halo and Mass Effect series, if that gives you an idea); the pathfinding is good enough (except for a few doorways where you'll have to be very gentle); and the visual style is more a tribute than stale ripoff of JRPGs. So, why give it only a 50%? Almost every problem the game has can be traced to the combat, which is what you'll be doing for probably 85% of the 45+ hour game, and the main reason the game is so long. Nothing's broken... It's just damned slow. The larger, more labyrinthine dungeons near the end of the game will take hours simply because of the enemy encounters which, in any other game, would seem correctly spaced on the map. If there were nuances to the battle system that took time and effort to master, that'd be one thing, but you'll learn almost everything you need to know by the first few hours... Which is about the time the music gets old as well. Most of the sound design of the game has gone into some nice washes of ambient effects, but there are only a few variations on the battle theme you hear in your first encounter. You can turn the music off, but that also wipes out the environmental sound effects, so you'll have to weigh the consequences yourself. The bottom line for me has been the last several hours. I feel for the most part like I'm just going through the motions; I start up a podcast, load up my game, turn off the sound (your preferences are reset with every session), and clear out the dungeon I'm on while I'm distracted by something else before switching the sound back on for the dialog sequences. I'm interested to see the ending; I'm just not sure I want to deal with the tedium of getting there.

I remember seeing the ads for the game back in 1998, about how the developer (Valkyrie Studios) was left without a distributor, and how it was picked by Monolith. Well, I didn't remember all the details but I needed little refreshment (still has the mags and all). I think Septerra Core is best summarized as an RPG that tries to be Japanese in style, with a cool (albeit too cliché) story of some sort of superhuman beings ruling over a struggling, diverse population of humans, human-like colored reptiles, robots, et cetera. The world is divided in 7 layers, each one with their one government, their own motives and aspirations (or lack of), and of course their own problems. The settings are pretty nice, and seem to have aged well (this game is about 13 years old, mind you). You play as Maya, a blue hair woman, who at the beginning is a nobody, as usual, looking for your younger brother, and you learn a little bit about the past battles that severely affected your world (or shell, in this case). I think it serves well to set the pace of the game and get you hooked for awhile. You learn to battle, of the three different levels of attacks, about core energy, which let you cast the usual array of spells, and from there the story develops itself. It doesn't break any rules, it doesn't raise the bar for gameplay, it's your standard out of the mill JRPG wannabe. Problems I found with this game, the battles get too repetitive, too formulaic, and, depending on your stats and equipment, too darn long. When the enemies start cloacking themselves and you have nothing to counterattack that, you're so out of luck, because you're gonna be battling for as long as an hour (no kidding), praying they just get out of mana -core energy, which I think never really occurs-, or a HDD crash happens. There's hardly a way to loose (if you aren't overpowered that much), so to make up for the lack of AI you're confronted with an irksome script which consists of putting barrier - setting your spells - attack - miss - miss again - heal party - miss ... Then an hour later you reach your destination only to find out the guy who knows how to get through it isn't in your party so you need to go back to the entrance, rearrange your party, and do the same battles, again! That way of substituting bad AI with this you-got-to-be-kidding-me "battle system" was acceptable on a NES, and is no longer acceptable on a PC, despite this game's age. Another thing is the game's linearity, which I doubt in RPGs is ever a good thing, and that's why they do so much to try to conceal it. Not in Septerra Core. Here you find yourself searching for colored keys just because you have to, and it doesn't make much sense the same thing applies for a palace, a forest, or a prison. Couldn't instead they put a quest giver or a notorious baddie be left guarding for which you needed a special item or weapon to pass? But they chose to make you traverse dungeon after dungeon, which gets tiresome pretty quickly, just because "you have to". And last thing I didn't like, as you traverse the worlds, you don't feel like these universe teem with too much life. People and creatures from all the shells are not that different, despite the potential for truly unique civilizations. Their worlds are quite different, and I think that remains a good thing, but when you get to the cities, they all have basically the same facilities, and when they don't, you wish they would! Because it's such a hassle to find out you can't get core energy in a world and you need to get back just after arriving. This, of course, is just my opinion, and if you're not bothered by the things I didn't like about this game (or probably know you might be able to look at them from a different, more positive perspective) you might as well like this game. Sadly, for me, it wasn't what I expected.