Septerra Core: Legacy of the creator is a fine game for killing time (there's 40-60 hours of play in this thing, at least), but it's not as fun as it could be. The story is good but not great, the gameplay can be kind of confusing at times, and the combat can be kind of slow. It's a fine game for RPG lovers, but it's not an outstanding example of the genre or an especially good game unto itself.
STORY (4/5): The story of this game is a pretty good one, all things considered. The setting is unique and interesting, and the basis of the plot is pretty good; you control Maya, a salvager ("Junker") from the second shell of Septerra, and you along with your friends get pulled into a conflict between the Chosen People of the first shell and the rest of Septerra. If you can resist a knee-jerk reaction to all the religious philosophy that pervades the game, it's quite good. The reason why the story section doesn't get a 5 is because while it is generally good, chapter to chapter, the connections between chapters can be kind of weak. Often, I found myself exploring blindly across Septerra's varied landscapes, looking for a clue about what I needed to do next, but there will be more on that in the Gamplay section.
SOUNDS (3/5): The music of this game is very limited. There are seven different overworld map themes, but since you spend most of the game running around in towns or dungeons, you don't get to listen to those tunes much. Instead, you get combat music and the ambient background noise. The combat music gets old after you've heard it for the thousandth time. The music itself is generally pretty good, but the way the game is set up, you probably won't have the luxury of appreciating that detail.
The game is fully voice-acted, with a variable degree of quality. I've heard some great voice-acting in my time, and also some absolutely terrible acting; this game falls in the middle. The characters are great when they're making sarcastic remarks or giving descriptions of objects you find on Septerra, but mostly they don't do an especially good job of conveying strong emotions. Plus, in my version of the game, there was a persistant glitch that would cause short sentences spoken by the characters to be cut off; the game's written dialogue always runs at the same pace as the voice-acting, so in some cases there's no time to read what the characters say before the textbox moves to the next character.
Other sounds are unremarkable.
VISUALS (4/5): This game is pretty, given the time of its making. That said, the quality of the animations seems to vary depending on a variety of factors.
When your characters are conversing and it isn't an FMV cutscene, little talking heads pop up to accompany the dialogue. I thought these heads were fairly expressive emotionally and generally well-done.
When your characters are just wandering around on the map, their animations are limited and not very fluid. It looks better than a 16-bit game, but not by very much.
The few FMV scenes are often kind of ugly and also seem to be unnecessarily dark. I felt, during the game, that the designers much have done better to somehow render the cutscenes into the game itself instead of breaking the flow with FMVs.
GAMEPLAY (2/5): The combat is boring. B-O-R-I-N-G. It's very slow, there's no way to speed up the animations, and in battles which feature six enemies or more (which is almost all of them), it can take an arbitrarily long time to kill enemies who aren't seriously dangerous unless you just sit there and let them hit you. Even then, it would generally take them at least ten minutes to kill you.
Another reviewer complained that this is a bad game for a mage. This is true for most of the game, but in the endgame, magic becomes the fast solution to every problem. As long as you have enough Core-restoring items, any and all enemies can be destroyed in under 20 seconds using one or two spells. This is also boring, but at least it's faster than being shot at 3-4 times while waitng for your Endurance meter to charge up, unleashing one attack, and then repeating the process until everyone dies. Most of the time, magic is used as a weapon against you that you cannot effectively counter, making battles longer and harder without giving any extra rewards.
The dungeons are generally not very interesting. They look great, but they generally only come in the forms of:
A) Roughly linear tunnels full of monsters.
B) Looping tunnels full of locked doors and levers that open locked doors.
C) Looping tunnels full of locked doors, levers that open locked doors, and keys to other locked doors.
.... and they get progressively larger as the game progresses, so that by the end of the game you become absolutely dependent on your map in order to avoid getting lost in the enormous dungeon-sprawl.
On top of that, there are several sections of the game that seem to mimic an adventure game in a bad way. You get presented with a puzzle, usually in the form of a locked door, that you can only open with a certain combination of items. You need to be exceptionally attentive in order to notice every item you need and know how to use it. Your characters can give you limited hints if you click on the right things, but by and large you're left with no real guidance. Sometimes this can be very frustrating, because if you fail to notice a particular piece of scenery and examine it with the right character, you may never find a solution to your problems.
OVERALL (3/5): This isn't going to join the list of my favorite games anytime soon. It's interesting for its setting and plot, but not much else. If you want a game that you can play for weeks, this is an okay one; however, you'll be spending most of that playtime fighting needlessly long battles and marching through oversized dungeon environments.
I'm serious about the laggy combat. I got into the habit of bringing a book to read between combat rounds.