ActRaiser (SNES Review)

ActRaiser
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Quintet
Published by Enix
First Released December 16, 1990
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE
Terribly Remade as ActRaiser Renaissance in 2021

The last thing a person sees when their parachute doesn’t open.

ActRaiser was one of those games that came up so often in gaming magazines that, when it was released to the Wii’s Virtual Console in 2007, I had to jump at it. The funny thing is, ActRaiser was just a little younger than me and sniffing its second decade by that point, and it was still a one-of-a-kind experience. Actually, it still kind of is. That includes the sequel, which decided to remove the God-like aspects of the original game. I can’t imagine why it isn’t as beloved as this original SNES launch-window game. Nobody learned their lesson, which is why a horrible remake came out in 2021 that added tower defense elements that nobody in their right mind wanted or asked for. And now, playing ActRaiser 33 years after its release, it’s now glaringly obvious it’s a glorified tech demo to show off the capabilities of the new console. That’s not a knock, by the way. Super Castlevania IV and Super Mario World are in the same boat. I like them just fine, and I like ActRaiser too. It’s also a little overrated. Sorry, but it is!

You have to admire God’s determination to follow the rules of etiquette and use both hands on His broadsword, even when He’s leaping. Makes sense why He’d follow such gentlemanly rules. He invented them, after all!

ActRaiser is a roughly 50-50 split of sword-and-sorcery platforming and a stripped-down SimCity/Populous-like world builder. Most people remember it for the action parts, which are sort of like Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, only much easier (unless you’re playing the INSANELY hard Japanese version) and with less stuff to do. This is the third time I’ve played ActRaiser, and one aspect of it that struck me is how fast the levels go. It always caught me off-guard when the boss’s health meter would appear. “Wait? Already?” And that’s fine, by the way, because the combat is as basic as it gets. There’s no finesse to it. None. Despite the controls being pretty good (if slightly stiff), there’s no pizazz to it. You can’t block. You can’t swing the sword upward. There’s no sub-weapons besides bomb-like magic spells, some of which aren’t all that effective. The SNES is a six button controller. Half those buttons go unused. The fact that nobody would accuse ActRaiser of being a button masher is impressive.. because it kind of is one. Especially the boss fights.

And actually, the bosses don’t really hide their mashy nature. They have huge lifebars, but you’re not expected to dodge their attacks, so you would think they have the advantage. Instead, the battles are about getting three or four licks in for every tick of damage they give you. For a legendary game, ActRaiser sure has inelegant combat.

On the other hand, the action stages contain no filler and it genuinely feels like, once they ran out of ideas for each set-piece, they wrapped it up. That’s always preferable to padding a stage for arbitrary reasons. As basic as the action is, it never lasts long enough to get boring. There’s also a hidden complexity, in that you’re incentivized to fully explore the levels and not ignore enemies. In fact, you should slay everything in sight. That’s because every 50 points you score in the action stages increases the potential population of the town by one citizen. Of course, since you score points by the amount of health and lives you have (and lives reset between levels even if you get 1ups), you might not want to just hack and slash with reckless regard on every boss.

The longest level is this climb up a frozen tree.. at least that’s what I think it is. You have to ride these bubbles up to the top. It reminded me of Wizards & Warriors. Say, there’s a review I ought to do one of these days.

I didn’t even know there was a connection between scoring and population until I’d already passed the first two stages, which are the hardest to achieve a maximum population for. Go figure. Since the RPG-like leveling-up system that grants you extra health and extra God-power points in the simulations is based on reaching population benchmarks, points actually matter. Hey, I appreciate that scoring isn’t just included because it’s 1990 and the grown-ups making the games know that kids like to get high scores. I also appreciate that the game is nonlinear. At least to a certain extent. Your ability to visit each land is tied to how leveled-up you are. This was the first time I played the stages in a mixed-up order. It didn’t really make that much of a difference, but I’m big on players having as much flexibility as possible to create their own strategies.

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The main highlight of ActRaiser’s action scenes are the thirteen boss fights. They’re a fun hodgepodge of different world mythologies. A centaur. A minotaur. Dragons. King Tut.. for some reason. Come to think of it, that’s not really a myth. Just some poor kid who was so inbred he had a cleft palate, a clubbed foot, and a curved spine and lived a life of constant, agonizing pain (it’s not like they had Vicodin back then) before dying of malaria at the age of 18. Shit, no wonder he’s aligned himself with Satan to do battle with the personalization of God.

Hell, why bother with the sword? You could probably kill him by coughing in his direction.

While I enjoyed the bosses, they weren’t so good that I was happy when the game ends not with one final level, but with a boss rush. Not all twelve previous bosses, mind you. Just half of them. Specifically, the second bosses in each stage. Well, that sucks, especially since the back-bosses tend to be the least entertaining ones to do battle with. Again, the problem is, without any advanced moves, fights tend to devolve into just spamming attacks and counting on the fact that you’ll score more hits. That’s not just the way I played it, either. I don’t see how else you’re expected to do it. It’s almost comical how sloppy these encounters are. It’s odd that they work so well. Again, it’s the pacing. One or two bosses might take a while to beat (typically the ones that linger near the top of the screen), but otherwise, ActRaiser cuts a blistering pace.

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For the final boss rush, you don’t get health refills OR bomb refills between battles. Thankfully, if you die, you get to continue from the last boss you were facing (but you don’t get your bombs back). It’s still a lazy and underwhelming way to end the game. I suspect this choice was made because the last boss is also the lamest one and someone at Quintet figured that part out. Dammit so much. I hate it when good games fall on their face at the end. Oh well, I had a good time regardless. Unrefined as the combat is, there’s no sword-swinging platformer that feels quite like ActRaiser, and the dazzling set-pieces filled with original enemies seals it. Imperfect, but a lot of fun.
VERDICT: Wait, ain’t I forgetting something?

Oh, right.

ActRaiser’s simulation side feels more like a cousin of Animal Crossing than it does SimCity. As God, your main job is really just to clear debris and point which direction you want people to build each town. Since this is supposed to be an action game, you still fight monsters in the simulation. You have a flimsy bow and arrow, and golly, does it feel out of place. The monsters, which only come in four different forms (bats, blue devils, red devils, and giant skulls) will kidnap village people or burn their houses down, and having to fight them when you’re trying to focus on clearing rocks or sand or marsh feels like busy work. Your ultimate goal is to aim the building paths in the direction of the four monster lairs and let the people seal them up for you. In the entire game, only one time are you given a tool that can seal-up a monster lair the people can’t possible hope to reach. I’d almost prefer if you gained the ability to destroy every lair manually. To the game’s credit, every single time the people reach another lair, it’s so satisfying to see them do their little ritual and make the thing vanish.

If the people can do this but the angel can’t, then really, what does GOD need you for?

Occasionally, the people will pray to you for a specific thing. The leaders of one village have an adventurous son, Teddy. You have to locate the little bastard on the map and bring a loaf of bread to him. LATER ON, when the village decides to draw lots to decide who will be sacrificed to a local monster, the leaders are fine with the concept. Well, until Teddy draws one of the short straws. Oh, THEN they pray to you to intervene. Of course that’s how they’d be. They’re religious! And this exposes the limitations of ActRaiser, because I personally knocked down every house in that village in response to this and they never once grasped that I was pissed at them. I’m GOD, you f’n morons! What are you doing sacrificing yourselves to anyone BUT ME? I didn’t want to save Teddy, but if I had to, I should have had the right to give him and his family the plague. I’m vengeful, angry God over here and I can’t even inflict a hangnail on them? What kind of sissified deity am I? I should have the ability to rain stones on them to show my displeasure. Have horrible boils erupt on their skin and.. you know, actually now I’m starting to see why they decided to take their chances with the monster.

You get the occasional mission, like this dead guy in the middle of the third stage. First, you have to clear the sand using rain. Then, you have to guide their construction in his direction. When they find the corpse, your civilization discovers music. In the town next to them, people are turning evil or something, and you have to take the music from this town over to them to get them to stop being hateful towards each-other. I was just burning their houses down.

The closest you can come to an old testament style God is the fact that you need to knock down the old homes so they have to rebuild new, higher capacity ones. See, every time you seal one of the first three monster lairs in an area, the “civilization level” for that town goes up. Which just means the buildings look more sophisticated and start containing more people. And yes, you’ll want to actively destroy the old houses, since there’s a limit to how many buildings can be on the screen. Once you get to a high enough level, you’ll want to use an earthquake, which breaks all the Level 1 – 2 houses while leaving the max level 3 homes standing. Oh, and you’ll want to be careful planning the paths. You want to minimize the bridges in the first two levels, since nobody lives on them, but they count as structures. I didn’t know this, and I ended up maxing-out twelve people short of reaching the highest possible level.

Not that I missed that last bar or two of life during the final boss battle, but I still wanted to get a 100% completion and came 12 people short. Maybe next time.

I actually really enjoyed the simulation side of ActRaiser. Simple and limited as it is, it’s just so dang charming. Just its existence alone is enough to make me giggle. Like seriously, who saw the potential to combine THOSE action stages with THIS God sim? It’s absurd. They don’t even pair that well together, either. I can totally understand why someone at Enix would be like “maybe lose the sim parts” for the sequel. Yet, I can’t think of a better example of complete gameplay dissonance working like ActRaiser manages to pull off. Two completely incompatible gameplay types that most certainly are NOT working together in harmony, and yet, the end result is the rare bonafide gaming legend that holds up to the test of time. It’s not as good as you remember. The action is even more rudimentary than the simulation side of things. But, ActRaiser’s two gameplay styles are incompatible, and it still works. A game oozing with religious themes made me a believer, because ActRaiser not being an unmitigated disaster is proof that miracles are real.
Verdict: YES!