Actraiser 2 Review

ActRaiser is a fantastic game with excellent music, graphics, gameplay, a pretty good story, and even a really neat little simulation section that made the game totally unique. So of course they made a sequel and decided what the second game needed was less of everything that made the first game good.

I’ve been disappointed in games before and I will be again but this really was one of the first times I went into a game with hope and pie eyed wonderment and left being even more cynical about the state of the world than I was when I went in. Does that sound overly dramatic? Yeah maybe. But it’s kind of true.

I loved ActRaiser a ton. It’s still one of my favorite SNES games ever, but this is just… not that.

Plot? Same as the first game but there’s no simulation setting anymore. The presentation of each of the different regions in the game has gone a little deeper. We’ve got some more back story here and the regions are more linked with the seven deadly sins than just a random demon. It’s a small step forward in terms of story itself but it lacks the charm of the presentation of the first game.

As mentioned before, AR2 removes the simulation sections completely, instead they’ve made the action segments a little longer and a lot more difficult. Does that difficulty come from enemies with more health? Different attack patterns you need to react to? An emphasis on platforming? No. See what they also did was remove the magic system from the first game and replaced it with “charged” attacks.

Let me attempt to explain as best I can.

If you hit attack. You attack. Simple sword swing. Unlike the first game where the swing was an overhead coming down, more like a chop, this is a side swing. Almost like you’re smacking your target with the broadside of your sword instead of cutting. Meaning you have no protection from things falling on your head.

If you hold at attack button you’ll charge up. Depending on what you’re doing with the D-Pad after that charge, your attack will do different things. You can shoot fire, dive bomb, do a ground pound kind of thing, and a couple others I don’t remember for sure. The problem is the game is really eager to let you do all these other things instead of just simple jump and attack stuff. You almost have to learn to take your fingers off the buttons so you don’t do things that will get you accidentally killed.

This game gives you a shield and wings, both were missing from The Master in the first game. The shield… kind of shields. It’s Zelda style so you’ve got to be facing what’s shooting at you directly and you can’t move. If you do, the shield stops working completely. Is it a neat addition? No. Not really. More often than not it isn’t needed at all.

The wings are a whole different level of annoying. The first game had a very definite jump. Very Castlevania style. You jump kinda short and you fall really fast. If you don’t have momentum going up, you don’t have it going down. Weird to get used to if you’re not ready for it, but manageable. AR2 has a problem that goes WAY too far the other way. The wings make you, obviously, floaty. You can double jump, you can hover, you can dive bomb, and it’s very easy to keep your finger on the jump button a split second too long and end up floating/bombing yourself off a cliff or into spikes. You also slide like crazy when you land because of all this inertia you’ve built up. No more do you fall like a rock straight down, but now you fall at an angle and The Master has to try and use his wings as a break to stop him.

Think of it like this. Mega Man is ActRaiser 1 Master. Cape Mario is ActRaiser 2 Master, but bad. I found myself dying more to the platforming than enemies in this game and it was because I’d slide off a ledge or face plant into brambles that are coated with every poison known to man ever and I’d die instantly.

But it’s not all bad. The game has some things going for it. Graphically this game is AMAZING. Everything looks so much better than the first game. Maybe minus the font, but I digress. The new Master is a buff angle dude and not so much a tall armored knight. The bosses are more detailed and more evil looking. Our little angle helper has changed from the chubby little Peep with wings to an almost FF6 Esper-like entity who holds different items depending on the situation you’re in. The backgrounds are fantastic, the stages look really damned good. There’s an underwater level, there’s a village on fire, there’s deep forest, caves, and all the other expected environs you’d want in a game like this and they look amazing.

Sadly though, that’s really kind of where the praise I can give the game ends. The music has also taken a step back from the soundtrack in the first game. While it’s the same folks that made it, it does feel very minor league compared to AR1. The tracks just aren’t memorable in any way. The voicing is better, there’s more space in the cart for better sounding and more complicated arrangements, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t recall them. Know what I mean?

I was very excited for ActRaiser 2 when I got it and I almost immediately put it away for good after the first couple of weeks I had the game. It removed everything that made ActRaiser good and interesting and replaced it with an overly complicated combat system that just made surviving all the more difficult. There’s a good story to be found in each of the areas so long as you don’t actually want to experience it, it’s only told to us from the third person perspective. The music, while good isn’t great. There’s no emotional attachment to anything happening in this game like there is the first.

For all it’s leaps forward with the graphics this is a game that makes the argument very well that good graphics are no replacement for good story telling, solid gameplay, and an engaging soundtrack.

TLDR, here’s some numbers.