ActRaiser (SNES)
The NES library was packed full of platform games and the Super Nintendo was no different, so if you wanted to stand out, you had to have some enticing and unique feature to make sure you didn’t blend into the crowd. At the same time though, the god game genre had barely started taking form, the ability to guide a world’s development through divine powers still mostly an unknown type of video game to many players. Released near the start of the SNES’s life, ActRaiser ensured it would feel different and new by mixing together these two types of play, ActRaiser swapping between platformer and divinely guided city-building play and yet having them intersect in meaningful ways.
Hundreds of years ago, a god known as The Master (or whatever you choose to name them) ruled over the world of ActRaiser, but their divine benevolence was opposed by the evil being known as Tanzra. While the Japanese version makes this more explicitly about the Judeo-Christian God and Satan clashing, the story still goes that good cannot stand against the power of evil, and when Tanzra strikes The Master’s sky palace with the aid of his guardians, The Master is forced into a deep slumber to recover from the assault. When they awake, they find a tiny little angel who informs them the world has fallen into chaos and the only way for The Master to regain their strength is to help the scattered humans of the planet to rebuild civilization. While The Master and angel can both help influence the work of the few remaining people, it also proves necessary for the god to get more directly involved, possessing a statue of a sword-wielding warrior to fight back monsters who threaten to plunge the world back into chaos.
This ends up being the format for how ActRaiser plays. First you will fly your sky palace to one of the available areas of the world and need to clear out the monsters making the area uninhabitable by way of a side-scrolling action stage. After it is cleared, you next spend your time using your divine powers to help protect and instruct people as they work on a burgeoning city, and soon once that area is prosperous enough, you then need to clear out one of Tanzra’s guardians in another action stage to ensure peace for the newly formed civilization. While the city-building ends up the longer process since it is a more gradual task, the time spent emphasizing each form of play feels appropriate for the content offered in them. City-building is more demanding and involves some thought so you can’t just quickly brush through it to head to another action level, but the platforming stages are fairly simple so they offset some of that by quick surges of adrenaline between the city work.
In a platforming stage, the statue whose form you inhabit has a sword and not much else. It can slash high or low and has a jumping strike, but that is mostly the extent of its ability to engage with the stages you fight your way through. The area design picks up some of the slack in terms of making it more entertaining though, the navigation taking many shapes like climbing your way up the interior of a massive tree or making your way through twisting dungeons. Alternate paths with rewards or just as different ways to tackle the same trial and some environments contain unique traversal concerns like needing to wade through swampy water that can hide enemies. There are some fairly creative and memorable monster designs to be found, but you can mostly slash them and move on without too much concern until a few of the later stages. This is because ActRaiser is surprisingly benevolent during these stages, healing items not too difficult to find and more importantly, the area right before the boss will often have a full heal and extra life pick-up to ensure that if you do die you can essentially keep retrying over and over. If the levels were a bit rougher with the player this would be a reasonable way to avoid needing to retry the stage again and again in total since if you lose all lives it removes any mid-level checkpoints, but these platforming stages are more interesting for the designs you interact with rather than the danger they pose.
The boss fights do suffer some from that generosity with the health and lives too. In ActRaiser you can eventually get some fairly strong magic and the ability to use it multiple times, and a fair few bosses can be almost invalidated by running in, swinging your sword wildly, and then once you’ve taken too much damage, you use your magic to deal some heavy damage with fireballs or a star fall while your character remains invincible albeit immobile until the spell ends. Bosses thankfully aren’t trying to make up for weak stages since the path to them is at least entertaining if not very difficult, and there are some sweet spots for boss difficulty that make them more compelling encounters. Early on your magic options aren’t great so boss battles aren’t toothless yet, but in some later stages they concoct ideas like a plant wall with a small weak spot that is hard to hit over and over, especially while a vine tries to harass you so you can’t stand in place to strike it. The game even redeems a few of its forgettable boss fights with a justified boss rush near the end where you will need to learn them properly if you just cheesed them with mindless action and magic before, even the final boss having some tricks so that magic remains helpful but not at all a way to get out of needing to understand the fight before you can win it.
The somewhat low level of challenge is partly a result of your efforts to improve yourself though, the city-building aspect actually feeding into your power during the quick platforming stages. As your various cities grow in size and population they’ll uncover things like the magic spells for you to use or additional charges for magic attacks as well as adding more health to your character. If, hypothetically, you did poorly in the god game portion of ActRaiser, these levels could be more difficult as you have less health to spare, but the city-building isn’t that difficult even for those unfamiliar with the genre. Playing as your angel emissary, you fly above the area a small group of humans have chosen to inhabit after you first clear it of monsters. You cannot tell them precisely what to do, the people building housing and farms as they see fit, but you can tell them where they should build roads and more importantly influence and protect the land with your heavenly might. Many areas are quit unfit for human habitation, early work necessary to clear away rocks, foliage, and even in later levels things like snow and sand.
As your faithful followers begin to expand out and develop the area, you’ll need to keep them safe. Various creatures will repeatedly appear to harass the human population, dragons flying in to burn down buildings or evil bats swooping in to snatch people and carry them off. Your angel servant can fight back though, so firing arrows to maintain the monster population keeps you busy even while you wait for the humans to be ready to build some new houses or infrastructure. While you need to be quick and active to repel these creatures, it’s again not too challenging, and defeating these creatures also ties into your resources as you gain godly energy from doing so and can then work your miracles like rendering land hospitable for your humans. Eventually you can guide your people to take out the monster dens to get rid of this danger, but by the time they have, it will be time for you to do an action stage and face the area’s evil guardian, ensuring that just as your godly work would likely become too easy you’re moving onto a new challenge and then afterwards a new area.
Lingering in an area after you’ve cleared out the guardian won’t likely be too productive unless you want to hit some population milestones for a little more health, but moving on to the next area is wiser, especially once some areas start developing problems like a plague if you linger that can only be cured with items from a future location. Each of the areas you can build a civilization in has its own miniature tale to tell. Whether it’s something like the people being tempted to follow another god or a mysterious pyramid the people are compelled to explore, you’ll get small updates from your populace on this slowly growing story until it reaches a head that often involves your direct intervention. You will be asked to intervene in other ways before then though, things like your people beseeching you to find a lost boy or to honor a man’s dying wish giving you a greater connection to the people than just blasting away obstructions so they can build more houses. While the game surely wants you to be engaged with this facet of the game and promises rewards for the action segments for giving it proper attention, these extra touches give it intriguing benchmarks and little shake-ups in addition to that need to stay active to repel the monsters flying over your city. The city building ends up the more compelling half of the play session because of the energetic management approach necessary to keep things moving along. With excellent music in both halves of the game on top of consistently unique scenarios, you’re never too fussed to have to swap between them, partly because the shift always happens right when it should so that neither feel weakened by lacking deeper and more difficult challenges.
THE VERDICT: A good platformer and a good god game added together make a great experience in ActRaiser, and while it struggles with difficulty at times, it also has enough creativity to get around some of its simplistic play to ensure it’s exciting to swap between play styles and entertaining to see what they’re offering this time around. The city-building element feels like the better executed half because it keeps you consistently active and considering what you need to do next, but fighting through unique stages filled with monsters is an enjoyable break even if some parts could do with some more intense dangers.
And so, I give ActRaiser for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
A GREAT rating. Split either half of this game off into its own adventure and it would be enjoyable, but the synergistic relationship keeps the city-building consistently rewarding as you know a bump in health or magic power is going to aid you when it comes time to fight your way through stages. Perhaps ActRaiser could do with tuning the relationship a bit better so you don’t become quite so powerful as quickly as you do, but at the same time the stages aren’t empty of intriguing sights and elements just because you can afford to take a few more hits. There are still deadly drops, some more intelligently designed bosses, and even a few sections where the health refills are rarer like the tree climb so you can’t get complacent, but it certainly feels like the city construction has less of a problem with remaining consistent. Dealing with the monsters flying over towns as your angel is relatively simple but also demands consistent attention since the creatures keep coming until your people deal with their lairs, and for them to deal with those you must make sure to open up more space with your divine powers and guide them to inhabit it. The people interrupting that work with new concerns as well as new rewards keeps the section progressing as well so it’s not just a loop of the same simple tasks. Like the platforming though, there are more involved ways to expand on this premise, deeper interactions or world reshaping a possibility while the platforming mostly just needs its monsters to put up better fights to keep the danger feeling present as you explore. But by not getting into complex or overly challenging play with either half, you aren’t going to be upset when you shift play styles. Both styles work well and the time you spend in them is balanced properly around how much content they offer, so while you could likely expand them both and still keep the game engaging and enjoyable, ActRaiser achieves a strong relationship between them and was likely wise not to rock the boat with complications that could put that synergy at risk.
Carving your way through stages filled with monsters is a fine enough idea for a platformer, but by melding the god game elements with it, you get something far richer. You develop not only a few burgeoning civilizations but your warrior as well through your work in building the cities, and to get to more cities you get the exciting action stages that are far more hands-on than sending out occasional miracles or repelling baddies with the angel’s bow. While both of ActRaiser’s halves might be simpler than the paragons of their associated genres, it also gets to draw something unique out of them by intertwining them, the rewards for growth and success more satisfying because they help you better enjoy the other style of play.