Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

I played this game when it first came out and was amazed at how amazing it was. It's essentially one big saga, with great lore and a diverse cast, each one with their own reasons for fighting, and hidden agendas. The art is particularly beautiful, clearly influenced heavily from anime. It's a huge game, with many different and interesting characters and well worth the the 5.99 price tag.

The setting and story felt rather compelling early on. I almost thought I was gonna get some chrono-trigger type of fix. But....urgh. Combat is too slow. The first few combats it's not so bad, because you're learning the system, getting used to the flow. But when you hit the second encounter area it's just...why. I've sometimes noticed emulators have fast-forward buttons on them. If you can find a way to do that for this game, perhaps that would be a fine thing.

Gameplay is fun although bit tedious, this is especially true for start of game. Bit warning: avoid overgrinding at start as healing and any form of recovery is very limited for good while, boss fight required to access shop with healing items can be far more difficult for leveled party than low leveled party thanks to lack of healing options:) if you like rpgs in general, this is solid pick but be warned this also is quite bit harsher than jrpgs

Great game, awesome story, good battle system if you don't mind the grind. Works flawlessly with touch interface on Windows Surface Pro 4!

Septerra Core is a very good Western RPG, disguised as a JRPG. Despite I hadn't played the game when it came out in 1999, it aged very well for itself. But the game has issues when it comes to how most RPGs at the time when you defeat an enemy, you have to press prt-scan just to get the game to load the battle results. And without a patch or a fan patch; cutscenes tend to get skipped or become unplayable. Now I do think that maybe by some miracle this game, which was made under a shoe-string budget by a small team, gets a second wind for this game. Like, I can see this game getting a remake or a remaster of some kind, now that JRPG or JRPG-like games have exploded in popularity decades later.