Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

I got the game because of the reviews, and played it to the end, so I want to warn others, who are not aware what JRPG really means in terms of gameplay. Patience and diligence are of the core values of oriental culture, and you can definitely tell this by their RPGs (anyone remember Lineage with insane amounts of harvesting?). From the westerner point of view this game is an absolute time waster: 60%+ of the time is backtracking, 50% of the remaining time is watching combat animations, which leaves about 20% of actual gaming time (20 hours out of 'whopping 100 hours of gameplay'). The whole story can be told in about 40 minutes, the exploration of new areas is about 5 hours, and the rest are repetitious drab battles. Anyway, 80% time playing this game is plain wasted! And - don't be surprised - this is a very good JRPG! It's just how they're made, because the values are different! Details follow (for the brave): 1. The game has INSANE amount of backtracking. There will be areas which you will cross left-to-right and then right-to-left more than 6 times, each time fighting the SAME enemies in the SAME places (enemies respawn every time you re-enter the area). To make matters even worse, some areas are mazes with switches, that raise/lower barriers and open/close doors. You can have up to 5 switches in a maze, and most of thies time after you hit a switch you have to lug your party across the whole area, so you will fully cross the same area 8 to 10 times easily. And there are about 20 areas like this in the game. Furthermore, there will be areas, with lots of recursive backtracking: Area1->Area2->Area3->Area4->Fight the Boss->Area4->Area3->Area2->Area1. While still fighting the SAME enemies in the SAME places. I mean it! Most normal games give you a shortcut or a cutscene after you've defeated the boos (or achieved something equally important) and you're immediately transferred to your camp or world map - but not this one! And, yes, there will be a place with switches AND recursive backtracking. To complicate the matters, the plague of 199x games - getting stuck in the pixels - is here as well. Be ready for lots of manual control over your characters when passing narrow doors and ledges, walking around trees and flower pots and so on. Overall, expect to spend 60%+ of gaming time lugging yourself through areas to which you have been at least twice before. 2. Well, we all understand that certain amount of marching and backtracking is essential in every RPG to maintain story. But here comes another failure. At first 30% of the game the story is really interesting - the unusual concept of the layered world, biomechanics, core magic, etc. But then you realize that the writers probably forgot the main rules of drama dynamics: every good drama has it's pace accelerating towards the culmination in the end, so you expect major events to happen quicker, pauses to become shorted and the fights to become more intense. Well, this is true of boss fights (expect to fight two bosses in a row a few times), but as for the rest - the process is the same from 30% to 98% of the same: walk mazes, flip switches (see previous sections) and fight the SAME enemies in the SAME places, up until (and including) the final stage. . After about 60% in game you run into lots of situations when you have to go through an area only to talk to a character at the other end (no there's no shortcut even if it's 25th time you're being here! while being interrupted by critters that yield 38 exp (when you have about 15000 to level) about 8 times! (See section on battles below). Game designers try to keep interest by providing a variety of environments, but still the whole thing turns into routine about 50% of the game and even at the very end of it you need to collect 4 colour switches and flip tons of switches to get to the final boss. Also about 30-40% in game you realize that the plot and the characters are quite sketchy and cannot actually convey the cosmic scale of events. At about 60% of the game you get tired of parade of cliches including many 'noble deaths' that fail to create any feelings. The main characters are not much better, but at least you get a few side quests to end ideological quarrels between some of them. There is also lots of loose ends: you need to find a boat to cross a lake, when you have a flyer capable of delivering you anywhere (which could be solution to endless trekking, but, alas), and so on... And finally, RPG assumes certain choices that you can make to affect the global course of events. Well, sorry, you can't - it's an almost linear walking/battling quest! 3. So, the game is not about role playing, and not about story. it's about walking a lot and fighting approximately every 20 steps you make. What about the battles? After looking at the screenshots and game description you may expect something akin to Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3 with hero development, tactics and use of skills. Well, the hero development is out of your control - the whole group gets equal XP, the stats simply grow as characters level up (no point distribution, no skill trees, nothing). Certain skills open as you reach certain levels, and that all about it. You still can quip your party, though with typical JRPG-style items (Sword, Sword+1, Sword+2, ... Sword+99, etc) with little variation. The only interesting point here is getting weapon upgrades that unlock new skills for certain characters. The battles are on par: you get skills that hit targets 'close together' or 'in a single line' but there's no movement on the battlefield! Your group and the enemy group just STAND there exchanging blows (another typical CRPG/JRPG feat), there's no difference between melee vs ranged, no maneuvers, nothing. Sometimes enemies move (zombies closing in), but that happens very rare and you cannot move your characters anyway. The initiative mechanism and card combos are interesting, though, and we can see these mechanics getting into 'typical' strategies and RPGs. But probably the worst about the battles is lengthy combo/casting animations (some of them are like 20 seconds) which you cannot skip! Expect to dedicate about 50% of your battle time to them (including jumping into the battle sequences, which can sometimes be veeeery looong). === Conclusion === I understand that most of the explained above are typical traits of J/CRPGs, thus 3/5, not 1/5. If you're fan of tactcal battles: get HoMM2/3/4 and download fome 'Adventure' type maps (my favourite one is a map for HoMM2 where you start with a single Ghost and take on 500 Black Dragons in the end). If you're RPG fan, well, this is NOT an RPG. If you're Diablo/Witcher Action/RPG fan - this may be good for you if you're fine with the fact that 80% of the time you spend doing useful (NOT really fighting, NOT really developing the plot). But better buy Witcher cheap from GOG if you haven't been through it yet!

I've got this game, and at first I tought it was really good and cool, and that I made a awesome purchase here. Until I reached midgame... The dungeon in midgame was HUGE, and there was nothing to do on it but walk and fight, and the fights even if they are easy take too long, some fights would take several minutes of me just bashing the enemy until it dies, without even taking damage or using mana, utterly boring... To make things worse, your characters start to miss a lot of attacks, and you start to get large groups of weak enemies, meaning that before is your turn, you watch LOTS of animations, and while animations are playing your turn does not advance. But the story was reasonable and I decided to continue playing... It was when I noticed that the game was degrading fast, the dungeons got more and more huge (and empty), to the point that I would spend 30 minutes walking on a dungeon that could not even make me think or fear dieing in battle (even the boss was utterly easy), the characters even advancing levels get all their skills mid-game already, most of the magic is available, and most of the equipment too... Yet there are much more before the end... So as you can guess, the closer you get to the end, more and more padding is thrown in, in the form of huge dungeons (yep, not even sidequests, or people to talk...), about 75% of the game almost all dialog options in the entire world are exausted, you have nearly everything, and the only thing to do is visit more and more humongous boring labirynths (they are not mazes, because they actually are linear, about 95% of dungeon puzzles involve flipping a lever to open a passage somewhere, or fetching a key, to open a passage in another map, because levels don't work between maps... and all these levels and keys are usually in a way that forces you to visit the entire map). So, if you have money and time to spare, buying it is not much a problem, you will enjoy the start. But know that you may stop playing later... Technical aspects: The game design tends toward boredom, because enemies are too hard to skip (you can try to sneak past them, but the level design suck and make this almost impossible), the animations are LOOOONG and impossible to skip either, and dialogs you can skip it entirely, or not. You cannot make it go slighly faster... Example: You have a dialog with 10 characters that talk 3 times, you can only skip all 30 screens, or none of them, if someone is saying something that you already know, you are forced to wait them finish before seeing what another person will say. The graphics are good, but they have some flaws, to start you see black outlines around several sprites, like if someone did a bad work removing the background of the sprites file, some animations are nice, but some plainly suck, some are so bad, but so bad, but so bad, that you will facepalm when seeing them... The sound effects are more or less well done, they did had an effort, the problem is that some sound effects can run "out of control" (if you kill several robotic enemies at the same time, the explosion sound may be so loud that will scare your mom in the other room...), and that like I said, the game start to get more and more padded toward the end, meaning that you will tire of hearing the same sound effects again and again... Character design: Sometimes it is awesome, but most of the time it suck, and it suck because they take the awesome characters and repeat them over and over and over... Some cities you will see in total 3 different sprites, in various different colours, but the same 3 different sprites... Even their heads when talking to you are the same, even sprites with the intention to represent age, sometimes are just a middle-aged person with hair painted white... Also women (not grandmas, or girls) have mostly 2 sprites, one of them look like a secretary, and the other like a whore (in fact the whore sprite is used in a whorehouse...), meaning that in some locations you will see the same women over and over and over and over again. Also the same applies to monsters, they quickly use all the new monsters sprites in the first 25% of the game, then all mosters are the same but with palette swap, even bosses are palette swap monsters or edited sprites. The character personalities are usually bad, they are too flat, there are almost no character development, the antagonist is a idiot (he spends the entire game saying how he is going to save the world, while destroying it...), the protagonist have no motivation to be protagonist (I even don't know why the protagonist is the protagonist...), and this pattern repeats with major characters, they are really flat, the few characters that are actually good, actually are secondary ones (including one that has a really cool voice, and the actor ended voicing Master Chief also... and I dislike Halo, but that actor is awesome). The music is almost non-existant, and when it exists it is crap, boring, or irrelevant, with one exception (the track that plays when you are in the map, near a city called World Bazaar, since there are nothing else on this map, you go on it so fast that some people probably never noticed the music there...). The replay value is zero, there are NOTHING to see by playing again, not even secrets, the linear nature of the game means that every time you stray from the path, it is because it is a secret or bonus thing... There are no proper secret areas (there about 3 that are well hidden... unless you press TAB and see the map, then you can see clearly them...) Basically, at the start the game is worth a 5/5, but the farther you go on the game, the worse it gets... Probably being a 1/5 when you are in the final boss.

I really want to like this game, and I keep going back to try and finish it. I'm not sure why I want to like it, the characters are more than a little cliché, as is the dialogue... but I like the idea of it, I like the concepts behind the world they've made, and I'd still really like to see how the story plays out. The control system is (and was even originally) somewhat clunky, and it'd be nice to be able to pan the screen around without moving, but by far the biggest drawback for me is the unintuitive way the objectives are worked out. The clues as to what you should be doing, or how you should be doing it, are sparse to say the least. I spend a lot of time running back and forth having people give me the same 'I don't know's until I stumble on the one right thing to click. If that one element of the game was a little more forgiving and/or helpful, I'd have been loving it, but if you ever played Day of The Tentacle and thought it was a breeze, you might have better luck. I will finish it, though!! ...someday...

Playing Septerra was a pretty weird experience. It took me almost two years of irregular playings to beat it, mostly due to the dull gameplay, mixed with the supberb atmosphere. What can I say? Almost every time I spend playing it, my feelings were contradictory. The combat system is full of flaws, but at the same time it has some great ideas on it. The exploration was interesting, but boring in the long term. All the things that any JRPG fan would expect to be on a good game exist... but in pretty poor shape. And yes, I said JRPG. Septerra tries to give a different approach to this genre, most will say an occidental way. For me, the biggest problem was with the slow pace of combats, with tons of paused times without any reason (your characters attack, or do some card magics, and the "wait time" becomes eternal after so many battles). The fact that almost the first half of the game does not offer any real challenge, makes the game some kind of boring exploration with dull combats game. But then, I really got ethralled with the plot and characters. It was very refreshing to see a well balanced woman as a primary character lead. With some exceptions, all of the cast deserves some attetion. But nothing compared to the beatiful, genuine, world that is Septerra. There are very few games with a world as interesting as this "multilayer" place. And one last note. Im not sure why, but I found the almost-absence of music very dissapointing. The game would be much better with a most extensive OST. Maybe its not as important as other things, but hell, it is not there. Before buying it, I really advise to try it first. Its not a game for everyone.

The game was one of my childhood memories. Loved the story. This game needs to be given a chace, not many realize we talking about 1999 when not many or any game looked like this. Also it had voice overs on almost all its scene. It is a gem that was not recognized. Could be repeative but all games are. Like I said give a chance and hopefully they can make it better if it gets enough reconition.