"So many good points, what a shame..."

There are so many things that Septerra Core does exceptionally, even uniquely well. Valkyrie Studios clearly modeled the game on Squaresoft’s classic RPGs, but after playing Septerra Core, I doubt I could ever take Final Fantasy’s blue dialogue boxes seriously again—all the dialogue in Septerra is voice acted, mostly very well, and it really brings the game to life. Even Black Isle’s games, with their mixture of voice-acted tags and written text, seem pallid in comparison to Septerra Core’s fully realized script.

The world of the game, Septerra itself, is just a fantastic idea—seven concentric hollow shells, each with its own unique culture and geography, but also depending on the half-glimpsed worlds above and below. I never stopped being curious about Septerra—it is the kind of game where you know its designers have imagined far more than they were able to fit into the game itself, and I would love to see some fiction fleshing out the history of this strange and lovely world. The story we do see in the game is great—just enough is borrowed from the Squaresoft story formula to be warmly familiar, but there is plenty that is new and fascinating. A whole mythology slowly takes shape as the game develops, and as in the real world, characters find very different meanings in the same myths, and this is what sparks the story’s conflict. This is not a story of Good versus Evil, but a struggle between two competing versions of good, a level of intelligence that video games rarely display.

In the gameplay, too, Septerra Core adds just enough originality to a successful formula. Squaresoft’s familiar ATB gauge is used, but the player now has the option to make a weaker but faster attack when the time gauge is one-third or two-thirds full. This idea has now been adopted by Square themselves in their newest RPG, and it’s a good one, giving the player a lot more control over the pace and style of battles.

All of which makes it a greater pity that some more ordinary aspects of the game were neglected. The level design is atrocious. Hours are spent in repetitive, mazelike dungeons that contain no real puzzles but are impossible to find your way out of, so great is the number of identical corridors, in one of which is hidden the key to the next identical but differently colored dungeon, where you must search for the next identical but differently colored key. The last straw for me came when I made my way through five such levels, all pure drudgery, only to find that I was supposed to have got the key to the final level back on the world map, before I ever entered the dungeon. Back I went, and back I came -- the monsters respawning every time I re-entered a room. This was just sloppiness on the part of the designers, and I felt like strangling them. Had these frustrations come at the beginning of the game, I probably would have stopped playing, but as it was the pull of the story got me through to the end, and I was glad to have spent the time getting there.

The minor details of the game are mostly good. I loved the sound design and the sparse but evocative use of music. The interface is simple, using the mouse for almost everything. And the game fits fifty hours of play onto a single CD-ROM, an impressive feat considering the number of sound files required for all that voice acting. Load times for the various areas are also very short -- a nice change from many other PC RPGs on the market. I’m happy to take Septerra Core with all its flaws, but the sad thing is that the game’s financial failure means there is almost no chance of a sequel, and Septerra was a world I really wanted to find out more about.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/18/00, Updated 09/18/00