I
NEVER
GOT
TIRED
OF
THIS
GAME
As kid I remember trying to beat it without losing a single life. So cool.
Nowadays the remaster is the way to play it, as it expands a lot of things over the original.

A neat experiment that is done in by one fatal flaw. Its a top a down action rpg mixed with a horizontal shoot em up. When you get into random battles you are transported to an auto scrolling horizontal shoot em up segment where you collect experience for killing enemies. And I think there is where the game face plants. There is no way to speed any of these battles up and they are repetitive. In most RPGs you might be used to the game loop where after a certain point in a stage/area you can level yourself to a point where you can quickly bash your way through random encounters and get to the end of the level/dungeon quicker. You can never do that in this game and it just drags it down. Otherwise everything else about this is game is pretty nice (art, sound, story, etc.) The top down view feels a little too zoomed in on too, and that can be kind of annoying later on with backtracking but the sprite work and aesthetic are decent. Its a game worth checking out and playing for yourself despite my middling score i.e. your mileage may vary greatly from mine.

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.

It didn't need to be like this.

I've never sat down to research the development of this game, though I suspect the city building mechanic in the first game wasn't viewed in as favorable of a light as it is today. Tastes of course change, and it's certainly plausible that early 90s audiences just weren't receptive to ActRaiser's balancing act of sim and action the way folks are today. It's also possible there was a gas leak in Quintet's offices. I don't know, who's to say!

In any case, ActRaiser 2 abandons the unique identity of its predecessor in favor of mediocre action. Even using just the action stages of the original as a guide, ActRaiser 2 falls short by a mile. Level layouts just aren't as fun to navigate, and given how punishing the difficulty is, I often found my patience being tried on repeat attempts. It's not like trial and error is something I inherently have an issue with, after all I love the Castlevania and Souls games, but this is a fine case of a game that struggles to maintain the balance between difficult and fun, often falling on the wrong side. Ultimately, I was never able to fully find my footing here, and whether that's due to poor design of the game simply failing to grip me, I couldn't say.

I'm sure this game has its defenders, but when it comes to action games on the SNES, there's a long list of other titles I'd rather play before going back to this one. It's also a hard game to approach as a proper sequel to ActRaiser. Perhaps my opinion is a bit too colored by that, but it does make it really hard to get into this game when so much of what I liked about the original just isn't here.