Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

I bought this back at release. You have to remember that at the time, jRPGs in America were still mostly limited to Final Fantasy games and the market was nowhere near as saturated as it is now. Some American developer tried to fill that demand on the PC, a platform totally lacking in those types of games. jRPGs were known for having stories while American RPGs were known for little story but complex mechanics. Now, jRPGs done poorly are BAD. Super bad. The only thing worse than a bad jRPG is a bad jRPG made by American fan boys trying to imitate it but getting nothing right. Totally lacking any charm or story of jRPGs, totally lacking any complexity of American ones. The exploring and combat is reminiscent of the old Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger...only with all the fun sucked out. Wandering around is tedious since the game manages to be totally linear yet still makes it easy to get lost thanks to atrocious art direction with the backgrounds. It's hard to tell where you need to go. Not helping are the hundreds of scripted battles you cannot avoid. There are frequent, and they are tedious. Your options beyond basic attacks are nearly non-existent. Attacks take forever as your character sloooooowly leaps at the enemy then slooooowly leaps back. You must do this for hours. You must grind. Nothing new or fun. Keep those basic attacks coming and like it. The story takes foreeeever to get going. I think I was about 6 hours in, bored out of my mind until the very first cutscene where something interesting happens comes in, but then it was right back to grinding. After 6 hours of controlling a bland scrap metal collector, her bland punk friend, and her bland robot dog as they meandered around, I had enough and put it away. Keep in mind that I spend 90 hours grinding in Final Fantasy 7 around the same time so I could beat the super secret challenge boss. Even that kind of tedious pain threshold will be broken by Septerra Core.

I was really looking forward to playing this game after watching some videos of it online. But when you click new game, the game just freezes on the loading screen. I left the game running for an hour+ just on the off chance that this game has the longest loading screens of all time. It was still stuck on the same screen. Oh well. 3

The world of Septerra is truly not beautiful thanks to both good original ideas and solidly executed "cliches", one can truly feel the energy the creators put into the game to create all the lorem all the NPCs, all the nicely done puzzles and all the millions of mobs that will make you scream in rage as you slowly grind through their respawning numbers. On scenes with combat it is not uncommon to fight ten or more enemy groups and many dungeons are made of number of scenesm where movement between scenes causes the enemies to respawn. The combat itself opens in a "cutscnes" as PCs and enemies leap into positions. This takes multiple seconds for setup and then you wait for action bars to fill up. And while there is number of interesting fights a grat number of them are nothing but the most basic mind-numbing grind designed to douse the passion of human soul. Septerra Core is terrible thing that I reccomend to anybody with limitloess patience or willingless to use the cheats to get by the worst of its "gameplay".

I found the plot interesting, taking a little bit of final fantasy. I felt lack of no specific classes/professions during the battles, however one of the two negative points in this game in my opinion was the dev's having put point & click together with RPG. I had to take walkthrough because I often did not know where I was supposed to go or what to do with the items i found. The other point was that there were no save points inside enemy areas to heal the party. But apart from that I enjoyed the experience.

This is a good game but it only runs in Windows XP or Vista. GoG was very good with me and got me a refund because i was not able to run it on my current rig. Thanks GoG