Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

While many games have similar styles and plot elements, Septerra Core appears to directly ripoff a lot of elements from Bahamut Lagoon and Chrono Trigger. I'll explain what I mean below, but if you haven't played this game and want to, you may want to avoid this topic for now as there may be some small spoilers.

For starters, the "world shells" in Septerra Core seem very similar to the "lagoons" in Bahamut Lagoon, which are basically floating land masses (also like the Magical Kingdom of Zeal in Chrono Trigger, but not to the same extent). Though I've seen quite a few fantasy games with floating islands or castles, non of them had the whole world like that as in Bahamut Lagoon and later, Septerra Core.

As for the Chrono trigger references, aside from the unique speed/turn based battle system that exists in both games (with a minor difference in Septerra Core, there's three levels to which a character's speed/turn bar can charge instead of one), a lot of the characters in Septerra Core seem to be based on those of Chrono Trigger. I'll list these below:

Maya for example seems to be based on Marle. They just changed her hair to blue and gave her a rifle instead of a crossbow (both of which are similar). Going from a princess to a "junker" was quite a bit of a change though, heh!

Grubb and Led are based on Lucca (all three being mechanics that work on making and repairing robots).

Corgan and Araym both also seem to be based on Crono in different ways. Corgan is a swordsman and is a polite person who is always looking to help others for a just cause like Crono. Araym on the other hand has pretty much the exact same hair style and color.

Runner and Lobo seem to be loosely based on Robo. Runner uses the same type of laser based weapons and bombs, whereas Lobo is a humanoid robot (or in this case, a cyborg) like him with a very similar name. It seems to me as though they broke off Robo into two different characters, one that looks like him and the other that uses the same type of weapons.

The Mining Helgak (an enemy boss on Shell 7), looks very similar to Lavos and his spawn.

Selena doesn't seem to be based on any character I know from either of these two games, though she and the symbol on her cloak does remind of the main character from Chaos Legion.

And last but not least, Badu also looks like they loosely based him off of Frog. Though there is enough differences between these two characters to call them unique. If anything, he looks more like a primitive Protoss (Zealot) from Starcraft, hahaha!

Well, that's about it. So, what do you all think of this? Is this all a coincidence, or did the Septerra Core staff copy a lot of elements from these two classic SNES RPGs? And before anyone gets upset, I just wanted to say that while I enjoyed playing Septerra Core for the most part, a lot of plot elements and even characters seem to be copied off of Bahamut Lagoon and Chrono Trigger. It's not like I hate the game or anything, I'm just saying...

Also, the world of Septerra also reminds me a bit of the artificial satelites from the Panatasy Star series, namely Phantasy Star 3.

Edit: The core energy thing is also pretty similar to the whole "mana" idea in other games.

These days I don't really care if a game is a rippoff, as long as the game is good. Because like 95% of all releases are crap and same goes for the RPG area.
So... how does it play? Is the balancing and story good?

The story is pretty original, but towards the end, I felt that a few bits of it didn't make much sense. They're basically trying to stop a madman who turns out to be right in the end or something along those lines. It's been a while since I last played it, so I don't remember all too well. As for the characters, some I like. The others are quite strange on the other hand.

The battle system is very similar to that of Chrono Trigger, only a lot slower. It takes forever for a character's turn bar to get full. Sure, you can use level 1 and 2 attacks, but they're very weak compared to level 3 attacks for which you have to wait until the entire bar is full to use. Battles, especially in the beginning and towards the end of the game, take a very long time to finish. Trying to level grind in this game is really painfully slow. The game also randomly crashes when special attacks are sometimes used (by either the player or the enemy)...

Too bad. There is always some kind of huge drawback in Chrono Trigger clones which simply makes them not enjoyable even though most things seem to be awesome... Black Sigil (a CT Clone for DS) for example would be a wonderful game if it was less buggy and had a lower random encounter rate (or even visible enemies like in CT).

Yeah, I completely agree on the Black Sigil bit. It is nice even though it is little more than a heavy hack of CT. That said, I believe that game deserves more fame than it got. I'd love to see a patch that reduced enemy encounters to 1/3; I'd even do it myself if knew how.

Unfortunately that wouldn't do... the game crashes often during fights and with unusual decisions (and sometimes even randomly on the map) and a few group-attacks are not obtainable due to event-errors. Those are the more crucial ones, but the script is also typo-filled and there are graphical glitches. To fix this game up you probably need a small army of good coders and careful betatesters

It's really sad, because there seems to be a decent story and a fun game behind these big issues. I really feel bad for those three guys from Canada who developed the game and went bankrupt with their studio not long after the release. The heart and time they poured into it can't be unseen, but the low budget and the small team they had was simply not enough to make a polished game out of it...

I never had random crashes using emulators, but there are probably parts of the code that are iffy enough to be troublesome in other environments.
That said, you are right in that the game never got the amount of polish it deserved (it was originally meant to be a GBA game and it was moved to the DS late in development to capitalize on the newness of the platform back then).