I remember seeing the ads for the game back in 1998, about how the developer (Valkyrie Studios) was left without a distributor, and how it was picked by Monolith. Well, I didn't remember all the details but I needed little refreshment (still has the mags and all).
I think Septerra Core is best summarized as an RPG that tries to be Japanese in style, with a cool (albeit too cliché) story of some sort of superhuman beings ruling over a struggling, diverse population of humans, human-like colored reptiles, robots, et cetera. The world is divided in 7 layers, each one with their one government, their own motives and aspirations (or lack of), and of course their own problems. The settings are pretty nice, and seem to have aged well (this game is about 13 years old, mind you).
You play as Maya, a blue hair woman, who at the beginning is a nobody, as usual, looking for your younger brother, and you learn a little bit about the past battles that severely affected your world (or shell, in this case). I think it serves well to set the pace of the game and get you hooked for awhile. You learn to battle, of the three different levels of attacks, about core energy, which let you cast the usual array of spells, and from there the story develops itself. It doesn't break any rules, it doesn't raise the bar for gameplay, it's your standard out of the mill JRPG wannabe.
Problems I found with this game, the battles get too repetitive, too formulaic, and, depending on your stats and equipment, too darn long. When the enemies start cloacking themselves and you have nothing to counterattack that, you're so out of luck, because you're gonna be battling for as long as an hour (no kidding), praying they just get out of mana -core energy, which I think never really occurs-, or a HDD crash happens. There's hardly a way to loose (if you aren't overpowered that much), so to make up for the lack of AI you're confronted with an irksome script which consists of putting barrier - setting your spells - attack - miss - miss again - heal party - miss ... Then an hour later you reach your destination only to find out the guy who knows how to get through it isn't in your party so you need to go back to the entrance, rearrange your party, and do the same battles, again! That way of substituting bad AI with this you-got-to-be-kidding-me "battle system" was acceptable on a NES, and is no longer acceptable on a PC, despite this game's age.
Another thing is the game's linearity, which I doubt in RPGs is ever a good thing, and that's why they do so much to try to conceal it. Not in Septerra Core. Here you find yourself searching for colored keys just because you have to, and it doesn't make much sense the same thing applies for a palace, a forest, or a prison. Couldn't instead they put a quest giver or a notorious baddie be left guarding for which you needed a special item or weapon to pass? But they chose to make you traverse dungeon after dungeon, which gets tiresome pretty quickly, just because "you have to".
And last thing I didn't like, as you traverse the worlds, you don't feel like these universe teem with too much life. People and creatures from all the shells are not that different, despite the potential for truly unique civilizations. Their worlds are quite different, and I think that remains a good thing, but when you get to the cities, they all have basically the same facilities, and when they don't, you wish they would! Because it's such a hassle to find out you can't get core energy in a world and you need to get back just after arriving.
This, of course, is just my opinion, and if you're not bothered by the things I didn't like about this game (or probably know you might be able to look at them from a different, more positive perspective) you might as well like this game. Sadly, for me, it wasn't what I expected.
