Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

I loved this game when it came out, still great to play, just have to tweak it a bit to get the vids to play.

I hate for this to be my first review and comment on this site, but when my Windows 7 Machine finally decided to give out on me and I bought a new one, it had Windows 8 and does not wish to run on it. If I run it normally, the screen flickers and two more versions appear inside of it in inverted colors. If I attempt to mess with the compatibility settings and try to run it in a reduced color mode the game just crashes before it even starts siting that the games engine stopped working. I went through the windows trouble shooting and still nothing works. If you have to Upgrade to Windows 8 for whatever reason and have this on an older machine then I suggest you beat the game on it first, because its not going to work once the jump is made.

As I write this, I have yet to finish this game, and I am so annoyed with it that I am debating, for the second time, whether I ever will. The story is well done, well crafted, and entertaining with interesting characters. The problem lies in the designs of the various locations. Many of the locations in the latter half of the game are giant mazes in which you are required to run back and forth 3-4 times, just to unlock a single door, and many of these mazes also feature shifting walls which serve only to lengthen then amount of time you have to spend running around the maze. This, in and of itself, I find to be bad enough, but when the maps are hard to read, it makes it even worse. I also find the system for moving these characters to be needlessly involved, forcing you to click on a new location every 3-4 steps, in order to keep them moving, but you also have to find just the right spots in some of these area or the characters won't even move, which can make getting them through a door a near impossible task. This game is a perfect example of bad level design dragging down an otherwise compelling story. I want to see how the story ends, but I get tired of running back and forth for several hours, just so I can open a single door.

I picked up this game a long time ago on a whim, from a discount bin in a store that I forgot long ago. I found it to be a very good RPG, interesting visually with a nice story. It did everything right, as far as I could tell, but I wouldn't say that It seemed very innovative. This almost makes it ideal to play as an "old school game". Where innovative games may have introduced elements that were better done in later games, this is one of the games that perfectly captures the feeling of this style of RPG without many flaws.

I was initially attracted to this game because I liked the story, the art style and the promise of a blend of Eastern and Western RPG styles. I played it until about 75% in, during which I liked the story, the cyberpunk/magitek world concept and the slightly anarchic humour. the characters are fun and interesting. however, once I found myself in a situation where I had to backtrack, I couldn't play the game any more. it runs painfully slowly and jerkily, especially in battles. there is only proper music in battles and it is random which music you get. the dungeons are horribly complicated in a repetitive way, avoiding encounters is impossible and there is this unbelievably annoying point-and-click adventure aspect to it that tends to make no sense and suddenly let you know that you needed an item two hours ago but give you no clue as to where it is. I also went through a lot of trouble getting this game to run properly.