This is a game I bought a veeeery long time ago on my Wii Virtual Console, and haven't played in over a decade. I got stuck on the final boss rush and gave up way back when, but Note was talking about it in the Slack chat and it inspired me to give it another try. It wasn't nearly as hard as I remember it, so I'm glad to see that I've in fact gotten a bit better at action platformers in the past ten years XD. I played it on my Wii Virtual Console with my Classic Controller Pro (which I'm loving more and more every time I use it), and it took me about four hours to finish with an ending population of 4620.

You play as the god of a world, awakened by a little angel follower of yours to save the world from the Tanzra, an evil demon lord who defeated you long ago. You go through six worlds saving the people of that world from the monsters that are terrorizing that area.

ActRaiser is a balancing act of two main game modes: the action mode and the sim mode. Each of the six worlds has an introductory action platforming section to save that land from monsters on the surface, and then there is a second action platforming stage to finally rid that world of the monsters lurking beneath. There's also a final boss rush composed of the six bosses in the second action stages from each world followed by Tanzra himself. The American version's action segments were apparently made easier from the Japanese version's, and I appreciate it. For a very early SNES game, it's got a really pleasant sweet spot of difficulty where it isn't too hard but isn't too easy either (despite the controls being a little stiff).

In between the two action segments in each world are a sim section where you play as the little angel follower as you shoot arrows at monsters who spawn around the map. You guide the villagers who live there to start building out their settlements from their starting temple, guiding them to each monster lair to seal it shut. Once all the monster lairs are shut, then you get the opportunity to fight the second action segment in that world. But all is not quite that simple. Each world is plagued with the monsters you must fight, but also physical hindrances you'll need to use your god powers to get rid of. Eliminating trees with lightning, drying up marshes with the sun, fertilizing deserts with rain, and even connecting islands via an earthquake. The citizens themselves also have conflicts between each other that you'll need to solve, and it often involves taking their offerings and bringing them to other settlements to solve problems like needing wool to keep warm, or needing wheat to feed themselves better than existing crops.

Helping out the citizens in these extra ways is usually optional, but it's very important because of how the action and sim segments compliments each other mechanically. The more points you earn in the action segments, the higher your maximum population in that area can be. Your player level is determined by how much total population the world has, and the higher your level, the higher your maximum HP. In addition, your followers can find MP scrolls, magic spells, and even extra lives to help you get through the action segments.

It may be an early SNES game, but the presentation and mechanics hold up really well. There aren't a ton of musical tracks, but what is there is really nice. While there may not be many animations, the player and enemy models are big and detailed. A really impressive bit of design for developers more or less pioneering on what then was such new hardware.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Both types of gameplay are quite simple, but that works really well for the pacing of the game. If either were more complicated, it would bog down the pacing and harm the overall experience. Both aspects may be too simple to be their own game in a satisfactory manner, but paired together like this they make for an all around very complimentary experience. It may be short, but it's well worth trying out if you like action platformers and simple strategy games ^w^

Played on the Wii U Virtual Console

Yes, I technically had to abandon the game because I couldn't beat the end boss rush, but having completed every other aspect, I feel this review stands as a qualified opinion


These days you’re liable to seeing video game mash-ups from different genres, but back in the 90s, a then-new company called Quintet seemingly pioneered this tactic with their debut title ActRaiser(+). Shoving city building and godhood systems into an action platformer schematic, ActRaiser stood as a unique first-year release for the SNES, one that concurrently launched Quintet into mainstream discourse.

If you’ve been a part of any retro community, chances are you’ve read skyrocketing praise for ActRaiser over its various elements, and while they definitely do warrant respect, I feel the lack of a genuine sequel may have boosted the base game’s reputation into abnormal parameters. What do I mean by this? Well, as you guys have no doubt experienced by now, the best sequels are the ones that take the good from their predecessor and make it even more exemplary: they iron out the kinks, chisel new systems, and smelt the entire product into a revolutionary package: ACII, Half-Life 2, Arkham City, DKC2 -- we still look fondly upon the original, but recognize that significant improvements were done in the follow-up.

ActRaiser’s problem is that it didn’t get a true sequel(++), meaning any lauding it’s garnered from 4th gen enthusiasts smacks of the kind of superior advancements fans would’ve physically seen in a theoretical ActRaiser 2. This isn’t out of disingenuity or anything of the sort, but more-so nostalgia combined with the admittedly-novel concepts bolstered by the game.

To illustrate what I’m alleging, let’s start with the city building: it’s entirely linear. Each area has you start off with a giant piece of land that you then have to direct your worshippers towards industrializing (an activity they consequently conduct square-by-square). There’s no strategy, no worrying about environmental or economic factors, no catalog of dwellings to select from, nothing. Once your people seal off the adjacent monster lairs, you don’t even have to concern yourself with their safety (not even from such phenomena as natural disasters or surprise incidents). Throughout your tenure, you’re occasionally hit with a scripted dilemma, but almost all of these have to be resolved instantly in order to progress further.

The god prayers are handled a bit better insofar as you’re actually given agency whether to grant them or not (i.e., not smiting the requested mountain), but these don’t result in any noticeable consequences outside of your character not gaining a power-up or extra magic scroll (more on those later). Regardless, the lion’s share of scenarios ultimately demand completion for the sake of unlocking the hidden boss cave in the region, meaning they’re just as mandatory as the obligatory city ones.

Don’t get me wrong, these aspects provide a lot of that simple dopamine gamers have come to love from modern-day releases -- seeing each village get constructed from the ground-up, in particular, reminded me of the renovation system from the Ezio games wherein you’d instantly behold the fruits of your labor. I liked the interactions that came about between the citizenry and your protagonist: how they’d treat you reverently, make earnest requests, and offer alms in your honor. Despite the limited dialogue, it’s a relatively-accurate representation of how faith operated in older civilizations, and while ActRaiser doesn’t really address any deeper themes on the topic (save a blurb at the end), I do think this part has contributed to the game’s continued fervor.

On that note, what exactly is the premise of ActRaiser? Well, in the original Japanese script, you were literally the Abrahamic G-D trying to save humanity from the influence of Satan and his 12 minions. Of course, that kind of on-the-nose storytelling wouldn’t have flown back in the day, and so western markets renamed him The Master, and his opponent Tanzra.

Regardless, the gist is your typical good vs. evil scheme. One of the things I appreciated about ActRaiser was how you never actually see your persona: during the action scenes, he inhabits a gold guardian, while the town simulations have him directly interact with an anonymous Cupid. The former decision, in particular, end-ups being an unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally?) wise integration as it subsequently explains how your deity is able to be “defeated” by lesser enemies.

You’ll be conducting these fights during the platforming sections, which is arguably where ActRaiser succeeds the most. Quintet would later garner fame for their trilogy of ARPGs, and it’s clear they cut their teeth working on ActRaiser as it is absolutely solid: you have a jump, slash, duck, and magic attack, all of which you’ll need to employ should you wish to beat the various enemies and bosses thrown your way. The jump, in particular, works really well, with Quintet having mastered the precision, weight, and height factors that go into 16-bit springing (that is to say, it’s easy to learn and do without feeling like you’re at a disadvantage).

Honestly, there are only two real problems here: first, side bounding and attacking is very inconsistent to pull off (and outright impossible for vertical jumps), and two, the game is way too bloody easy, that simplicity largely coming down to a single spell you acquire in the third world: Stardust. At the click of a button, your avatar can call down a hailstorm of galactic pellets, and man do these babies do a significant amount of damage: so much so, that bosses are rendered cakewalks. To try and counter this, the game puts a cap on the amount of times you can cast a spell/per a run (NOT per/a life; die and any previously-depleted slots remain empty), but the thing is, if you’re fully developing your cities, chances are you’re going to find the majority of magic scrolls (ammo) out there anyway, thus ensuring you’re well-armed prior to most battles (this isn’t even taking into account the number of temporary extra scrolls you can loot in-game).

I’m not sure who on the dev team thought this would be a good idea, but it ends-up undermining a lot of the programming that no doubt went into the craftsmanship of these bosses. Perhaps realizing this too late, the game forcibly reverses course during the final act wherein Tanzra is preceded by a punishing boss gauntlet that’s so frustrating, you’ll see below why it caused me to drop the title(+++).

Thankfully the levels themselves are quite stunning, taking place over a variety of locales ranging from indigenous-inspired forestry and frosty ice caves to even a Tatooine-influenced abode (no seriously, it’s got its own Sarlacc Pit). The bosses themselves exemplify this virtuosity to a tee, often being conventional monsters wrought out with gorgeous colorwork and gargantuan proportions. Enemy design, on the other hand, could be hit-or-miss: some levels throw uniquely-crafted creatures at you like forest ents, orc-like wasps, and lizardian knights, while other times you’ll find yourself scratching your head at the presence of floating eyeballs, conventional gargoyles, and even swole women!

ActRaiser, as stated before, came out early in the SNES’s life, and while the visuals for the abovementioned levels are top-notch, unfortunately the bird’s eye map for the city building isn’t quite at the same level, often looking one-step removed from Oregon Trail’s graphics. If that weren’t enough, you’re often forced to partake in this discount schmup schematic via your little Angel shooting arrows at an ever-breeding(++++) source of minions (till their grounds are sealed for good). The critters themselves are even more generic looking than their earthly compatriots and do little more than destroy structures and carry away the occasional batch of humans (as I keep saying, it’s an underdeveloped part of the game that ultimately gets repetitive in light of the lack of differentiation between continents, as well as the relative shortness of the platforming stages).

Part of me does wonder if more was originally intended with the city-building as you’re granted elemental powers (earthquakes, lightning, wind, etc…) that can theoretically affect the landscape, but which are only ever utilized during the, you guessed it, scripted events. As it stands, unless you wish to destroy your own creations Sim City-style, you’re not going to find much use for these abilities.

Ironically, the sound design operates oppositely to the visuals in that more effort was put into the aerial arrangements than their platforming equals: from the creature growls to each of your god powers, you’ll hear a distinct din compared to the ground wherein everyone is silent save their projectile attacks. Your sword literally swipes like someone breathed a hot air “ha” on the microphone, and the dialogue scroll is so awfully-screechy, I implore prospective buyers to choose the fast text speed for the sake of your ears.

The music was strung together by Yuzo Koshiro, a man who’s, of course, acquired a strong reputation amongst the RPG community. Unfortunately, he simply wasn’t given enough money here to do what he could, meaning there are a lot of repeated tracks chock-full of their own repetitive loops. Sometimes this works, as in the case of the soothing town-building tune, but other times it comes across as unintentionally lazy, such as every boss sharing the same beat. That said, I will give him credit for morphing his tracks depending on the individual theme of the stage (i.e., the pyramid has a more Egyptian horn accompaniment whereas the lava motif wouldn’t sound out-of-place in Bowser’s Castle!).

Regardless of my complaints, I still recommend playing ActRaiser by any legal means necessary. For starters, it doesn’t wear out its welcome, being completable in 1-2 sittings, and for all the downsides of its supplementary genres, the fans have a point -- there really is no other game like it.



NOTES
+For the record, I don’t know if ActRaiser was the first video game to combine multiple types of games into one cartridge. Also, does anyone know what happened to Quintet? It’s a very sketchy story when you read about their disappearance from society.

++There technically was an ActRaiser 2, but it abandoned the town sim aspects entirely in favor of pure platforming. A spiritual remake called Renaissance was released semi-recently, but, as pointed out by SNESDrunk, it failed to do any kind of innovation on the formula minus adding a Tower Defense-schematic.

+++So basically you have to beat six of the previous 12 bosses before facing Tanzra who, in turn, comes in two stages. The problem is, you aren’t given any kind of health or mana replenishment throughout the ordeal, meaning you need to beat it one-go. Oh, and to top it all off, the game strongarms you into using-up several mana shots on the first thug, a sped-up version of the Minotaurus, due to said speed-up making it near-impossible to hit him with conventional attacks. It’s a shame because an easy work around to this difficulty spike (in addition to granting replenishments) would’ve been to just save the meteor spell for this moment, allowing players to beat the bosses as they were originally intended during the vanilla run.

++++Strictly-speaking, there is a limit to the number of spawns, but it’s so high you’re better off closing the portals as soon as possible.

I'm a big fan of genre mashups. For a while now, the best way to get my attention and stand out from within the neverending tide of new releases is to do "genre 1 + genre 2" to make combinations I haven't seen before. Sometimes these result in great new games that do something innovative, and sometimes they produce an incoherent mess, or just an underwhelming experience. And whilst I associate most of this school of design with modern indie games, I knew that they certainly weren't the inventors of this approach; and I thought I had to pay my respects to the OG weird genre mashup : Actraiser (and yeah I know there were weird genre mixes even further back depending on what you count but remember that video game genres are bullshit anyways so its fine)

The strength of a hybrid gameplay model is 2 fold. One is that its an in-built tool for pacing wherein one mode is a nice change of pace/a break from the other. Though more conventional, games like Persona (3 onwards), XCOM, Recettear etc keep the line going up and down with their respective gameplay models. When I'm tired of hanging out in P5 I can do a dungeon and when Im tired of that I can go back and eat a giant burger in Shibuya. The other is that the gameplay modes can feed into each other and make what might be two vastly different mechanical exercises integrate more closely through these connections like getting weapon fragments from killed aliens in missions in XCOM to build laser rifles back in the base to kill aliens more efficiently to get more fragments etc.

That last part is usually the make or break for the genre hybrid in my experience. At best, the two tie seamlessly together in a way that it makes you wonder how no one thought about this before, at worst both become a slog or one feels bolted to the other unnaturally, you resent one mode from keeping you away from the other. There is also a third approach, where you simply don't try all that hard to integrate the two modes or even at all, which can also work.

Actraiser kinda tries to integrate its city building with its castlevania-esque action platforming, but not super hard. And I think it works in that respect. You play as an avatar of "the NOT Christian God" helping various settlements to grow in population by directing them to build towards available land, clearing swamps and foliage, killing demons who respawn until the towns grow close enough to their lairs to close them etc. You do this so more people can worship you, which makes you more powerful and therefore more able to foil the plans of "NOT Satan". Its a cool (and you'll forgive me for using this word) ludonarrative, wherein a symbiotic relationship exists between god and those who worship him, God protects his flock from evil who in turn make him stronger. It also pre empts the usual narrative question of "how can there be an antagonist to an omnipotent being?" by making the battle between good and evil also a battle for the hearts and minds of people, the will of the creator being realized through their work.

This is brought up more explicitly during the Maranha Arc, an island with a pretty substantial presence of monsters, leaving you to constantly kill the demons in the overworld lest they get 5 seconds to burn the peoples' crops. The narrative of that particular episode involves the people being seduced by the dark forces and eventually even the temple priests who communicate with you go over to the demons' side. After you defeat the evil demons they explain that they were deceived by the demons due to the hardship they suffered, their faith wavering when faced with hunger and violence. This reminds a bit of the story of Job from the bible, who was tested at the behest of "the adversary" to prove to God that his faith was only due to his blessed circumstances. Ultimately Job endures great suffering without turning his back on God which leads him to be greatly rewarded.

There is also the matter of the "demons" being based on figures from other religions like the minotaur, pharaohs (who were the gods' representatives on earth in egyptian mythology) , various others from nordic and hindu mythology etc. The master is a jealous god, angered by these "false idols", its no surprise the game was subject to censorship when being localised in the west to avoid the more overt references to christianity and religion in general. As much as the game is a metaphor for monotheism I think there's also a hint of Buddhism, possibly due to Quintet(the studio which made Actraiser) being a japanese studio. There is mention in the epilogue of reincarnation and whilst in keeping with Christian lore, the idea of humans being straying from righteousness by the allure of demons who keep them in suffering on this earthly realm through violence smacks a bit of Mara, the demonic representative of death, rebirth and pleasure, who tried to stop Siddharta Gautama from achieving enlightenment.

Actraiser does a lot with very little, in this respect, and I kind of wish there was more to this, the game is rather brief and most of the "point" is relayed right at the end after the final boss rush, at which time I'm a bit too high off of the victory to meditate on human's tendencies to abandon religion when their living standards rise. Actraiser is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The menuing and UX of the city building is a bit clunky, not being able to do anything whilst a town is being constructed is ok, but can you just let me use my powers without having to show me the slow text box explaining its use every single time I use them? The platforming is good, has that weighty movement reminiscent of a Castlevania 1 but the hitboxes can be a bit dodgy, sometimes in the enemy's favour, sometimes in the player's. Hitting enemies at floor height remains kind of a crap shoot all the way to the final boss. I am pretty shit at the game but thankfully Actraiser is a lot more generous with the wall chicken than CV1 is. And hell, worst case scenario you can go back and increase the population to upgrade your max health. Not a big fan of the final boss gauntlet, its always a gut punch reading a guide for a game who says "yeah this boss is bullshit, just use your fuck you spell to kill him quickly, the other bosses can be fought normally".

In the end though, I enjoyed Actraiser, I think its rightfully seen as a classic and will rank highly if I ever make a list of my favourite genre hybrid games. I have heard that the sequel abandons the god game aspect entirely, and that sounds like kind of a waste... I'll play it eventually but not anytime soon.