Let's see, a game where you get to play a god and build towns of loyal followers as well as do a little light platforming as a knight or something with a sword and magic? Yes, please!

ActRaiser was definitely one of my favorite SNES games. Pretty sure I never owned it but just rented it from Hollywood Video several times. Dragon Warrior, also made by Enix, was one of my faves for the NES and a few of the callbacks to that JRPG style but in an action RPG/sim/platformer mix was entrancing. It's like a Castlevania/Sim-City mashup with the added benefit of god-like powers. Incredible.



The soundtrack absolutely rules with orchestral tunes, angelic melodies, and baroque-sounding vaguely-hymn-like jams. The graphics are classic 16-bit goodness with a couple Mode-7 tricks for funsies. Balanced difficulty and a decent pace made it fun and appropriately challenging for middle-school me.

Fantastic.

Review from thedonproject.com

For perhaps as long as the gaming medium has graced us, there’s existed an enduring analogy framing us gaming faithful as gods, “controlling” the lives of our digital avatars in Mario, Sonic, and whatever you named your Dragon Quest hero over their respective treks over Freytag’s Pyramid -- a feat achieved only through our divine hand. ActRaiser, the earliest champion of Super Nintendo’s treasured third-party library, takes this interpretation to its literal extreme by situating us as a literal god, slaying demons and managing towns in a unique fusion of action-packed side-scrolling and a life sim stripped straight out of SimCity.

A bizarre marriage, yet one with undeniable appeal: there’s been much said over gaming’s broad appeal to immersion – ranging from the hours of Zen-induced concentration to the sadistic glee gleaned from inconsequential mass murder – and ActRaiser’s simulator sections supply the best sort of escapism. Our angel avatar juggles everything from land construction to playing guard duty against monsters – a round-the-clock gameplay loop forging a perfect balance of stress and gratification as we field one prayer after the other. (That is, if the never-ending deluge of villager requests don’t compel a murderous divine disaster; mind you, I’d never dream of assuming the role of such a capricious god, but Game Center CX’s Shinya Arino had other, more hilarious ideas.)

It’s all never particularly deep, yet addiction’s innate in simulators such as these, and grafting an episodic narrative upon it all demanded my full attention. It’s not enough that I rescue little Teddy from a monster’s lair; no, I simply must develop every square inch of every single town until they’re bursting at the seams. It’s never necessary, but I am a fallen god recovering from a millennia-long slumber, damn it, and I shall reward my devout people for their enduring faith. What sort of benevolent entity would I be otherwise? That I’m this absorbed into ActRaiser’s world speaks to its quality.

Alas, it’s a level of commitment that I wish the action setpieces could inspire. It’s not as if our godly knight needs Super Mario World’s acrobatics or Super Castlevania IV’s flexible whip – sometimes less can be more -- but while Yuzo Koshiro’s masterful symphonies remain some of the most rousing and melancholic SNES tunes today, they’re the only qualities elevating these awkward expeditions into anything but just that. It’s true that ActRaiser’s brisk pacing ensures neither segment wears out their welcome – that our mighty knight undergoes the ever-familiar feedback loop of perks and buffs ensures a synergy between the two -- but even that can’t dispel how the stiff controls echo your average bargain-bin platformer, and much of your magic arsenal trivializes boss encounters. It’s a shortcoming I imagine the game’s hidden hard mode would solve, but sadly, I’ve already had my fill of gods.

There are those who consider ActRaiser a 16-bit masterpiece, chugging away at their villages and dwelling upon the narrative's religious allegories; myself, I’d happily consider myself among their number if it proved itself a more focused package. Sadly, Enix’s disinterest in perfecting this formula was evident as far back as its obscure sequel – in a move undoubtedly fueled by both marketability and development priorities, it omitted the god sim in favor of a full-fledged side-scrolling focused game. Perhaps that’s crystalized ActRaiser’s uniqueness over the years, but with ActRaiser Renaissance’s sudden debut last fall, might our appeals to Go-, erm, “Master” bless us with the sequel of our dreams?

Mezcla de sidescroller platformer con Sim City.

En este juego eres literalmente Dios y perdiste contra el Diablo, tienes que hacer que la gente vuelva a tener fe en ti para recuperar tus fuerzas y derrotarlo.

En la parte de SimCity controlas un ángel que debe ayudar a la humanidad a prosperar, incluso tiene un poco de acción al tener que matar unos diablitos que pueden intentar destruir lo que la humanidad ha hecho.

En la parte de Sidescroller, Dios "baja" a la tierra poseyendo unas estatuas de sí mismo. Estos niveles son bastante complicados, como suelen ser los juegos de esta época.

A surprising amount of fun. The city building aspects were actually really well done and enjoyable. The action sections were probably my least favourite part of the game. A good chunk of the enemies felt very unfair to fight against and proved way too challenging in my opinion. The bosses were kind of hit or miss, with a good chunk of them being a decent amount of fun. A lot of the other ones were quite poorly designed in terms of their movesets. I kind of think a lot of retro action games really struggled to make consistent challenges, instead falling into the trap of either placing an unfair amount of them or giving them annoying movesets. The final boss was really cool and the boss rush that preceded it was quite a thrill, although they were just bosses that you've already beaten.

Spend any time in the indie space and you'll be bombarded by a sea of 'genre 1 + genre 2' projects with fleeting aims and fanatical foundations. And it's not that these games are fusions of disparate playstyles, but rather tandem affairs - usually doing one thing for a bit then alternating to another. Sometimes they pull it off - having one gameplay style drive the experience while feeding experiential unlocks into the other more passive mode. Even games that don't advertise themselves as mashups do this. But I don't know an immediate project to point at that succeeds at doing it without having two gameplay styles with absolutely no threads or reward systems feeding into each other at a large-scale level.

Actraiser does this - and well. Not the first of its kind by a wide margin, but maybe the one with the highest contrast between its play types. One-part classicvania-style action game, another-part god-sim. Besides some HP boosts and low-level items you can get for the action stages, there's no overlap in how the two interface. Taken at face value individually, they're both just ok - the sim is somewhat sluggish with how you have to direct your town's growth towards vantage points while constantly being locked out of the menu that lets you do that, and the classicvania shtick has some bad levels and bosses near the end. Combining them doesn't 'fix' either, but there's a good rhythm between how the game divides and transports you to each step. Every area is 'Act 1 -> Sim -> Act 2', though after the first level it feels more like 'Sim -> Act 2 -> Act 1': A low-profile breather gameplay style followed by an imposing challenge, and ended with a breadcrumb into the next major worldbuilding bits and conquest. It's a great fluctuation in theory and in practice.

The end of the game has a text crawl where the cherub tells you how all the civilizations have been doing, and I couldn't be bothered to read it cause the text moves as slow as hell. Hope the master is doing ok up there with all that free time of his.

Eons of memes and bantz about many portrayals of, and commentaries on, gods and religion in Japanese pop media all threaten to frame Quintet's debut as a schmaltzy creation myth. The last thing I expected was a translation of Japan's cosmogony into a commentary on the monomyth, hiding its version of the pre-Imperial hero god Okuninushi (or Onamushi) behind a Judeo-Christian façade. But that's the level of creativity and innovation that the studio's founding staff and contractors strived for. Set aside the simple yet subversive premise and you'll still have one of the most fun and clever hybrids in console software history. ActRaiser's influence never traveled as far as it ought to, largely materialized in series like Dark Cloud, yet it's more than earned its cult classic reputation. Not that I'd call this the Velvet Underground & Nico of xRPGs, but it's a valid comparison. Few if any video games marketed for a wide audience tackled such a broad, charged set of themes and sensations in such a formative period for the medium, no matter the imperfections.

As unwieldy as it sounds, this fusion of two strongly contrasting genres—side-scrolling action platforming and the primordial god simulator—likely couldn't have been bettered in 1990. Bullfrog's seminal Populous had only arrived on Japanese PCs in March, and I've found no evidence of PC-98 developers working with Peter Molyneux's blueprint. We know, however, that the founding members of Quintet, having left Nihon Falcom during the development of Ys III, had finished 70% of what became ActRaiser before having second thoughts. Whether or not they'd seen or played a certain PC-based god game is yet unknown. (Ironically, their former employer's own Lord Monarch shows Yoshio Kiya's own infatuation with Western imports like Populous, though that game's an early real-time strategy wargame.) The group's growth and frustrations while working on Ys and related PC xRPGs might have pushed them to do something risky for a console audience they hadn't yet catered to. Why not bring the essence of a complex Japanese PC simulation title to a workmanlike action platformer a la Dragon Buster or Castlevania?

The waxing and waning divine works its wonders amidst spirits and sovereigns. It takes on forms both distinct and recondite, like shadow to light. Beyond the waking minds of souls freed into a bourgeoning world lives the idyllic hero, desirable yet unknowable, a paragon which leads through belief up until that faith is no longer needed or traditional. Such tales of good versus evil, or many shades past, endure across time, often as aspirations, warnings, and the subject matter of popular art and entertainment. It's this fascination with mythology, and what it means to people and their worldviews, which anyone playing ActRaiser (among other games letting you "play god") must engage with.

Now the goal was to evoke that feeling of playing god, a paradox given the player's inability to shape the game outside those possibilities which developers set for them. They compromised with a dual-avatar story, where both a chiseled holy warrior and boon cherubic messenger shape separate but linked sections of the world. Main writer and planner Tomoyoshi Miyazaki wisely chose to represent this god's duality of presence. In the sky castle, we are without form, and the angel merely a presenter for this abstract interface set among the clouds. But it's not long before the player descends, their guiding light inseparable from the extra-textual, animating a statuesque warrior into action, all to smite and vanquish the dark. On the flipside, the winged child soon becomes our vessel with which to reinvent this realm we've conquered, swapping out fantastic inhabitants for mundane, moldable men and women. Both characters exemplify the almighty in ways we can bond to, but never deny questions about the powers, limits, and mysteries behind what's sublime and what's imagined. To "play god" is also to probe one's identity and ability in context.

Though we're ostensibly the alpha and omega, mortality still matters to us, as The Master incarnates on this Earth in a limited extension of being. Nothing in this game holds back from trying to kill you, whether it's insta-death pits and lava or just an odd thing flying from the side of the screen. ActRaiser plays nice, though, particularly in its NA and EU versions with reduced difficulty and added extra lives. Most levels have smartly-placed checkpoints, letting you learn each segment without running out of time that easily. There's only a few collectible power-ups, either for score or health and 1-ups, but finding those breakables and wisely rationing magic use for the tougher fights is critical. Even if you can't ever Game Over for obvious reasons, starting the action stages from scratch can feel crushing, the good kind that encourages skill and concentration. The "fail state" in sim mode comes from your angel losing all their health to enemy attacks or collisions, at which point you can't fire any arrows. Overworld nasties will take advantage of this temporary vulnerability, snatching up residents, destroying homes, and even razing all your hard work with earthquakes (damn those skulls!). All these challenges and setbacks mirror those of the families we're fostering, or even the monsters one slaughters for that juicy high score. It's a piece of humble pie to counterbalance these grand themes.

All this came to mind as I flew from one region to another, enjoying the safe game loop that ActRaiser makes the most of. On their own, neither the action or sim sequences rank with the best in those genres, even at the time. The Master's stiff controls and lack of mobility options (my kingdom for a Mega Man-ish slide!) often don't match the severity of enemy attacks and zone control later on. I'd be hard-pressed to call the town management engaging just on its own, with very few means to affect what villagers build and very straightforward terraforming puzzles. If one really wanted a top-notch, side-scrolling action game for SNES, let alone other systems and arcade boards, then there's no shortage of options. SimCity might not exactly classify as a god game now, but it fit the earliest definitions back when most started playing it on PCs or, of course, Nintendo's enhanced port. It's the mutual interactions between these modes, simple to understand and swap between, which creates that vaunted positive loop of advancement. The game's main coder and director, Masaya Hashimoto, had figured out with Ys that you could mix even a decent graphic adventure and Hydlide-like action RPG to create something special. No wonder it works here!

The salad of once contradictory, now inter-weaving ideas continues with ActRaiser's locales and cultural tropes. Fillmore's mysterious, metamorphic forest of foes gives way to a city-state in the making, with one of the shrine worshipers playing oracle and then martyr for The Master's cause. Way later on comes Marahna, a Southeast Asia-like region whose darkest jungles and ornate temple of evil clashes against the hardy, pragmatic people you guide to self-sufficiency. Enemy and boss designs range across typical European and Asian fantasy faire, from dwarfs and lycanthropes to serpents and tengu, with big bads like the centaur knight and ice dragon playing to regional theme. These entities would seem banal and rehashed from competing games, but regain some staying power when framed via this conflict between them and amorphous monotheism which you embody. One can sense the sensory and conceptual distance between this god and its subjects, either those it subjugates or the civilizations it cultivates. No one prays to you from the comfort of their own homes; all must congregate in shrines to communicate with the great beyond, something they can imagine but never fathom. Only by your actions does the world change, reflecting values of nurture over nature and other Abrahamic virtues. Any dialogue between this universe's denizens necessarily involves upheaval.

In this way, the final level, a boss rush much like any other from the era, becomes more than just content reuse. It's the cataclysm of God vs. gods, a refutation of polytheism. But it's just as likely a nod to the religious lore Miyazaki would have been most familiar with, the Kojiki and its narrative of Japan's beginnings. Following in the wake of Susanoo, that hero of chaos, Okuninushi emerged from exile in the underworld to defeat his evil brothers who had forced him there. In its manual, ActRaiser draws a direct parallel, with The Master having fallen in battle to Tanzra (or Satan in the JP version) and his cunning siblings. Only after a period of recovery does our god return to the world, long forgotten but ready to reassert a moral order of society and positivity. The Master and Onamuchi both face trials, personages, and climactic battles to unite their lands and usher their peoples from prehistory into history. As such, the dynamic between The Master and Tanzra, already Manichean and inextricable by definition, is also a less than didactic allegory for the national myth Miyazaki & co. (and players) were familiar with.

Quintet uses these devices, both subtle and obvious, to motivate your journey as expected, and to pull the proverbial rug out from underneath. Imagine doing all this hard work, slicing and jumping through obstacle courses, then sparing villagers from demonic intervention as you pave new roads and fields for them, only to become invisible, beyond recognition. Onamuchi himself acquiesced to this fate, ceding the earthly kami's rulership of Japan to Amaterasu's heavenly lineage. The concept of divinity you brought to these societies was once pivotal to their survival and eventual growth, a uniting force transcending the chaos surrounding them. But in a stable, almost arcadian state of affairs, this godly example now has each and every human finding faith in themselves and others, not in The Master and its herald. ActRaiser ends with a striking inversion of the game's most iconic cinematic tool, the constant Mode 7 zooming in on each action stage you visit. Finally, after the bittersweet revelation that no one visits any shrines anymore—that your own creation has moved on from you, emotionally and ritualistically—the game zooms out, the continents shrinking into nothing as this reality ceases to consider you, or vice versa.

I was genuinely agape when this happened. The game had shown some forward-thinking use of video games' formal elements, mainly to emphasize the uncanny gulf between the clean user interface and what diegetic actions/consequences the buttons led to. But this moment went well beyond those little touches, demonstrating how Miyazaki, Hashimoto, and others at Quintet sought a novel style of storytelling, moving on from the face-value imitation of manga and anime in previous works. For all its issues and missed opportunities, ActRaiser nails these once one-of-a-kind twists that shake you up, simultaneously indulging in new audiovisual potential while using it to the medium's advantage. These surprises aren't as common as I'd hope for throughout the game, but when they happen, oh do they succeed! Moments like Teddy's bad luck in Bloodpool, the archetypal albatross appearing both in Kasandora and Marahna, and the implied Sigurd-Gudrun couple reincarnated by the world tree in Northwall all stick out here. Everything of this sort is still all too simple compared to ye olde Disco Elysium of today, yet effective as a kind of heightened fairytale in-between the melee and management.

The word I'm looking for is alchemy, the transmutation of ordinary elements into a greater whole. It describes the very compound term ActRaiser, a portmanteau I'd expect to see in a game jam ditty. What distinguished this amalgalm of systems from others around the turn of the '90s was this focus on story, not just another player-fellating genre hybrid for its own sake. It's because this adventure makes a micro-critique of our indulgence in power fantasies, and their relation to founding myths, that the individually unpolished bits you interact with remain fun and worthwhile. Perhaps the harvesting and trading of offerings between the cities is a fetch quest underneath, but it rarely feels that meaningless. I just want to gift the Kasadoran a far-off tropical remedy for their troubles, or clothe the citizens of icy Northwall in wool from Aitos. And yes, the final platforming gauntlet might as well be a greatest hits of the adventure's most irritating design quirks, but damn does it push all your skills and patience to the limit. This potion Quintet's concocted leaves a mysterious aftertaste.

Debut software on vintage PCs & consoles could often vary wildly in robustness. Every developer getting something to market on Day 1 has to learn a newly enhanced architecture as quick as is feasible, a feat many can't achieve. ActRaiser stands toe to toe with ritzier, more sophisticated SNES classics that were still on the drawing board in 1990. Koji Yokota and Ayano Koshiro of Telenet & Falcom heritage, among a host of talented artists, go ham with color schemes that the PC-88 and Famicom could merely have dreamed of, enriching the greebles and decorative patterns of dungeons and biomes. Tasteful use of parallax scrolling, alpha-blending transparencies, and other visual effects works in tandem with clean yet florid art direction, bearing the hallmarks of paperback book covers and Dungeons & Dragons. Ayano's brother took up the mantle of music and sound design, a daunting role considering the SNES' new sample-based sound chip. I'm more a fan of Yuzo Koshiro's orchestral work within the confines of FM synthesis, another tall order for musicians and programmers of the day. But this remains one of the system's most memorable and defining soundtracks, with melodious militant marches and more pensive ambiance in abundance. Figuring out how to cram so many instruments, pitch and volume bends, etc. must have been an ordeal for him. My ears tell me it was worth it.

It's a shame, then, that the Koshiro siblings only helped Quintet again for this game's long-debated sequel. The rest of the company continued to evolve, recruiting new talent to develop more ambitious xRPGs dealing with stories and personalities both grandiose and relatable. Hashimoto and Miyazaki's startup had firmly diverged from their old employers' conservative milieu, and future triumphs like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Brightis, and Planet Laika are testament to Quintet's longevity. Us players, having embodied the holiest in both mortal and supernatural ways, can only look back on the studio's works and progeny, subject to critical reverence and dismantlement alike. Somewhere, out in the cosmos, The Master could be liberating new planets, or perhaps dooming them to the curse of civilization we're all too familiar with. That builder's spirit, a lathe of heaven…it's rarely if ever about reaching the end, but savoring the stops along the way, those flips in perspective. ActRaiser toys with players and the perspectives offered to them, engrossing us in the champion's cause while suggesting that this isn't the best of all possible worlds—just the one we must cherish.

Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to all the gratuitous changes I'm spotting in ActRaiser Renaissance. The most I can gather is that its deviations can't harm the original ex post facto. Until next time, I'll just be listening to Fillmore's FM-synth beta version in the green room.

tl;dr Amazing game, but flawed in both aspects. Too short and too simple.

Imagine a game if you will that's half castlevania platforming fun, and half sim city early ancient rome. You get act raiser.
In this game you play as a god helping the civilians fight back evil monsters and create a small village AFTER you play a castlevania level complete with bossfight and special abilities that you gain during the sim city gameplay.
That sums the game up right there, but the biggest problems I have with it is that both aspects can be seen as mediocre. The combat is simplistic and there's no moves, movement upgrades, or differing strategies other then simply moving left or right and fighting the stiff jump.
As fun as it is playing the platforming segments and all the enemies you'll face and encounter, almost none of these segments are even remotely challenging if your an experienced gamer. The bosses themselves leave more to be desired and although I like a lot of there designs could be a lot better.
The sim city proportions are also underdeveloped and require some more depth to them. You really only tell the workers to build in x location, use a miracle to solve a problem, and shoot monsters that are attempting to fuck with your villagers. There's some hidden depth to it like the score for that platform segment = the population cap that village can have, but nothing that's groundbreaking honestly.
With that being said honestly both sides are perfectly satisfying and I wish there was more content, because I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing it. The gameplay loop is astoundingly good, and keeps you engage wondering to yourself "What's the next platform segment going to look like" or "What the new village going to hold?". The game itself has plenty of secrets and unlockable items that make either gameplay loop easier. You kinda want to just explore a sim city map and expand every nook and cranny just to see your little people spread out the whole map and walk around. Making more farms or houses for there people. It truly is a special game and I think even though I have been a bit harsh on this title, that there just no game like act raiser. Many people will point to hinterland, but yeah that's a completely different game and honestly hinterland is much more complex then act raiser. One of those games I'll never forget honestly and one of the few I played earlier.

One of only a few launch year titles for the SNES, and certainly the most unique of that bunch. It's kind of a marvel how they executed such an honestly crazy idea so well. You would think alternating between sidescroller levels and city building simulators would be insane and get monotonous really quick, or that you would vastly prefer one to the other, but I pretty thoroughly enjoyed both for the whole game's runtime. I found myself a lot more attached to the towns I was creating than I had anticipated, especially due to the beautiful and very satisfying ending the game leaves on.

It doesn't require as much time as it sounds like it would, only 4-5 hours I would say. Would definitely recommend this one, I promise it's simpler than it may seem.

Dear God, please watch over me and bless my writing so I can turn in a really kickass review of ActRaiser, and also give me a gamer girlfriend and a copy of Shadow the Hedgehog for the Nintendo Gamecube because mine has a scratched up disc and won't load Mad Matrix. Amen.

I feel like only a few years ago nobody knew about this game, but by now I probably don't even need to explain ActRaiser's main hook to you. As every other review on this page points out, the blend of action-platformer and city builder should not go together, but Quintet was able to take these two radically different genres and blend them so well that ActRaiser never for a moment feels like it lacks cohesion.

The gameplay loop is also very focused despite juggling two totally divergent gameplay styles. The player assumes the role of The Master, one part gladiator and one part community planner. Each location opens with an action stage where The Master is tasked with cleansing the land of its demonic presence. Once the area boss and its minions are defeated, the player can begin building a new human settlement. Laying down roads, performing miracles, and closing demonic portals helps your civilization develop and grants The master additional HP and SP. After a certain point in a settlement's progress, you'll hop into another action stage, fully liberate the land, and then move on to the next location.

The action stages play great. Some really solid and at times challenging platforming, great boss encounters, and excellent level design make these every bit as engrossing as the city building that breaks them up. Performing well in stages provides additional benefits to building your city, which in turn levels up the player for subsequent action stages. It's a really satisfying way to tie the two gameplay styles together and reward the player for excelling in both.

City building is nowhere near as complicated as other city builders of the time, cutting out a significant amount of micromanagement, though it never becomes a totally brainless affair. If anything, this speeds up the rate at which your city develops while giving the player tasks that can be completed quickly. This helps the game maintain a fairly snappy pace, and it never feels like you go too long between action stages, or vise versa. It's this more concise system of city building that makes ActRaiser work.

It's unfortunate that the recent return of ActRaiser screwed up this formula so badly, but then that was also true of its direct sequel (which I'll get to soon.) If you really sit down and break the games systems apart it's not hard to see why it works, but whether through over thinking or just plain buffoonery, nobody has been able to replicate it since. Thankfully, ActRaiser is pretty easy to play today, and it's not like it's hard to figure out SNES emulation (but that would be stealing and stealing is wrong and if you do it you're going to get a visit from The Master and you are NOT going to like it.) If you're looking for a good platformer or a good city builder, you can't go wrong here.

Mixing wildly different genres or modalities of play into a singular experience feels fairly common for the late 80s and early 90s of gaming. Just immediately coming to mind are titles like Blaster Master, the Contra franchise, Rygar, Zelda II, Castlevania II.... I'm sure there are others but I swear this is a common design decision. However, few are as striking of a shift as ActRaiser is, with its blending of side-scrolling action platformer with RPG, simulation, and shooter mechanics. Like, the amount of concepts thrown at the wall here should result in a fairly messy game, but it actually works out quite well. My theory is that each individual piece is fairly rudimentary when compared to it's contemporaries, allowing the ideas to be malleable enough to work in conjunction. The quality of your play in the shooting segments will strengthen your ability to manage various cities, which will in turn strengthen your ability to fight in the game's action stages. This is because you gain more citizens at a quicker rate the better you are able to defend your people, and the amount of people you have effects your level, which is tied to your health and magic bonuses. Similarly, ensuring the safety and happiness of your people helps to unlock various consumable rewards, and sometimes even new abilities to use in the platforming areas. If each part of this game were standing on it's own, it actually wouldn't even make sense because of how well everything ties together. It's incredibly short and the ideas feel more like ruminations as opposed to fully fleshed out concepts, but it's an intriguing and entertaining game in spite of this. 4/6

(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.

ActRaiser was really cool. I think it's a good length for what it is and I never got bored during my playthrough. I enjoy both parts of the game pretty much equally, although the sim portion doesn't have much depth.

I didn't have too many issues with the controls in the platforming sections until near the end. It's like Castlevania plus in how it controls. They're the most frustrating with some late game enemy placements and parts of the final battle. You can only slash at the peak of your jump which feels bizarre. The star magic is really OP against bosses. I would just slash through the levels then spam stars on the boss for a free kill. If you don't do that some of the bosses are obnoxious. The final gauntlet especially has some BS.

Actraiser deserves a lot of credit for how it weaves its disparate halves - one part good-but-not-great action platformer, one part rudimentary town-builder sim - into something more than the sum of its parts. A lot of it comes down to the effectiveness of the premise: the main character (Master schmaster - we know you're playing an avatar of the Judeo-Christian God with a capital G) draws power from people's faith in Him, so building up the population and quality of life in the various cities you're building will net you level ups and magic spells which will increase your effectiveness in the action segments. It's pretty insightful too, showcasing both the foibles of man (asking you for help with problems they created on their own) but also their occasional bigheartedness (their first instinct on discovering something cool is often being to offer it to you and ask you to use it to benefit other cities too).

The other thing this game does really well is to give the player enough tools to mitigate the old-game jank that is inevitably a part of the package; almost as if it's aware of its own bullshit and gives casual players an out. The platforming sections are pretty strong; I'd liken it to a Classicvania-lite where the stiffness of your controls facilitate a more deliberate style of play. Its main weakness is some wonky difficulty spikes and the lack of a reliable way to attack above/below you, a deficiency that some boss encounters (most notably the final boss) cruelly exploit. However, many of these battles can also be cheesed with the right spell if you find yourself stuck. The town-building segments have a particular monster that is an absolute pain to deal with: the skulls are the fastest, most damaging, and cause the worst disasters... but given that you get access to several one-hit-kill bombs and any damage caused during the sim sections is temporary and reversible, things never get too frustrating.

Not bad at all for a 33 year old game, and one of the first to come out on the SNES!

It's a very simple game, a bit shallow but makes up for it with charisma. The mix of different types of game mechanics gives it an unique vibe.

The art is really good, specially in the platformer sections. And still about those, they can be cheap with difficulty sometimes, but it's never something way too frustrating. The spell system sucks a little in the sense that only one of them is really good from my experience.

Overall, a fun, short, and novel game, which I think is worth checking out if you're exploring the SNES library.

An interesting mix between an RPG, a 2D side-scroller and a city sim is one way to describe ActRaiser. Due to that, it may not be to everyone's taste, but it piqued my interest enough to play through it.

If you've played any of the games from the Quintet trilogy (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia or Terranigma), you'll find some familiar things here. This makes the game a sort of spiritual prequel to those games.

Despite the game's mix of genres, the overall mechanics aren't very complex. The side scrolling stages are pretty much what you'd expect from any side-scroller released around that time, so you only have a jump, a normal attack and a magic attack. Go through a stage, fight some monsters, do some platforming and fight a boss at the end. Very minimalistic, but above all, it encourages learning enemy patterns and making the most of the little you have.

Although simple in nature as well, the city sim element is the spice of this game. You have to guide a location to prosperity by using your powers over nature to free up space and give people orders where to expand.
Of course, their expansion isn't something to ignore, as people in this game are the equivalent of XP, so it's better to have more than less. Also, you receive some nice items (as as they're called in-game - offerings) in return.
There will be monsters that will try to sabotage this progress, so you'll have to protect the people while they expand. The entire thing is like a pretty basic 2D shooter.
Once people expand enough in a certain direction, they can seal a monster spawning point (lair) so it doesn't bother you again. You can't command people to build specific things which is a shame.
Regardless, it's satisfying to watch a place grow and see the progress of slowly intertwining these separate locations with each other.

Overall, despite its simplicity, ActRaiser has a nice flow to it, which binds it together pretty well and makes it a solid game. It's also around 6 hours long, so it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Extremely forward-thinking synthesis of two seemingly disparate genres. The gears only truly grind against one another when you need to farm population size for more HP. Combined with an early but considered Quintet protonarrative about stewardship of humanity and the planet, ActRaiser has a wealth of ideas but never over-iterates them. Criticisms of its simplicity seem off base; what more does this game truly need? I do wish the action segments were less clunky but they made this shit in 1990, we can't get too crazy here.

"Music has mysterious power.
By listening people can calm their hearts and purify their minds."

It's such a sweet little tale of the transition between the first and second stage of humanity.
First, the genesis - God created everything and God is everything, we must depend on Him, and all is how it is because He said so. Certainly a step up from living merely to sate one's carnal desires as a beast that knows nothing but pleasure felt in the moment. It gives humans the ability to think on a higher level, utilizing the materials found within reality to further the quality of life, thereby prospering. And yet - this cognitive thinking, it still feels lacking. As if humans have still not reached their full potential.
Second, the modernity - God is Dead. He is left behind as quickly as He arrives, as human progress is ever the speed of lightning. People stand on their own two feet instead of depending on a transcendental being.
And that's for the better.
Humanity is so much more beautiful without needing help from God.
It's a message that reverberates even through Quintet's very first work:
"Life for yourself. Always pursue progress. Chase after your dreams. Don't let God dictate your life."