I remember playing about five minuets of a demo. Those five minuets were enough to remember the world shell idea and keep the game in my mind all these years later. So aside from those few minuets I never played Septerra Core. Here is a review without Nostalgia to cloud it.
Septerra Core borrows VERY heavily from Chrono cross. Three people teams, the ability to combine magic, a world map that functions exactly the same. It's inspiration is that of classic JRPG's. Luckily it does not copy those JRPG cliches. You don't play a 13 or 14 year old. You play a young adult. She does not use a huge freaking sword, fight with her hands or specialize in magic. She comes from a decent sized town, not a farm. And you are not imminently assaulted with being some kind of hero foretold in prophesies the instant you leave your village.
THE STORY is pretty standard stuff. Family dies in a war. You find out 'who done it'. You want revenge. Your best friend, who is like a brother, decides to go with you just because, and you end up going from one messed up situation to another. Sometimes you make things better, sometimes you make things worse. You, the player, pretty much know what to expect. But the story is framed well, if not necessary written or voice acted well. Good enough to want to read what everyone has to say at least.
The setting is very original, though the ancient history of this planet borrows very heavenly from Judaeo–Christian archetypes. A one god that creates the world who's right hand man turns against him and tries to make the world his own. So the creator sends his “only begotten son” (yes, that's actually a game quote) to save everyone and banishes the evil entity to oblivion or something like that. For a game with such an original setting I would have thought they might have been more original than that.
You can read books in this, in the style of JRPGs and book shelves, if you want more history and blurbs about various things in the game. It's nice to be able to learn more about the setting, but the presentation is always so dry. It's either like reading a text book entry, or some biblical entry.
As you progress through the story you amass a fist full or ragtag allies that you can use in your party. These people join you for various reasons, but these reasons can feel pretty trite. One of the parties members that joins you does so even though YOU are the one that killed some of the members of brotherhood. *spoiler start* He remains a member even after someone who destroyed his home and was involved in killing every single member of that village joins your party. He protests of course, but one tiny sentence of along the lines of, 'it's so and so that is your real enemy, not me', seems to be enough to make him shut up. *spoiler end* There is almost no drama with how your party members interact with each other, even though there is MORE than enough fertile ground for it.
GRAFICS look pretty much what you would expect a PC game of this date, trying to resemble JRPGs, to look. The colors seem very washed out though. Never are the bright colors very bright, nor are the dark colors that dark. It's just kind of muddy. Thank good it's 2D isometric. I shutter to think of how bad this game would look if they tried for a 3D engine. The art direction in this game is -fantastic-. The world is SO well imagined, it almost seems wasted on this game. There are A LOT of cliched 'monsters' here though. Werewolves, zombies, cat like things. There are also a lot of extremely original ones too, like some kind of living beehive that shoots out wingless armored bee things.
COMBAT is pretty standard. Each character has a timer that fills in real-time. There are three levels to each characters timer. These levels correspond to the power of attacks (light, medium, and heavy attacks), use as well as special abilities, such as the ability to scan an enemies or repair a robot. If you want to use a level two ability you have to fill up all of the second section of your bar. The heavy attack requires a fully filled bar. The party shares Core Energy. This core energy powers magic and special abilities. At first you don't have enough to do much, but as characters advance more core energy is available. Some characters contribute more to the team. Magic is represented by cards, all doing pretty much what you expect. There is elemental, healing, status effect causing and protective magic. Characters can combine magic to make more powerful spells.
I only have two real issues with the combat system. Firstly it's just sloooooooow. When you are attacked it stops your timer bars from filling. When one of your characters does something it stops the timer bars from filling. If you are fighting five or more foes that use weaker attacks then it will be a very long battle simply because you have to wait for your bars to fill in between them attacking or simply WALKING toward you if they are zombies. Secondly I cane queue characters to attack. If any character of foe is acting you are completely blocked from doing anything except selecting the next character you want to command if one of YOUR guys is the one in the middle of something.
All in all the combat is adequate. It never feels exciting, and it always feels slow and cumbersome.
SOUND: is pretty bad. Honestly. The music sounds inspired, but it never reaches the full potential that it seems to be building toward. Of the two main battle songs one of them builds builds and feels like it's about to turn into something special but never goes anywhere. Outside of battle that game is pretty much dead quiet. There is some ambient sound, but it's usually birds chirping, or wind blowing. I find myself wanting to listen to Winamp most of the time. It's too bad, really. This game could have greatly benefited from a more solid score.
Sound effects range from competent to horrible. Often sound effects which, on their own, might be good turn out to be terrible because they never match with whats happening on screen. For one of the characters, who uses a giant wrench, to hit things the attacking sound effects starts AFTER she has hit the target and even though she only hit it once, the sound effect sounds like she hit it three times. They are the same for every level of attack, light heavy and medium.
The voice acting is not too bad for this time period. All I can really say is that voice acting in video games has not gotten any better, an in many cases it has gotten worse. I honestly don't hold this games voice acting against it, even with the badly timed and emoted voices, simply because even extremely high profile games now days often do even worse.
GAMEPLAY, outside of combat, will introduce some environmental puzzles that resemble point and click adventures in someway. Unfortunately it will sometimes feel like back tracking to areas you have explored simply for the sake of making you walk back to the place you were just at, but hey that seems to be the modus operandi for any RPG I suppose.
Characters level up when they gain a certain amount of experience points. They never really felt like they were progressing though as levels never seem all that important. I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing, since I don't really feel like I have to power level, or if I do I don't really see a dramatic shift in my capabilities.
For some characters you can buy upgrades for their weapons which increase the power or abilities of that weapon. For other you just buy new weapons. Armor is something that you pretty much have to upgrade at every new place. Too bad, really, I like the upgrading of the weapons, and it would have been nice to see this idea extended to all weapons as well as equipment.
SHOULD YOU BUY this game? If you are a super fan of JRPG's, SNES games, or anything that resembles Chrono Cross, yes. If you are a fan or original worlds, and or original artistic direction (as I am), this game may be worthwhile simply because it truly offers a different from any other fantasy or sci-fi settings even if it occasionally falls prey adding cliched enemies into it's line of killable things.
If the above two things do not apply to you, it would probably be wise a idea to stay clear of this game. It is not an epic, actually is just barely a -good- game. I didn't play this game back in the day, but I suspect I would have pretty much had the same opinions.
If you missed the opportunity to play this game back then, you didn't really miss anything at all.
Because it's only 6 bucks, this game gets 3 stars instead of 2.