Actraiser Review

The time was the early 90’s. The place was my bedroom. The game was ActRaiser. Purchased kind of on a whim with some summer lawn mowing money, I grabbed the game used from a pawn shop cause I thought name and the box art was cool. I was so naive back then. But, as the old saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day and I ended up with a pretty danged good game here.

ActRaiser was an early SNES game from Quintet/Enix. Maybe even a launch title? I don’t recall for sure. But it was pretty impressive game back then and I think it even holds up pretty well today for the most part. Different modes of game play, secrets galore, an semi-rpg level up system, a level based stages that are either fairly linear or very open for exploration, bosses large and small, damned good music, a little angel with heart shaped arrows, calling down lightning, lakes of blood… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

ActRaiser. Ever wanna play God but not in a Populus kinda was? Then this is the game for you. Many a long year ago you, The Master, beat up Tanzra (the Devil), and sent him to the underworld. Then you napped cause you were all sleepy. Well while you were napping Tanzra decided he wasn’t too pleased with being evicted from Earth so he came back, sent out his minions to wreck the place, and he pretty much caused what few remaining civilizations there were on the planet to fall apart.

Our little Cherubic (but not really, look up Ranks Of Angels) alarm clock wakes us up all in a panic like that robot from The Power Rangers. He gives us all the back story, derides us for sleeping in so late, and says it’s our job to take care of all of this mess again. Who is he to tell us, The Big Man, what we’re supposed to do? Little jerk.

So, we take control of our flying palace and float around the world looking for various Stonehenges. Rings of stones I guess. You get the idea. We go down, go through an action stage where we have to jump, swing our sword all bravely, make some “Ha!” noises while we do, and kill some bad guys. Also eat apples to get health back. Cause this God is totally cool with that.

After we beat up the end of stage bad guy, we get to check on the population we’ve just resurrected. Via our little Angle pal we will listen to the people and hear their wants and needs, their hopes and dreams, their fears, their favorite foods, what kind of music they like, if they’re too cold, too hot, and all that other whiney stuff that people find so adorable in The Sims. Along with that, we direct the way we want them to build their territory. Where the roads and buildings should go, essentially. It’s not quite Sim City, but it’s close.

While we’re going about that business we have to clear out some obstacles. Bushes, swamp land, rocks, sand, snow. All sorts of things are just making it hard for these little armless people to build their homes. We use miracle power for that. But, wait, oh no! We only have 10 miracle power and causing an earthquake takes 60! Well, as your populations grow around the world more people will believe in you. And when more people believe in you, you level up. More health for the Action and Simulation stages of the game and more MP to throw lightning bolts at horses and that one dude Jeff who showed you his bum that one time. Curse you, Jeff.

It’s not all rainbows and daisy-corn-sunshine biscuits though when you’re an angel. You’ve got demons popping up outta the ground and they want to make life for your Weeble Wooble people difficult. So they carry em off, burn down their houses, ruin their crops, and generally just be jerks. You, as an angel, can’t really do much about this other than destroy the demons that pop up outta the gates. You really need to seal the gate if you want to make progress and only the people can do that. So clear a path in all those above mentioned obstacles and point the people to the monsters nest and they’ll use a spirit bomb (no, really) and seal that thing tighter than a bag of salad from the local sundries market.

Sealing all the demon lairs in an area will unlock the second action portion and you’ll go in and take out the big final demon boss in the region. The one that reports directly to ol’ Satan himself. Once they’re taken care of, life kind of becomes pretty dull for your people. They’ve got homes and food and nothing is trying to kill them anymore, so you decide you have to go as your planet needs you. You move on to the neighboring country and lather, rinse, repeat.

The game is fairly open in that you can take on most areas in any order, but there is an HP limit before you can even attempt to get into a few of them. You can, kind of, farm levels and health if you hang out in one location long enough but eventually you’ll top out as there’s no more room for homes and the people just stop building. It’s a pretty good system that ended up in other Quintet/Enix games in one way or another. If you don’t have enough X than you just can’t do Y no matter how hard you try.

I like that idea, and I kind of don’t. It makes sure you don’t run off and get wrecked right away, but does kind of put a limit on how much you can challenge yourself.

Before we go on to the graphics a couple of things to wrap up the gameplay here. In the simulation portions you can do on hunts for secrets. Maybe there’s a rock that looks a little different than the others. Maybe if you make it rain over a lake it’ll flood, maybe an earthquake will cause a rock slide, maybe someone in Town 4 learns how to make a bridge but the dummies in Town 2 don’t. There’s a lot of, I hesitate to use the word but, secret stuff you can do if you really just experiment. The simulation is where you’ll find the magic spells and charges needed to cast them in the action segments. And you really will discover items/abilities in some towns that really could be useful in others so you might have to revisit a few places if you wanna be extra ready for the end game.

Graphics in the game range from pretty damned nice to pretty damned ok. The action segments have fantastic graphics. Large and well designed, animated, and colored sprites. Good enemy design, interesting background and large and impressive bosses. The simulation… well… you can tell what things are. So that’s a positive. The sim mode is just kind of boring to look at and it requires a little more attention than I think I like. You’ve always got to be on the lookout for demons trying to kill your people or break their stuff. What should be a little more of a relaxed vibe ends up being a rhythm game of sorts as you wait for the “Demon Incoming” noise to stop so you can play the “Fire Bow” noise.

Musically the game is fan-freakin’-tastic. The opening music, the various stage music, the town music. It’s all awesome. Gonna name drop Yuzo Koshiro here. He’s the composer and he’s been working on video games and music for nearly 40 years at the time I’m writing this. Some of his more honorable mentions include: Legacy Of The Wizard, Streets Of Rage, The Ys series, Robotrek, Legend Of Oasis, Shenmu, a few tracks on DDR games, Castlevania: Portrait Of Ruin, Etrian Odyssee, Kid Icarus Uprising, and about a thousand more. He and his sister founded the game dev company Ancient in 1990 and he’s still the head of it today.

The man does good work. That’s what I’m saying. And, by the way, the orchestral arrangements of the music from this game are absolutely stunning. It’s an album I can just put on and listen to while I’m doing almost anything and I’ll have a damned good time while I’m at it.

ActRaiser is an interesting game. The hybrid action/simulation style was really kind of revolutionary at the time. The game, in some ways, is really part of the Soul Blazer series too if you ask me. It doesn’t always get included but I really think it should be. Almost like a Soul Blazer Gaiden I guess. So, if you have played Soul Blazer, Terranigma, or Illusion of Gaia I think you’d enjoy this.

TLDR, here’s some numbers.