ActRaiser (1990)

I have never played another game like Actraiser. It combines 2D action sequences with a combat city builder. You play as a god who is waking up over 1000s of years to find that his continent has been overrun with monsters. His goal is to eradicate the monsters and build up a population of people who worship him.

The game sequence is set up in 3 parts. The first part is an action sequence where the deity takes the form of a warrior and does some 2D platforming and combat. I usually found these levels fun, but a bit bare bones. You swing a sword and choose 1 magic spell to use throughout these stages. They aren't too long and always end in a boss fight. The difficulty of these levels is pretty low and most people shouldn't have an issue completing them with the given number of lives. The REAL challenge isn't whether or not you can beat them but if you can get a high enough score in these stages to max out your population.

This leads me to part 2: the city building stage. These are really novel and fun. You take the form of an angel and have to guide your people to build out their cities and destroy monster lairs. While building is happening, the monsters will destroy your population, but you can kill them as the angel. This is relevant because your level is dependent on the total population throughout the continent. Throughout these stages the people will repeatedly come to you with requests and tips on how to progress the stage. While I don't think there is anything revolutionary in these city building stages, I do think they are fun and novel parts of the game. They are definitely the stand-out section of Actraiser.

Finally, the third section of each stage is a repeat of the first action section. These are usually more difficult and require more precision, but the formula is the same. After the second action sequence is over you can freely max out your cities so that you can level up as high as possible.

While Actraiser doesn't really do anything exceptionally, I think this game is a clear example of "more than the sum of its parts." I think everything comes together here really well and creates a very unique gaming experience.

Preliminary: Argh this is gonna be one of those situations I might regret following my chronology project rule of always playing the original version, at least when there are substantial changes. I will be playing a fan translation of the original Japanese version, and many reviews point out how the Quality of Life changes to the gameplay for the NA version make it much better. I also see that there is a fastROM hack, I read up about those and that implies there are a lot of situations of too many sprites causing slowdown. I just don't get how NES and SNES programmers ignored the reality of sprite flicker and slowdown, like why not just level design/balance the game without the need for a million sprites on the screen at once?

This is absolutely beautiful, reminds me a lot of its contemporary arcade games and those early Genesis games that obsessed with high quality graphics over actually being able to use the graphics heh. Shadow of the Beast comes to mind too. Like cmon, how does an SNES game not let you move mid-jump.... Butttt I'm still playing it for some reason. Probly because the sim/religion aspect is interesting and it's beautiful and decent tunes so far.

At first I was irritated but I kinda liked the Fillmore Act 1 boss.

Early Game

As tedious as the citybuilding has been, it is oddly addicting. And the music has this, I dunno, RPG Maker 2 or like, I dunno, city building PC game type tune to it that just keeps me playing and playing even after telling myself I should take a break or just call it the inevitable 3 star and move on :-p As hooking as it has been, and very unique, none of it is particularly great to warrant a 4+. The platforming was good enough. The city building is very interesting, and I love seeing my city grow and the little people spread around, and them use their magic to seal the Monster Lairs, etc. But I'm thinking my end goal will just be to finish Fillmore. But we shall see.

The tedious part is all the words for each action, like maybe tell me all that the first time I Lightning Strike or Move Town. After a while, it's very redundant.

Always nice to see a level up type feature. I am almost finished building Fillmore and sealing all the Lairs :-p I assume then each area closes with a platformer segment and boss?

Ok maybe I'll do one more area heh. This is oddly addicting. Super cool feature where it zones in down to the next Battle Monster Act. Showing the whole world map as it spirals down.

The Minotaur boss of Fillmore was pretty lame. And well the whole platforming element is quite clunky and lame. Definitely bogs down the game, but I suppose it needed some more action elements than just the angel+bow vs spawned monsters. I will give Bloodpoool area a bit of a chance, but might burn out on Act 1 platforming. What I really want is a little more of that city sim before I call it quits on this interesting game!

Really cool Look to Bloodpool Act 1

I know I mentioned it before but in many ways these platforming parts really do resemble its contemporary arcade action platformer/hack n slash games. The Look and the controls for sure. The music for this Bloodpool Act 1 segment is... really circus-y :-/

Yeaaaa that boss was tedious and I think it's time to move on. Neat game tho! (And maybe I'm just eager to play some OSRS but still, time to move on :-p)

Look: 7.5/10 Neat enough. Some cool backgrounds. And love the zoom down feature when entering an Act

Sound: 7.5/10 Love the world map/city building tune. Nothing special but hooking.

Play: 7.5/10 The platformer parts could use some serious work. But super neat idea (and execution) with the cityy sim part

Feel: 8/10 What a unique and neat idea

Attachment: 8/10 It's a game I've always heard about. And likely will give another shot, when I uh some day have all the time in the world. For now, moving on.

Overall: 7.7/10

Completion: Up to the boss of Bloodpool Act 1, after having fully sealed and developed Fillmore

Playtime: 1h 50m

@Roachs SNES post inspired me to check out a bunch of snes games I'd never touched before, mainly to see if my love for the console is more than just rose tinted nostalgia.

I'm so glad I chose this game to start with because 10 minutes in and it's easy to see this is pretty unique. I love overworlds and not only does this let you fly around the map as a god in a sky palace, but you can also zoom in and out of the map, and fly down from the palace to manage areas in more detail. Really neat!

It also blends my other favourite genre which is platforming! To make areas inhabitable by regular folk you have to vanquish monsters via a cool platforming section. Really love the music too - the whole game just has a lot of different things going for it.

Another replay but I recently started playing ActRaiser Renaissance on steam and as is my wont I felt compelled to quickly replay the original to better judge how different it was and whether it was an improvement. I remembered the original only being a few hours long; I was right, this was another example of a game where I previously got to the final boss and then never actually beat it, it probably helped that this time I played it over two sessions instead of just one like I did originally.

The platforming/action sections which are the first thing you experience in the game do feel fairly clunky even by the standards of the time I think, especially your weapon reach; a problem I've noticed being unusually common for me in games I've played as of late is playing a platformer where you're a sword user and doing a long string of attacks where the thing I'm trying to hit is just barely out of my weapon range (Blasphemous has this too). The upside is that most of the levels are designed to compensate for the clunkiness by giving you health refills at convenient intervals and occasionally extra lives, though this doesn't matter much as you can just restart the level with no penalty if you run out of lives. Bosses can be a bit annoying/tedious with trying to damage them and stay alive, but for a lot of them you can just out-DPS them or find the right magic to use to just nuke them unceremoniously.

The town sim is honestly the more distinctive and memorable part of the game for me, maybe it's just the monkey brain satisfaction of seeing everything progress and flourish just the right way after I've cleared the path for it. The way it actually proceeds is pretty simple but the presentation with the dialogue you have with your followers as you expand is really nice worldbuilding. Weirdly enough this is the part of the game where you can upgrade your character for the action sections which I reckon I have significantly more to say about after this new run; you need to get offerings from your followers to upgrade your lives and magic capacity and get new spells, and most of the time you get this from events which are practically automatic or require some pretty straightforward nudging on your part but others just feel like total non sequiturs, like hitting one of your own temples with lightning to scare one of your followers into giving up an item that he'd been secretly keeping even though you get no hint that that's what will happen.

One more thing that I only really learned about in this new run that feels bizarre to me is the way the world population system works; you need to raise the world population to increase your own level and raise your health, but what determines the max population for each area is not only the type and number of structures that are present (you need to go out of your way to demolish less advanced structures so that they're rebuilt as newer ones) but also... the score you get for the action sections for that area. Which you get no in-game indication that these two mechanics are in any way connected. You also can't redo action stages without restarting the entire game. This wouldn't be too much of a hangup for me if not for the fact that unless you do some pretty deliberate minmaxing in that regard it's impossible to hit the upper level threshold of 17, for which you need to hit 4600 world pop (I was about 100 short of this in the end, and about 150 short of what's apparently the upper threshold for maximum possible world pop, according to retroachievements anyway).

So that felt pretty weird and undermined the straightforward enjoyment of the game for me a bit, but even with this slightly-less-than-perfect build I managed to actually follow through and beat the final boss this time around. Thankfully level 16 was enough for the "DPS race with some judicious pattern recognition use" strategy to work. Overall it's a pretty cool experience that's largely carried by the uniqueness of the gameplay and the world and how good the music is. Will probably play again at some point and maybe attempt the minmaxing nonsense now that I'm at least aware of it.

Now this is some good old fashioned SNES fun!

ActRaiser is an action platformer (and I guess sim?) game for the SNES where you play as a God or supreme being of some sort and take on the life of a statue to fight monsters across multiple continents and unique areas. Each area has two stages that conclude with a boss fight in order to move into another area.. sort of.

The other part of the game, the SIM part is when you aren't beating up baddies, you are on an overworld map as a cupid and directing villagers to build a town in their region. At the same time, you shoot monsters that appear on the map and direct the villagers to seal their lairs. Essentially, you are trying to rid the land of evil, by empowering the villagers to build, and then physically beating bosses in the platforming combat stages. I say you "sort of" progress by defeating bosses, but really you need to build your village big enough to level up to get to the next area.

Each area has little quests to do by destroying certain areas with your holy powers, or finding lost people etc. All of these things lead you to progressing in the game overall. Personally, I didn't care for the town building. It was fine at first, but then it becomes all the same, and really just serves to slow the game down. You don't get a lot of autonomy like in a Sim City to build what you want, its mostly automated and inconvenient. I understand why it exists to round out the game, but by today's standards its extreme filler.

The hack and slash platforming part of the game is quite fun. The game was put together quite well and feels satisfying to play. Its not easy enough that you fly through it, you have to put some thought into how to fight the bosses. The only complaint would be that the end of the game gets almost too difficult too quickly in the last stage where its annoying. Also, the final boss gauntlet is fairly easy by having enough HP and extra lives to just be able to tank most damage and hack away.

At any rate, if you are a SNES fan, this is a must play. Its fairly quick and has a good difficulty to sink your teeth into.

(This is the 35th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The final game I played for my 1990 play-list is Actraiser, the fourth SNES game to ever release, which released on December 16th and is unique for combining two genres that you don't see combined often: City building and platforming.

There are multiple towns that you have to liberate from monsters in order for humans to live in them. You then help them establish themselves there and help them out with all their needs. Basically, you play god. Each town has a few monster lairs that you need to close and then a final one that you need to venture into in platforming sections to kill the boss. Once a town has no monsters left, you can move on to the next one.

Each town tells its own little story, which adds a lot of motivation to playing this game to completion. The gameplay itself offers a fun loop for a few hours, but due to its age and limitations does get repetitive after a while, at least it did to me.

But the mix of these genres works pretty well here and this game was yet another standout for the SNES, which looks to provide a lot of fun as I move on to 1991, where the world was greeted by classics like Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Castlevania IV, among others.

OVERALL

Should be in your play-list if you're looking to find out what some of the better games of the early 90s were. It has a unique mix of city-building and platformer that is pretty simple in execution due to the time it released in, but overall pretty successful in offering the player a fun 10 hours or so of gameplay.

Played The Japanese version with an english patch.

ActRaiser is a hybrid between a simulation game and sidescrolling stages that mix really well and give a nice pace to the overall experience.

Basically you are God and you need to destroy Satan (Original name of the final boss in the JPN version). In order to do that you need first to free 6 town that have been invaded by the bad guys. So lets split the gameplay in two sections:

Sidescrolling stages:

This stages are basic in concept: go to the right killing enemies until you reach the boss of the stage but, the JPN version is harder than the USA release, so you will face a lot more enemies and you are gonna die. Maybe a lot of times. You need to learn the enemies spawns and positions in order to not lose life so you can reach the boss. Each of this stages gives you 3 lifes. You lose those life and you go back to the main hub of the game, so luckily it doesn't have limited continues. Pretty much all of these sections are try and error. Difficult stages but not unfair ones, with the exceptions of the last 2 stages.

Final 2 stages:

The tree stage and the final stage are more inclined to the unfair side of the scale. The tree stage is a vertical, long ass stage with some really shitty enemy spawn and patterns, even sometimes you can not avoid damage. If you managed to beat the stage then you will face the final stage: A boss rush.

In this stage you have to fight 6 previous bosses and the 2 forms of the final boss with just 3 lifes, good luck with that, you will need it. The USA release gives you 6 life instead, what an advantage that is. Again, this stage is remembering enemy pattern and trying at all cost to avoid damage. I managed to come to the last boss with my final life.

The final boss is not to hard. I will say the lag is the real enemy in the final boss. It lags every time the the boss throws some magic balls, so take that in consideration.

Simulation stages:

Everytime you beat a sidescroll level you have to play a city simulation level using your partner, some kind of cupid guy. The objective here is to kill the demon lair in the area so the people can build and expand the city.

You have spells here called Miracles that you must use in order to destroy terrain, make rain happen, destroy swamps, etc. Once you do that the people can build roads and approach the demon lair.

Once you destroyed all the lairs then you can keep expanding the city to its full capacity.

Another thing to remark is that you can level up in this game, and that happens in the sim stages. The more people lives in each town, the more levels you gain. The max level in this game is level 17 and is not that hard to gain (at least in the JPN version.)

Music:

Well, Yuzo Koshiro composed the music. What else can I say? It's freaking awesome.

Overall:

This is a good game, maybe a really good one. And for the first ever Quintet game, this was a good experience, especially with that hybrid gameplay that I've never seen before. I you lack the pacience and just want to experience the game, play the USA release. If you want some challenge along with the fun, play the JPN version with an english patch

Story (3/5) | Characters (3/5) | World (3/5) | Gameplay (3.5/5) | Visuals (3.5/5) | Music (4/5) = 67% overall score

While not connected by any plot threads, ActRaiser is Quintet's first game on the SNES and it deals extensively with the themes of death and rebirth. These themes are the core central component for both the story and the gameplay mechanics of Quintet's later action RPGs also on the SNES: Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. It's for that reason I consider this the first game in a quadrilogy.

Actraiser has a very basic story. As God you were defeated by Satan hundreds of years ago and now, rehealed with your wounds, you must retake and rebuild the world that Satan destroyed. This involves you going to different themed regions of the world and alternating between traditional platformer stages where you fight through a level to a boss and an overhead shooter stage where you protect your subjects as they rebuild.

Contrary to the game's description, this game is not a town builder. You can direct where the town will be built, but you have no control over what is built and there is no simulation. This section is instead intended to be the counter to the "death" platformer section where you only kill enemies, now you are helping to build things and "rebirthing" the world. This cycling gameplay helps a ton with not getting burned out by either section. Unfortunately, I'm not a big platformer fan and I generally suck at them so the boss gauntlet at the end of the game was very difficult to get past.

Graphically this game is above average with some decent platformer stages and the town shooting sections are cute to watch as your people build the town. This game has some great music that really makes each section even more enjoyable.

Time to Complete: 5 hours

Favorite Chill Theme: North Wall

Favorite Action Theme: All Over The World

I recall renting this back in the 90s and while the details of the game did not stick with me, the fact that it was an enjoyable experience did. I beat the game again in 2016 or 17 and enjoyed the game. The action portion of the game is nothing special while the simulation God game portion is what I liked most. It reminds me of games like Populus, Dungeon Keeper and Majesty. There is just something special about a game where you do not have direct control over your minions and instead must try to influence them to complete strategic objectives for you. Though the God sim aspect of this game is very simplistic I believe this was the very 1st God game I ever played and it sparked my love of the genre.

Despite the game's simplicity and shortcomings, it is a great game that should be on any SNES must play list.

♪ Oh it's tough to be a god, but if you get the people's nod -- Count your blessings, keep 'em sweet, that's our advice

ActRaiser is a game that's actually two games in one. For probably about 2/3rds of the game you play a city-building sim, and for the other 1/3rd it's a side-scroller (you go back and forth between the two styles of gameplay). Very unique, and overall it's quite fun. But here's the thing -- this is definitely a case where I'd say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The city-building sim is honestly just okay. And the action platformer levels? They're probably just mediocre at best. But damn, if there isn't something magical about the game as a whole. I love this game to bits, and I think it all boils down to the game's presentation. ActRaiser is god-tier (wink) in terms of its presentation. It oozes charm with its cute overworld graphics, its quaint dialogue, its contrasting dark and dramatic action stages, and its memorable monster designs.

The music in ActRaiser is among the best the 16-bit era has to offer. And perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone -- this was composed by Yuzu Koshiro, who would go on to handle Streets of Rage 2 and Beyond Oasis. In ActRaiser, the city-building tune "Birth of the People" is one of the most memorable video game tunes I can think of. The various platformer level songs though are also great, really getting across an epic and intense atmosphere fitting for an adventurous god vanquishing all the monsters in the land.

The ending for this is also one that sticks with me. It left a surprisingly strong impression, and is another influence for making me a fan of this game. I recommend any fan of the SNES to give ActRaiser a full playthrough for a unique 16-bit era experience.

Gameplay, Story and Value:

Humanity is young, and monsters roam the earth. As a god, it's your job to both protect your people from evil and aid them in establishing their civilization, becoming self-efficient.

Actraiser is really two games in one, broken up into six "stages". Each stage starts and ends with a side scrolling action (or "ACT") sequence where you rid the area of monsters and a couple bosses. Between these sections is the city building (or "SIM") part of the game where you help the current village expand and close monster portals while you fly around performing miracles and killing monsters.

Sim mode starts out easy enough, and is fairly interesting. You'll fly around shooting down monsters and clearing obstacles with your powers, while directing the townspeople to build roads. Building roads will spawn homes and villagers, and building up to a monster lair will close that lair and prevent monsters from spawning from it. As your population increases you'll gain levels, so you'll want to completely clear out every map and build on every possible location.

Different maps have different monsters to deal with and different obstacles to clear. You'll be using your lightning to burn down bushes, beams of sunlight to dry out marshes and rainfall to wash away sand. This is fun at first, but every map is effectively identical in this regard, and after a while the process can get somewhat tedious especially when you're clearing out entire deserts or melting away maps covered entirely in snow. There's also a lot of waiting around involved, as in order to level up you'll need to wait for villagers to appear to begin construction, wait for the construction, clear away low level buildings and wait some more, etc. All the while you'll be bombarded with various messages from villagers about one thing or another. It's not a horrible system, but it quickly becomes predictable and boring. One nice touch is that you can access a status screen at any time which will tell you the level and population of each village, and whether or not you've maxed them out.

The action sequences are much more straightforward and, in my opinion, the better half of the game. Your level dictates how much HP you have and you'll want to have a lot due to the above average (but not unmanageable) difficulty of these stages. You're able to move left and right, jump, swing your sword and use an equipped magic attack, and it all mostly handles pretty well. You have a high amount of control over your jumps, but attacking takes some getting used to. Attacking in the air is very slow and there's some timing that needs to be learned, and every once in a while the D-pad inputs are either slow or don't respond at all. There were more than a few times where I'd be attacking the air because my character didn't change directions when I told him to.

At the end of every action stage is a boss, and these bosses are all fun for the most part. They're all very well designed in the sense that once you learn their moves and patterns, it's possible to take them down while avoiding damage completely. This is very satisfying. The problem is that early in the game you'll learn a magic attack that rains stars across the screen, and all but a couple of bosses just completely fold to this ability. Add to this the fact that you're invulnerable while channeling it and it quickly begins to feel cheap.

Presentation, Music and Sound:

While the visuals during city building leave a lot to be desired, the action sequences sport some decent graphics. Sprites are large and movement is smooth, and every new dungeon feels feels distinct. There's really nothing too bad to say about the graphics here, so let's talk interface. The action interface is perfectly serviceable, reminiscent of Castlevania. In city building mode it mostly works but there are some quirks that make it annoying. Some items could be named better, such as the save option being referred to as "Progress Log". Sure that makes enough sense, but in a game with a lot of progressing and logs it wouldn't have been the first place I look to save my game. Most grating is the fact that you can't cancel out of selections. If you accidentally select a menu option and try to back out, you're first prompted with "Are you sure you don't want to do this?" followed by the menu being closed out completely. It's nothing gamebreaking, but it can wear on you after a while.

The audio is pretty middle of the road. There's nothing bad here, all the music tracks and sound effects are perfectly fine, but there's nothing really standout either. I think the best thing that can be said for the music is that it never gets hard to listen to, despite the fact you'll be spending a lot of time in the game's city building mode with the music playing on repeat in the background.

Afterthoughts:

So, Actraiser didn't end up being the 16-bit Dark Cloud I was hoping for, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. While the overall experience was surely unique, the game more or less just screams "average". City building starts off interesting but immediately becomes systematic. The action stages are fun but they always feel held back for one reason or another.

It was an enjoyable playthrough, and I'm glad I beat it.

Review:

Playthrough:

]