Let's Split Up Into The Worst Possible Groups, Gang!

There's a particular moment in Septerra Core that I have to say is one of the most amazing ideas in the whole game; it's the sort of thing that I can never decide if it's a great idea or a terrible one, but it's certainly an idea.

During the final battle, the party splits up into three groups of three, because there are two things that need to happen before you can go fight the final boss, and Maya says this:

(Maya [because the world is about to end and the piece of it they're standing on is about to become very unlivable]: "We don't have time for that! Lobo, take Araym and Led and knock out engine room one. Grubb, you take Runner and Badu and kill engine room two. Corgan, Selina and I will head to Doskias' bridge."

Screenshot taken from this video.)

This is an... interesting way to divide up the party, because it seems like a terrible idea. Let's review the teams:

Lobo, Araym, Led: Lobo and Araym are pretty much literally best friends, actually; no problem there. But Led hates Lobo because he's physically a Jinam combat cyborg and she's from Jinam's old enemy nation, Ankara. In fact, she will literally attack him at random intervals if they're in the party together during battle. (To Lobo's credit, he doesn't reciprocate this behavior, even though this is easily Led's nastiest character trait. She's not really a particularly nice or sweet person and I see no reason to hold that against her, but then she treats one of the nicest characters in the game horribly because he looks like a category of entity she's been taught to blindly hate. Racism metaphor much?)

Grubb, Runner, Badu: Grubb is a tiny nerdy guy, good at building and fixing things and casting spells. Runner is a gigantic (slightly larger than a Smart Fortwo) robot he built, with the dazzling intellect of a dog and a laser cannon in his mouth (I think it's self-explanatory why that combination of features is unnerving). Badu is a great warrior/hunter from a primitive culture/mutated human subspecies from the deepest part of the world, adapted to live in a Nausicaa-esque Mold Forest, completely blind and reliant on sonar, has Poison Spit and Vampyre (health drain) as attacks, is about as large as Runner, and armed with "knives" that together are about the size of a surfboard... and is also completely unable to speak Septerra's lingua franca. In a non-video game party situation, that would have been a bizarre and hilarious scene.

Maya, Corgan, Selina: Maya's the party leader. Corgan is from Shell Three, which was a pretty nice place until the Chosen invaded it to make its largest city into an airship base to give their living airships the water they needed for long journeys into Septerra's depths*. Selina is a former Chosen general who was nominally the leader of a unit that destroyed some outlying towns that were potentially mustering resistance... most notably Corgan's hometown. Like Led, Corgan hates Selina so much that he'll randomly attack her during battle. (Like Lobo, Selina doesn't repay in kind, mainly because she didn't actually give the orders even though she was nominally in charge, and feels personally responsible for the slaughter even though she couldn't actually have stopped it. I reckon Corgan's somewhat more justified than Led, even if it makes putting him in a party a pain in the arse sometimes.)

So I'm a little mystified at the exact logic. I mean, the plot dictates that you should use certain specific weapons, a pair of legendary magic swords, in the final battle, and Corgan and Selina are your sword people, so I pretty much get that, even if it seems a little suicidal.

That's where it gets to the brilliant/terrible/certainly an idea part:

There are three special sidequests in the game that are intended to help build up the relationships between your party members. You can complete the game without them, but they're largely intended to make this little stretch of the game go more smoothly.

Specifically, two of these sidequests require the "hated" member of the party to do something positive for the people of the "random attack jerk" party member, and that'll offset their hatred and remove that random attacking factor. Considering how the combat engine works, completing these quests is a little less "helpful" and a little more "friggin' mandatory."**

Then there's the third sidequest, which involves getting Grubb to notice that Led is totally into him, which gives the two of them some rather neat love-powered combination attacks (that are ultimately overshadowed by the magic system of the game, which is basically itself entirely a complicated but awesome combination attack system). And... those two are in different parties in this chunk of the game for whatever reason.

I think that even if Septerra Core hadn't made much of an impression on me otherwise, I'd probably have remembered it just for this.

*Septerra is made up of a bunch of floating continents arranged into seven layers or shells which move like a huge, deranged clockwork. The highest shells have the lowest numbers.

**The battle system is loosely based on the clock-based "ATB" system found in many JRPGs. Each character has three "ranks" of attack strength, and to a point, the longer you wait the stronger your attacks will be. This is most vital for the spell system, the Fate Cards, where you combine multiple characters' moves to create spells of up to three parts to unleash the strongest attacks in the game, generally things like summon magic and the fancy and visually spectacular Destroyer/Big Bang/Black Hole spells. While you only need one character to have a full three-rank bar to get the full effect of a three-part spell, it still involves a lot of waiting... and thus the random attacking that Corgan and Led do can deprive your party of a link in your magic chain at a critical moment even if the damage done by the attack itself is negligible. Even worse, usually when Led's in the party with Lobo, it'll be under the assumption that she's that party's primary caster and using her Repair skill to be Lobo's medic.

-Signing off.

Excuse Me While I Natter: Septerra Core Again

Septerra Core was a pretty formative experience from my late teenage years. (Even though it was older, I got into Total Annihilation when I was in college. Idiosyncratic purchase order for the win.)

And while I loved the gameplay and learned it inside and out*, it was the story, characters, and especially the world that had my attention.

Take the country of Jinam, for instance.

We never see the place in its glory, because it gets Doomsday Device'd before we have an opportunity to visit it. But we learn some fascinating (and horrifying) details about it from local Best Character Ever Lobo (you may want to enlarge the image, and I'll also provide a transcription because this is a fuzzy screenshot-also here's a link to the YouTube video I took the screenshot from if you want the voice acting; Lobo shows up a little after the fifteen minute mark):

(Lobo [responding to a piece of dialogue describing him as a Jinam Combat Cyborg]: "Once. I've heard that the combat cyborgs like me were made up of volunteers. But our memories were wiped clean and I don't remember. Some people have said that the Cyborg brains came from criminals, but I hope not.)

This one tidbit of information makes the nation of Jinam comparably horrifying to the main villain (who brings the world to the brink of destruction for the sake of his ego) and the undead plague that the otherwise idyllic Shell Three is suffering from. Yet other than the fact that Jinam actually is the place of origin of two party members, Lobo and that redheaded guy in the party in the screenshot, it's the most obscure location in the game, only visited once after it's been destroyed. (...And it's been wedged against Shell Three, so now it's full of zombies as well as rampaging malfunctioning robots and combat cyborgs. I don't remember the combat cyborgs there being treated as undead, but it wouldn't have shocked me.)

It's actually kind of interesting because the design of the Jinam cyborgs seems to be inspired a little by the battle droids from Star Wars (as a very slender "mook" robot), but they're basically an army of Robocops. (Despite their appearance, they're tough as nails, especially the high-level ones that pop up late in the game; Lobo is also in the running for strongest member of the party. I once saw Lobo shrug off a monster called the Hell God basically puking lava on him; he took less than twenty damage, while the guy next to him with a barrier [reduce damage by 50%, unless it was a fire barrier, which means reduce damage by 75%-I don't honestly remember anymore which it was] took nearly fifty. Granted, machine-type characters have really good fire resistance already, plus better equipment, but except for healing items being less effective for mechanical characters and the fact that he was awful at spellcasting, Lobo had no particular drawbacks [both of which can be negated by proper party composition-just stick Grubb or Led in there, and both problems are counteracted thanks to their good spellcasting abilities and Repair skills], could tank like a boss, was faster than the party average, and had high damage output and the best attack-oriented skillset in the game. The only characters who were tougher and could hit harder physically were also so slow and even worse at spellcasting.) There's apparently very little material left from the original person-the brain at most, probably not even the whole brain.

And the end result is considerably tougher than the basic footsoldiers of the Chosen, who are one of the three or four identifiably oldest cultures in the setting and usually identified as the most advanced nation (the arguable example of most advanced nation is a secret branch of the Chosen who also aren't such tremendous jerks and have turned themselves into living airships, which is awesome for reasons I don't feel the need to elaborate on). Those combat cyborgs seem to put the lie to their claims of absolute technological superiority, at the very least. (And they actually stole the strongest weapon they use, the Doomsday Device, from the Ankarans, Jinam's traditional enemy.)

If the plot of the game hadn't gone the particular way it had, there was a good chance that Jinam, not the Chosen, would have been the biggest threat to the well-being of the world. Instead, they got wiped out thanks to the main villain's machinations less than halfway through the game.

*Not saying I know everything about its battle system, but watching videos of other people playing it, well... I don't want to brag but I got pretty darned good at Septerra, to the point where watching other people play it makes me cringe**. Probably comes from playing the living hell out of the demo while waiting for it to arrive; at one point I had the party leveled up so that the toughest regular enemies in terms of the damage they could take, the Armored Crabs, were being one-shot-overkilled-for-more-than-twice-their-hitpoints by the weakest attacker in the party (albeit with his strongest basic attack). Then I got stuck on stupid puzzle junk twice in rapid succession ("rapid succession" being a period of a couple months overall) and spent that whole time randomly playing and thus grinding.

...That party was so overleveled. And yet there was a random boss you could run into that still took a tremendous effort to kill without the "cheating" method*** that kept one-shotting the party for most of the game, until I finally figured out what I needed to do ages later and came back... and took him out with a set of basic attacks. Yes, I killed the guardian of the Armstrong seal shrine once without cheating or strategy. My party was that overleveled. ...To be fair, he didn't actually have a lot of hitpoints, just more armor than a pair of battleships sandwiched together, and weapon scaling and level grinding eventually negate armor strength.

**This isn't intended as an attack on people; not everybody can spend over a year immersing themselves in every game, and Septerra was just one I spent at least a year on. ...I think I've also mentioned I'm an unrepentant level grinder; Septerra's where I picked up the habit. Also, I've seen at least one person pull a neat trick that I'd not been aware of in a video, so I won't claim I know everything. (Using Cloak to dodge the final boss's counterattack? Neat. I mean, I... kinda didn't play the final boss battle, because my sister had pushed through more of the story at some point and once she'd beaten the final boss, I didn't feel the need to-but she and I co-developed our playstyle, and she was just about as good at it as I was when we were at our best.) Actually, years later I found Chrono Trigger to be a blast because it was a quicker, less buggy version of the same gameplay, and my old Septerra habits served me well even though Chrono Trigger is a somewhat harder game; other than Lavos, hopeless fights, that room with six Nus, and a few cases where I ended up fighting high-level encounters by accident, I don't remember anything from that game as being a serious challenge.

***I mention that the boss in question, the Rot Beast, has few hitpoints but a lot of armor (pretty sure he had a lot more armor than the final boss, or basically anything but a couple of the Magi encounters), right? He's undead, so spamming the healing summon on him dealt him decent damage, but staying alive long enough to use it the five-plus necessary times was hard even though he tended to waste time reviving his zombie buddies when that killed them.

(This was a challenge because he dealt stupid amounts of damage, and had a hit-all attack that could, under normal conditions, one-shot the party. The only way to reasonably survive this attack was with the counter-undead barrier, which would reduce all damage from undead by a whopping 75%. That changed things from an impossible fight to a very hard one. He could still nearly one-shot most party members at will, though, because he had the spell Poison, which inflicted the Poison status. Doesn't sound so bad, and in a lot of games it wouldn't be. But Poison in Septerra scales in strength with the level of the caster versus the level of the victim, so instead of the percentage-based damage one might expect, or something piddling and annoying, as soon as the poison kicked in your character was dead even through a barrier, because poison damage and barriers don't interact and that Rot Beast had a ridiculously high level. That bastard was scarier than Draxx, the godlike necromancer who presumably created him and all other Beast enemies [and also happened to be the first Beast you encounter], who were generally a sort of miniboss archetype who were also occasionally storyline bosses. Compared to Draxx and the Rot Beast, the other story boss Beast, the Curse, was kind of a joke, though, because even though he was statistically stronger than Draxx, he had an AI bug that would make him spam the Curse spell if you set up a Ward barrier and made sure the party was cured of Curse. Free tip if the guy ever gives you trouble.)

Giving him a healing item, though, did fixed damage to him equal to the healing value of the item, and I'm pretty sure that the Root, which would long since have become one's standard healing item, does more damage to him than his total health (or close to it, failing that), and I know that the next item up on the scale would do him in. The game designers clearly didn't see this as "beating" him, though, because if you use healing items on undead, you don't get any experience.

By the way, I did kill the Rot Beast the hard way more than once. After all the grief he gave me, I felt the need to.

-Signing off.

Gotta Feel Sorry For Those Three*

I mentioned relatively recently that a lot of my love of JRPGs comes from a game that, strictly speaking, is not a JRPG at all, Septerra Core.

Septerra is a game that's a huge homage to games of the sort, however, and TVTropes actually categorizes it as one despite its Western origins because it's such a close match in terms of gameplay, storyline, and aesthetic. (That, and a certain amount of Japanese media in general; before I was aware of the Toxic Jungle/Sea of Decay from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, I was exploring Septerra's Shell Seven Mold Forest, which was a huge homage to Nausicaa and similar things that it inspired.)

So it's really nice to see that the game has gone from severe obscurity to comparatively well-known thanks to digital re-releases through things like Steam and GOG.com. It used to be that if you wanted to look at something from the game, you had to hunt through the game for it. Earlier, I decided to search to see if one could find the game's summon animations online, and was rewarded with a video with every player-castable spell animation in the game.



The game was... honestly a bit of a pain to play back in the day, because it didn't run well on even pretty new systems, but if you have a Windows 7-ish computer (not Windows 8**) it actually runs better than it ever did.

*Those three enemies. They got a lot of attack magic demonstrated on them.

**My sister's rather puny and aging laptop runs it like a dream. This big fancy superpowered desktop I'm blogging from? It's honestly a bit choppy. You stink, Windows 8. (And that's why I don't want Windows 10, by the way-it's supposed to be some kind of magical cross between 7 and 8, but there's literally not a single feature from 8 that's worth jack [and plenty that I'd really, really like to get rid of, like the "app" crap-the way that works really remind me of the MSDOS era, which I thought you guys were trying to move away from?], and every ad I've seen for 10 emphasizes its 8-like interface. No, guys, no.)

-Signing off.

Game Profiles: Seven Kingdoms (AA/II)

You know what old RTSs are totally awesome? Seven Kingdoms ("Ancient Adversaries" and "II: The Fryhtan Wars").



Years ago, I got a disc with some demos on it, and one of them was for 7KII. That disc influenced a lot of the game purchasing decisions my sister and I made over the following five years (well, all of them, really), and we eventually purchased at least three of the seven games on it. (I can't remember if there were any other games we thought about buying, but the three we got-Septerra Core, Revenant, and Seven Kingdoms II-were all games we both enjoyed and played quite a bit.)

More recently, I was curious about the game, and some careful internet searches later, I discovered that, like a number of low-selling games from the old days have of late, the first Seven Kingdoms (which is often called "Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries" because it was later packaged with its expansion pack, Ancient Adversaries) has been released under a general public license, and has been updated to run more smoothly on modern operating systems. Which means you can get it for free. (7KII apparently is somehow still providing enough income that Enlight, the company that created the games, is unwilling to GPL it.)

Anyway, if you've ever played an RTS, you know how they work. You look down on the game world, click on units and give them commands, and build units and bases to create and sustain an army with which to overrun your opponents.

Seven Kingdoms was the RTS that dared to be different.

Before games like Warcraft III introduced the idea of heroes who gain massive benefits from experience, Seven Kingdoms gave that feature to every unit (well, except war machines, because they're machines).

But that's a minor aspect of it. Seven Kingdoms (and its successor, Seven Kingdoms II) featured unique systems that forced you to consider how to treat your units, how to expand, and more. Each non-war machine unit other than your king has a statistic called "loyalty," which rises and falls depending on many factors, and enemy units have a statistic called "resistance" which is essentially the opposite of loyalty. It is easier to bring towns under your control with generals (or your king) if the general matches the nationality of that town. (7K:AA messes the math up a bit with its mixed nationality towns, but despite that, it was an interesting feature unique to the first game.) Also, while you could reduce an independent or enemy town's resistance by attacking it, this tends to drive down your "reputation," yet another statistic, which affects both general loyalty and resistance relative to you, and also affects your final score. There are also spies, which work in a way more like real spies than is possible in most games.

While 7K:AA had many features that were removed from 7KII, the things that it had weren't much of a loss (other than water and ships, which I love), because the addition to 7KII was a wonderful one: Fryhtans.

Essentially, Fryhtans are giant, murderous monsters that run around killing everybody and probably eating them. They appeared in the first game as "trolls," essentially annoying enemies with prizes for killing them (another thing featured later in Warcraft III), but in 7KII, you can play as Fryhtans.

For me (and my sister), this honestly makes all the difference: Fryhtans don't have reputation scores, and that means you can be as nasty as you want. In fact, you're encouraged to be as nasty as possible, because Fryhtans have magic that is essentially powered by killing humans. Seriously. (There's also another interesting vibe to Fryhtans, but I like Fryhtans so much that I'm seriously going to do another blog post at some point all about them.)

The second game also fixes a wonky thing I noticed about the first game: AI players in the first will attack independent towns to drive down their resistance, because AI players apparently don't care about their own reputation. (AI Fryhtans, of course, have no compunctions in the second game.) Another nice feature of 7KII is that you can choose to have bigger buildings, although if you're used to playing with the smaller ones, it's disorienting.

Both games also feature a number of other things, like summonable deities and other such stuff, but that's really just icing on the cake.

If it sounds remotely appealing, give that first game a try (you've got nothing to lose, it's free), and if you like that, try the second, too.

From what I've heard, the third Seven Kingdoms, Conquest, was panned by critics; it apparently only carried over some general ideas from the first two, those being the use of "gods/greater beings" and the idea that humanity had huge, terrifying monster enemies (generically renamed demons). It looks like it was very pretty, but that's probably the best thing about it. [/curmudgeon]

-Signing off.

Game Profiles: Septerra Core

Septerra Core (official and frikkin' old homepage here) is a rather interesting sort of game; it's an effort by an American game studio to essentially create a Japanese game.

It really isn't a particularly well-known game; it spent enough time in development that it basically was one of the last sprite games, contemporary with an army of full computer graphics games. It was three-dimensional enough in its environments, but technically two dimensional.

But enough about the game's technical problems. The game takes place on a unique world called Septerra (hence the title). Septerra is a massive, physics-defying construct that consists of a Core (obviously) surrounded by seven layers of magic floating continents.

Yes, magic floating continents. In the sky. One actually bands the planet at its equator.

Each layer, called a "world shell," has its own distinct flavor.

The "first" shell, Shell One, is the highest, and is inhabited by technologically advanced and sophisticated people who call themselves the Chosen, who built a single huge city around the planet's spine (the axis around which the continents rotate, which can be tapped for energy).

Shell Two is a post-apocalyptic desert region that was made so by Chosen infighting.

Shell Three is a semi-medieval fantasy setting, with swordfighting and zombies.

Shell Four, with its massive world-banding continent, is the World Bazaar, the seedy center of trade for the whole planet, where there is no government and everything is legal. (No joke. For a significant portion of the game, your headquarters are in the Red Light District there.)

Shell Five has two advanced nations on it, whose relative proximity to the Core has made them wealthy, as the Core can be mined for a diamond-like material called Corite (an NPC remarks "It's like diamond, only better!"), but they have long squabbled over the rights to mine there.

Shell Six is sparsely populated, but is a den for pirates.

Shell Seven is an alien fungus world (if you've ever seen the film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it's like that) inhabited by mutant monks called Underlost (no, seriously).

Each world is radically distinct and beautifully crafted. The only real flaw in the worldbuilding, which is always nice and occasionally breathtaking, is that Septerra is actually quite a bit smaller than it looks. (There are also a lot of little pointless spots, like empty backalleys, that make you wonder if the problems with the game's production interfered with them constructing the world.)

The plot is fairly straightforward (a game reviewer on one site complains that it's far too much so), at least in that there's a single main villain, Doskias, from the beginning to the end (telling you that Doskias is the main villain isn't even a spoiler), and it has twists and turns but they have little to do with that villain directly. (There are a few other nice twists, though, the main one that comes to mind being that SPOILER the daughter of the Chosen Emperor [the Emperor had been killed by Doskias's flunkies earlier] is helping you with evacuating an area about to be hit by a Doomsday Device, then suddenly turns on you and announces that she intends to marry Doskias because he's made her a better offer.)

The combat system in the game is pretty similar to a standard turn-clock-based system, but has a few twists to it, such as a three-tiered combat system where you can let characters "charge up" to do more damage or use better attacks and skills. Central to the combat system are the Fate Cards, which can (almost) all be used to cast a spell alone, but are more powerful in combinations. Each character can only use one Fate Card at a time, which means that it's actually necessary to use all three members of your party to cast the strongest spells. (Actually, it's apparently pretty similar to Chrono Trigger's combat system in that way-it even has similar map-based combat characteristics.)

The bosses are the biggest enemies, but many of them are also the trickiest enemies. One early "tricky boss" is a device that sits in a lava pool. You can't attack the center (which can attack you, by the way), but you can destroy its three legs (each of which can also attack you) to knock it into the pool and destroy it. Simple, right? Well, not as much so as it sounds, because it can heal and resurrect its legs, and the legs are really tough. When my sister was recently replaying through this battle, her characters were considerably lower levels than the first time that one of us first encountered this boss (there was a bit of questing roadblock, and I spent a lot of time levelling up, such that one of the characters in her recent save had only acquired the skill "Steal" after this battle, while in my original save he had not only had "Steal" for a long time, but had mastered the more advanced skill "Mug"). She had also taken a less appropriate party member (one of the best for the fight is the character Grubb, whose "Repair" skill can be used both to heal mechanical allies and severely damage mechanical enemies-to the point where this skill does more damage to the boss than its elemental weakness) than I had. Did she get curb-stomped? No, it just took her longer (and cost her more items and hitpoints), because she followed the right strategy-wearing down the legs while using big magic to finish them.

One of the things that sets Septerra apart from similar games (i.e. actual Japanese RPGs) is that it has voicework. ("Over 5 hours of recorded dialogue.") For fans of newer games, one of the voice actors had a more recent and famous role-as the voice of Halo's Master Chief.

Septerra Core is a game that hasn't really aged terribly well (the often long load times for combat and scene changes can be really annoying), but if you're a Japanese RPG game buff, you should investigate it, because while it probably won't work with newer versions of Windows, it's a strong American pastiche of those games which doesn't command a high secondary market price.

I don't play terribly many games (except for Pseudolonewolf's and other flash games, since those are good games that are also free), and this one, along with Total Annihilation and a game called Revenant, pretty much defined what I look for in PC-based games.

Also, my sister totally ships Maya and Araym.

-Signing off.