Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator (PC)

Here's another requested game for you. This time I'm taking a quick look at PC RPG Septerra Core, released in late '99. It came out between Final Fantasy VIII and Planescape: Torment to give it some context, though I don't know yet which it'll be closer to in gameplay. It could be a Diablo clone for all I know.

The CGI intro explains the set up: the game takes place on an artificial planet called Septerra, made up of seven thin World Shells that rotate around a central core (sept-terra, get it?)

Yeah yeah, I know what you're thinking, "Wow, another RPG set on a series of hollow interlocking planet shells, when will this industry ever get any new ideas?" But there is a twist!

Legend tells that Septerra's Creator has hidden within the core a means for man himself to inherit his power. Every 100 years the alignment of the upper continents allows a beam of light to reach the core, at this point all you have to do is unlock the secrets of the core with two special keys and heaven itself is yours apparently.

And as luck would have it, the next alignment is going to be coming along... in just over 50 years time. This could be a long game.

Fortunately for the sake of the story, Lord Doskias of the Chosen has no intention of waiting that long and has plans to move up the timetable. The Chosen are the descendants of the Creator himself and are currently in possession of both keys, but Doskias is willing to move against his own people to claim the relics for himself, even if he has to start a holy war to do it.

Emperor Aspertine is fully aware of the danger Doskias presents as he knows only too well that a man willing to go out in public with a beard like that is a man unrestrained by fear, shame or common sense, and so he readies his own forces. Shit is about to go down.

Meanwhile, on one of the shells below, these three spot a Chosen airship fleet passing overhead while hiking through the desert and run behind a sand dune for cover.

Mohawk guy is excited to finally see their ships up close, but blue-haired anime girl knows that they mean trouble, and people have to be warned.

This CGI is way less fluid than an FFVIII cutscene, but I don't think it looks bad for the time. It gets the job done without being unintentionally hilarious.

A quick cut later and our blue-haired protagonist (also known as Maya) has returned home to tell her uncle about the Chosen airships. After one last bit of drama where the Mayor (also known as Mayor) bursts in looking for a smuggler I'm finally allowed to take control and run around the room. (Incidentally, I'm not sure it was a great idea to introduce two characters called Maya and Mayor at the same time in a game with voiced dialogue).

Speaking of voiced dialogue, I'm asking my uncle questions here by clicking on these different images and every line from both characters so far has been fully voiced. Most Western RPGs at this point were happy to give a player one or two lines of speech to introduce a character before going quiet while JRPGs tended to skip right to the silence, but this hasn't missed a line yet.

Okay uncle, tell me about the Chosen.

Whoa, Maya's uncle has an awesome head. Not only does the game have full speech, they've added animated CGI portraits to read out the lines.

It seems that the last time Chosen airships appeared overhead, the town was wrecked and many people killed, including Maya's parents. The airships weren't even deliberately attacking them, the villagers were just collateral damage. So the fact that they're gearing up for a holy war up there right now probably isn't good news.

But these folks don't know anything about that yet and couldn't do anything about it even if they did. All they know for sure is that Maya's late for school and should get her ass over to Azziz's Temple fast.

Of course everyone just assumes I know the way there already and refuse to give me directions, so I'm left to wander the streets until I find it.

I can either give Maya a destination with a mouse click like a Western RPG, or control her directly like a JRPG. The rest of the interface seems pretty mouse driven though so I'll go with that, while holding down shift to make her run everywhere.

Interestingly the city seems to be populated by palette-swapped clones, but these guys are all just minor NPCs so I'm finding it hard to care. Plus every one of them has fully voiced dialogue still. I don't get a full list of topics for many of them and I definitely can't ask for directions, but they seem friendly enough.

Also, and this is the part that really blows my mind, the acting... isn't bad. At all. In fact I'd go as far as saying that this game has near universally good voice acting so far.

I've finally found a late 90s RPG with shop signs, it's a miracle! I can't actually read the thing, but at least I have an idea what's being sold here (stuff).

It's not the prettiest of video game menus, but it's functional enough. I didn't start off with much cash, but I've got enough for a couple of loaves of bread at least. Each loaf when eaten dry in its entirety is able to heal 50 HP, which sounds pretty good to me. Probably. I can't actually spot her health on these stats so I don't actually have a clue. I've already got a weapon and some gear so I don't see why I shouldn't splash out on bread.

Oh wait, I just realised they've hidden her health under her portrait! I couldn't figure out what that was about at first, I thought it might be some kind of serial code or something.

Well I have discovered the map button, not that it's helped me at all. It only seems to display the floor I'm currently on and nothing's labelled. I was kind of hoping for a beautiful illustration of the entire town with "school" clearly marked on it.

Oh, well that'll kind of do. Hey Maya lives in Midgar!

Well from here I can travel to a smelting complex or a junk heap, but somehow I doubt I'll find a school at either of them. I'm going to check anyway though of course, because I might as well be thorough.


SOON, AFTER I GAVE UP ON THE TOWN AND HEADED OFF INTO THE DESERT.

Hey the game has a proper JRPG style overworld for me to walk around on! No random encounter battles though, it's entirely peaceful out here.

It's weird how the town doesn't quite look the same as it did on the other screen though. It's close, but not exactly right. These are the kind of things I ponder when I'm walking around in the barren wilderness lost and bored and looking for a school.

I think I'll check out the Badlands next. It seems like the last place anyone would send their kids unsupervised every morning, but there'll probably be nasty junk-snakes or whatever there for me to shoot and I'm eager to actually do something.

There's no random battles here in the Badlands either, but I don't much like the look of that wolf creature up there on the top left. If I can see teeth at this resolution, then those teeth are too big. Plus I've found that glowing red eyes are almost never a good sign.

It's funny how the buttons disappear when I move the mouse away from the bottom of the screen, but the box stays there, being entirely useless. That's cutting off a good 20% of my screen that is!

I strayed too close to a grey wolf and the characters automatically jumped across to their attack positions. Now the wolf's running over to bite me, the bar under Maya's portrait is charging up, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing here. I mean you can see for yourself how many buttons I've been given to click on here.

Incidentally, I didn't quite realised just how subtle and ambient the soundtrack had been so far until the battle music kicked in. Personally I reckon an epic sci-fi fantasy starring a woman with anime hair should have a bit more energy in its music, but I guess it just wasn't what they were going for.

AHA, clicking Maya's portrait brought up my options. This is all mouse and icon driven, but it basically seems to be similar to the Final Fantasy ATB combat system. When a characters turn comes around I get to choose from 'attack' or 'use item' ect. and then I select a target for the action. In this case I'm selecting 'gun' and 'the wolf's head' respectively.

I wonder why I have three different strengths of the same attack here though. Oh, OH! I'm an idiot. Maya's bar has three segments, and as long as at least one segment is filled she gets to take a turn. But if she hangs on a little longer and charges up the bar, she unlocks more powerful attacks.


SOME FIGHTING LATER.

Azziz's Temple! Not only do kids have to traverse the grim wolflands to get here, they also have to cross the world's most terrifying bridge. If you happened to fall off that thing there's a fair chance you'd keep falling until you reached the planet's core and you'd have more than a day to think about it on the way down.

Good job I brought all that bread really, you know just in case. No sense being hungry the whole way down.

Azziz's lesson for the day is about Core power. You see, the biocomputer in the Core is powered by energy harnessed from the rotation of the World Shells and it uses this energy to... regulate the rotation of the World Shells. Sounds a bit like a perpetual motion machine to me, but I honestly don't know.

Anyway this is all relevant to me because I can use the excess energy from the Core to the run machinery, cast spells and... basically what he's saying in that message box above. He finishes the lesson by giving me a water magic Fate Card and then sends me on my way. QUEST COMPLETE!

I think I should probably keep playing the game a little longer though, at least until the intro plot and Maya's story actually intersect in some way.

I went back home to Maya's uncle's house to rest up and found that a kid had skipped out on school and I was sent back out to go look for him at this nearby water pumping station. Here I found that... he was the weapon smuggler that Mayor was looking for earlier!

Unfortunately I managed to wander in just as he's about to get busted by agents from World Shell 3. Then the slippery little bastard manages to escape and leaves me to get arrested instead!

Maya isn't even considering surrender as an option though and immediately opens fire on the sword-wielding cops. Unfortunately they're also magic fire-wielding cops and they're cutting through my pitiful level 2 health.

Looks like I'm going have to... eat some bread.

Damn, that is some epic bread eating. Why can't I ever make sandwiches that good?


MUCH MUCH LATER.

Okay I've had enough of this now, my patience has gone. Fighting the wolves earlier was a bit annoying, but this is dragging on forever.

I'm trying to charge my bar to full each turn as a level 3 Gatling shot is more damaging than three regular level 1 rifle shots, but that means I have to sit through three or four of their own attacks in the meantime. They have to jump over to attack me first though and then jump back afterwards, so that adds up to around 30 seconds I have to wait between turns.

I should've brought a book to read. And they should have made this entirely turn based, no timer bullshit. I'm seriously considering turning this off right about now.


LATER.

I eventually finished the fight, but the smuggler kid escaped across the pipes so now I've got to go chase him. First though I need to pay a visit to mohawk guy from the intro and get him on the team. His robot too, hopefully.

Before we head off to Outlaw Canyon though I think it'd be a good idea for me to head back to the Badlands, grab a level or two and earn cash to buy some new gear for my new team, because there's no way I'm going to let myself get into another situation like that last fight. From now on I want my fights to end long before they wear out their welcome or else I don't see myself playing this much longer.

By the way, some of the menu graphics in this look a bit... well, like placeholder art they never got around to replacing. Still the game does let me save anywhere I choose, whenever I choose to, so as far as I'm concerned it can look however it wants to look.


A FEW DEAD WOLFMONSTERS LATER.

I did a bit of killing and then headed back to town to get Grubb here a new pair of black LeatherShoes. There's two sets of equipment for sale here for each character, one giving them a decent defence boost, the other more balanced to give extra speed as well. After seeing how that pumping station battle went, I'm going with speed, no hesitation. Defence ain't going to matter one bit if I fall asleep in every battle out of sheer boredom.

By the way, equipping a new item of clothing changes its colour on the menu picture. Which would be cool, except it doesn't change it on the in-game sprite!

Oh hang on this, is a bit of a problem. I can't get onto the pumping station pipes while this fan is spinning. Grubb says he could short it out if he had a generator and as it happens I have one in my inventory! But dragging it over didn't do much good as he also needs a cable to connect it up.

So I went on an epic adventure across all the places I'd been, looking for a bloody cable. I thought the junk pile in town would be a good bet for that, but nope.

You know where the cable was in the end? About a screen or so below the bloody panel I was trying to short.

Oh shit, it's an enormous antagonistic crustacean! These battles have gotten far more bearable now that I've gotten a team together and I'm starting to see the point of the charging system now as well.

Each of my characters has a different charge time and a different attack power, for example Grubb bar will max out well before the others, but his most powerful attack is comparable to the robot's weakest shot.

This crab has so much armour on him though that I can only do 1 damage with anything less than a fully charged laser blast from my robot. In this situation Grubb suddenly becomes my star character, inflicting 3 damage with three weak shots in the time it takes the robot to charge his weakest shot. Meanwhile I can leave the robot to charge up fully and have him one-shot the more fragile beetles.


SOON.

Man, would it have killed them to show multiple floors at once on this map? When I'm on the pipes I can only see pipes and now that I'm on the ground I can only see everything else. It's forcing me to try to use my memory, which is just cruel.

It wouldn't be so bad if the game camera was zoomed out a little, or if I could scroll the screen around like in an Infinity Engine game. But I'm stuck with my tiny window on the world, locked to my heroes at all times.

Alright, I escaped the pipe maze of infinite crabs and I'm right outside Outlaw Canyon. But fuck that, I need to head into town to get some rest and resupply my team first.

It's a cowboy town! With a saloon salloon and tumble weeds and floating alien horses and everything!

Unfortunately the staff at this particular saloon don't serve my kind (junk scavenger), so no rest and no resupply for me. Well, I guess I have no choice but to go to the canyon anyway, and hope my bread lasts out.


BUT THEN, IN  THE CANYON.

Too many outlaws and they've all got magic shields! My bread's not going to last out!

I've been using Grubb's second level repair skill to keep my robot in the game, but it's eating through my Core energy fast. It seems that the mana pool in this is shared between all the characters, so I haven't got enough left to use magic cards either.

Okay screw this, I'm going back home while I still have some bread left and I'm going to level up a little and resupply. I fully realise this will take me through those bloody crabs again, which take a minute and a half to kill at the best of times, but better that than continuing down the canyon and ending up in a fight I can't win.


A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME LATER, AFTER BACKTRACKING DOWN THE PIPES, LEVELLING UP, AND GOING RIGHT BACK ACROSS THE PIPES AGAIN.

I can just kill the outlaws in the saloon to scare the bartender into serving me! I'm an idiot. A total idiot.

Still, at least now I've levelled up my robot's max beam attack from absurd to ludicrous. See if your magic shield can block that, mate. Oh by the way, not only is the robot my heavy hitter, he's also my thief. If I charge him up to two bars I can 'fetch' items from enemies.


SOON, AFTER FIGHTING THROUGH OUTLAW CANYON.

Anyway, I made it through the canyon only to find I'd arrived just as that World Shell 3 agent was trying to arrest the smuggler kid again. What are the chances? But then the agent is murdered by the kid's contact, who reveals that the man had to die, as no one must know that he's secretly planning to take over Wind City!

No one but us four that is, as fortunately he doesn't seem too bothered about what we know. He just tells the kid to keep up the good work and then heads off to kill some folks with his new weapons.

Maya quickly realises that's she's got another opportunity to warn someone about something here and decides to make her own way to World Shell 3 as well. The plot thickens... but what has any of this got to do with Doskias trying to get the keys to open the Core?

Aha, Doskias turns out to be the one behind everything! Well that enough story intersection for me, I'm going to use this as my cue to turn the game off.


I have to admit, I was expecting a lot worse from Septerra Core, but it started to grow on me; especially once I gotten a team together and the battles became less tedious. It reminds me a little of Chrono Trigger so far, weirdly, with the way that battles take place on the field and how you travel between multiple world maps for the different World Shells. It also manages to keep the cutscenes short and to the point, letting me investigate things further myself with Western RPG-style optional dialogue topics if I'm interested (only questions though, no choices).

On the other hand, the game's been a bit... dull so far. It's been like playing a PlayStation JRPG with the music off and regular battles drawn out to last over a minute each time. There isn't even a catchy victory fanfare! Which is a shame I reckon because I'm actually liking these characters and their story and I want to see what happens to them. Plus it's been entirely lacking in side-quests up to this point, with nothing for me to do but follow the main plot.

But it's nice to play another RPG that lets me get on with actually playing the game, instead of stopping me every couple of steps to drag me into another scripted event. Plus it's not crap, so it gets a star:

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If you feel like adding your own thoughts about Septerra Core feel free to leave a comment. There's a handy box down there you can fill with your opinions and feedback, it'd be a shame to leave it empty.