Septerra Core is an RPG for the PC that has the feel of a Japanese console RPG. Fortunately, Septerra Core isn't just a cheap imitation of a popular RPG series like Final Fantasy; it has a style all its own. It's a good game, with some nice ideas, but unfortunately it's not as great as it might have been due to some nasty problems.

The story is a fairly standard one - save the world from complete annihilation - but It does have a few nice twists. First off is the world itself. You've never seen a world quite like this one - a giant machine with 7 layers of floating world shells. Each shell has its own unique style and is filled with interesting places to visit and explore. The character design for the player characters is also quite good, both artistically and as far as personality goes. Of particular note is the main character, Maya, who is a strong female leader - something fairly rare in video and computer games.

These characters are brought to life with lots of quality voice acting. In fact, all of the dialogue in the game is spoken, something I would like to see in more games. The emotions in some of the dialogues feel forced and some of the NPC dialogue is overused (hearing that kindly shopkeeper from another shell greet you when you're talking to a mercenary doesn't feel right), but considering the size of the game, the voice acting was unusually good.

The gameplay in Septerra Core is standard RPG fare with a few unique systems. Battles use segmented time bars (kind of like Panzer Dragoon Saga) - if you wait longer before attacking, your characters will be able to use more powerful techniques and attacks. The magic system is quite interesting as well - spells are cast with cards and core points (which are pooled together into a party Max core total). Each character can only use one card at a time, but by having characters use cards simultaneously, you can create more powerful spells.

There are 9 playable characters, each with their own unique stats and up to 6 special techniques. Characters gain XP equally regardless of whether or not they're actively fighting which I thought was a nice feature since you can only have 3 characters in your active party at one time. The game is also graced with a fairly large inventory of items, equipment, and accessories. The game is pretty long and will probably take around 50 hours for most players to finish. And as long as you pick up the version 1.01 patch, the game is pretty stable and mostly bug free.

The graphics are good. The backgrounds are not tile based and look great. Each character (even NPCs) has his or her own speech portrait (anime style) and the main characters have nice pictures on their status screens. Animation is at a minimum, but is more frequent than some RPGs. There are also a few movie sequences, some of which are nice (like the opening describing the world of Septerra), but most of which paled in comparison to the standard video quality you find in most Playstation games.

What music the game has is good, but for the most part, the game focuses on ambiance as opposed to rousing musical scores. There are a couple of different battle tunes, which is always a nice feature. Sound effects (aside from the great voice acting) aren't anything special, but they don't annoy.

Septerra Core has many positive aspects - nice graphics, tons of good voice acting, good character and world design, and nice systems for combat and magic. However, it also has some very definite problems.

First off is the control. In general, the control is pretty good, but it has two noticeable problems. The first and major problem is with moving your characters around. There is no way to make running the default movement style (and your characters walk so slowly that you absolutely have to run everywhere), so you have to double click whenever you want to move anywhere. Also, your characters sometime have problems moving in tight locations, which can be quite annoying. And your characters don't walk through each other very well, so changing directions in a tight corridor is difficult.

Secondly, though the magic system control is ideal for combination spells, it doesn't work as well for single card spells. You shouldn't have to drag the card over to your character for single card spells. Also, using healing magic is a bit of a bother - outside of combat it's the only magic you can use, but you still have to scroll past all of your combat spells to select it.

Then there's the magic system. Early on it's basically useless - too expensive and too weak. In the midgame, it has some use - some of the spells are quite useful in boss encounters. And then near the end of the game, magic becomes insanely powerful due to a few very powerful cards (most importantly, the cheap "All Effect" card) and the fact that, at this point, you can purchase almost an unlimited supply of core restoring items. So near the end of the game, random encounters basically become a joke - in most cases, you can absolutely demolish all of your enemies with a powerful spell before they can even act.

The techniques that your characters possess are similarly badly balanced. Although each character only has 6 techniques (beyond basic attacks), most of the techniques are pretty useless. Also, since the group explosion techniques can only be targeted at an enemy and tend to have very short ranges, it's hard to hit more than one enemy at a time.

The game has some minor puzzles, but these are poorly excecuted in the game. Basically, they follow the standard bad graphic adventure game format - if you have the items necessary, you can solve any puzzle in about a minute of experimentation, and if you don't have the item necessary, you could spend hours of tedious wandering around looking for it. There are often no hints to where these items are so if you don't know, for example, that some of the stores sell essential story items off screen at the bottom of their inventory lists, you could get extremely frustrated.

Some of the other aspects of the gameplay are poorly designed as well. The dungeons are designed like a poorly designed FPS and are full of switches and keys, requiring a lot of backtracking. Combat happens far too frequently and since there are a limited number of random enemies (most of the later enemies are just palette switched versions of earlier enemies with higher stats) and you lack good multi-enemy attacks for most of the game, combat becomes quite tedious.

There are also some points where the developers stuck in a dungeon just to add length to the game, regardless of the fact that it didn't make much sense. One of these happens right at the beginning of the game. You have to go to a temple and since children go to this temple regularly, someone with common sense would assume it's in or near town. Not the case - you have to go through a badlands dungeon to get to it. Since no one tells you where the temple is, you could easily spend an hour or two looking for it. Another example occurs later in the game where you have to hurry to save someone from being assassinated and, of course the path you are told to take is filled with half a dozen locked doors and takes an hour or two of backtracking and wandering around to traverse.

As a final complaint, I had a problem with the villains, or lack thereof. The main villain of the game, Doskias, was pretty boring compared to some of the excellent villains to be found in other RPGs (like Ghaleon, Sephiroth, or Luca Blight). And the supporting villains, with the exception of the Magi (who only had about 5 lines in the game), were pretty forgettable as well.

Despite the numerous problems I had with the game, I still enjoyed Septerra Core.It just wasn't the classic I was hoping for. It's a decent first effort from an unknown developer, and with a little more work and experience, future RPGs from Valkyrie Studios could be truly fantastic.