First 50:
51. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - PC52. Starflight - PC53. Skies of Arcadia - Dreamcast54. Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000 - PC55. Super Star Wars - SNES56. Shadowrun: Hong Kong - PC57. Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel - PC58. The Catacomb - PC59. Azure Striker Gunvolt - 3DS60. Mighty Gunvolt - 3DS61. Catacomb Abyss - PC62. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - PC63. Strike Suit Zero - Director's Cut - PC64. Wolfenstein 3D Spear of Destiny - PC65. StarCraft - PC66. Metal Storm - NES67. Septerra Core - PCHah! Finished with you, you fucker. I'm so glad to have this bastard behind me. It's not like the legendarily bad games out there; instead Septerra Core is an exercise in a lot of good/interesting ideas with shitty execution.
Septerra Core is the work of a small dev team trying to emulate the JRPG with a western twist. And here lies the first set of problems; they don't go all in on their JRPGness. The game sits in between the understated nature of most WRPGs and the craziness of JRPGs, and that's a bad spot to be. Things are implausible but not implausible enough. Characters ham it up but they don't ham it up enough.
The second thing you see from the western influence is the game takes a lot of cues from adventure games. Throughout the game you will be having to keep your eye out for key items, some of which need to be combined with others, or taken to an NPC to be refined, and not all of the key items are really noticeable on the background (while others are only if you're thinking to look for them). Several end up being "hey, remember that thing from several hours ago? You should go back there and pick it up now that you have this doohickey". I highly recommend a walkthrough so you don't have to deal with that level of frustration, especially due to another terrible design decision they made.
And that is the massive tedious backtracking. The game likes to make you revisit areas now that you have some key item/party member, and it's never a fast trip. Even when you massively outlevel enemies combat is a slow affair. And to add to that is the fact that most dungeons consist of going deep into it, getting the item/event, then backtracking out through the way you came. Only occasionally will you have tunnel dungeons where you go from one end to the other and now you're in a new area you want to be in. And the game never gives you any fast escape (either through shortcut or magic), except in the final dungeon past the point of no return. At that point it's like the game is taunting you: "oh yeah, we just learned how to make dungeon crawling suck less".
Speaking of sucky dungeon crawling, the game includes the nice feature of an in game map that's prepopulated. Sounds nice, right? Well, the first frustrating part is you can't open it up while your character is moving. Since movement is click driven this means you'll frequently try to open the map to check where you're going and get the error message. You can open the menu while moving, just not the map, because fuck you. And there's the minor quibble that the map is always forced into filling the screen, even though the actual terrain might be some very narrow rectangle, which leads to terrible distortion. But the real sucky thing is that they decided that they still wanted you to wander around like a drunk monkey, so instead of just having confusing layouts (not so confusing when you have a map) they add in a ton of switches that open/close parts of the level. So even though you might know where you want to go eventually, you still have to figure out the locations of all the switches and the right order (and they aren't on the map).
Combat is another area where they manage to cock things up. The game uses a modification of the ATB system, where your bar is divided into three segments. Once you have a full segment your character can act, whether it be attacking, using an item, magic, or attempting to flee. Many attacks require more than one segment, and magic is more powerful if you have multiple segments. Each character starts with three attacks (basic attack using 1-3 segments) and can gain six more, giving you a 3x3 grid of attacks (3 for 1 segment, 3 for 2, 3 for 3). These attacks might be added area damage, status effect, or just a harder hit, but the non-basic ones also require MP as a balancing act. The magic system is based on cards, where you have a selection of basic cards such as elemental magic or a barrier spell and then a few modifiers, like hit-all or mirror. You can combine cards in several combinations that make intuitive sense, such as barrier-mirror-all to remove a barrier from all enemies. All this sounds like it would make for an interesting combat engine with lots of decision points, right? Well, they fucked up the balance. A level 3 basic attack does more than 3x the damage of a level 1, which makes level 1 attacks useless outside of situations where you need to tap an enemy to finish him off. Similarly, the various MP costing attacks either do too little damage in exchange for their aoe properties or come too late to be worthwhile, as in the last third of the game magic takes over. Speaking of, the first two thirds of the game magic is terrible due to extremely low MP and low power, and all of the good support magic only coming near the end. But in the last third you gain access to the best hit-all spell that utterly trashes everything outside of one dungeon on a level 1 charge (and in that dungeon you just use a level 3 charge instead). At that point combat goes from long and tedious and boring to short and boring and popping cheap MP items like candy.
The general story stuff is also a really mixed bag. They had the cool idea of taking WRPG style conversations, so when you interact with an NPC you can ask them about several topics, or even have your individual characters talk to them (which might unlock new info, or items, or trigger an event). All the dialog is fully voiced, which consists of main characters voiced by external voice actors (with bad scripts and not the greatest delivery a lot of times) and side characters voiced by members of the studio (which is all kinds of bad). But going back to those key items, if you want to give a key item to an NPC you need to exit conversation and use the item interface to give it to them; there's no provision to do it in conversation, which is dumb. And as for the overall story, it starts off with your typical JRPG "must save the world from the bad guy who wants to rule it" but it kinda falls flat on a few key points. The two most egregious are:
There is one thing I can say about the game that is 100% great: it has the best airship ever. The airship replaces your overworld character and can land on any spot you were able to walk into before; no hunting around for a spot you can land, get out, and go to the hotspot, possibly having to trek over a long area of unlandable terrain. You get it after having seen all seven shells that make up the world, and it really reduces the potential tedium that could have happened considering how much hopping around you do at that point. Oh, and I guess the idea behind the world is also interesting. It's a planet that consists of seven world shells. The outer six are essentially floating continents, and each one allows them to explore a variety of terrain and town types. So the scenery doesn't get boring.
Fuck, so happy to be done with this. Do not buy this game. Anyone who tells you it's good is lying to you.