Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator is a JRPG-style RPG from the American studio Valkyrie Studios, set on a fractured world divided into several concentric shells, between which one can travel using a giant elevator called the Core. The player leads a party of heroes led by a young girl from one of the lower shells, who set out to uncover the secret of their world's creation and face a threat endangering all of its layers.

The game combines turn-based combat inspired by Japanese RPGs with hand-drawn backgrounds and a fairly extensive, linearly told story full of twists. The combat system uses a timeline on which the player plans the actions of characters and enemies alike, bringing more tactics than classic menu selections. Visually, the game relied on detailed 2D backgrounds combined with 3D character models, which even after all these years gives it a distinctive look.

Septerra Core is praised especially for its imaginative world of divided shells and a story drawing on creation mythology, less so for its occasionally slower pace and lengthy dialogue. For fans of the JRPG style on PC, it is one of the few notable Western attempts at a genre then dominated mainly by the console Final Fantasy series, and it therefore deserves a place among the interesting, if lesser-known, titles of the late nineties. The game's publisher was Monolith Productions, which at the time was experimenting with various genres, and it was precisely this partnership with the smaller Valkyrie Studios team that allowed a title to emerge that was not afraid to draw openly on Japanese game aesthetics at a time when they were still relatively rare on Western computers. To this day, Septerra Core is therefore among the titles that fans of the genre discover belatedly, pleasantly surprised at how well its story and world have held up over the years. The main heroine also stood out as an unusual female protagonist for a genre that in the nineties on PC was still mostly built around male heroes, giving the game a still-appreciated, somewhat timeless dimension today.