ActRaiser

"The best thing in this game is that you can kill all the humans in an earthquake and they still love you since you are God.."

During the 16 bit era there were a lot of action games with platform elements in it. You had one weapon that you could attack all the enemies with, some died after one hit while others took more than one hit to kill. The enemies also tried to attack you, and the only two ways to avoid getting hit was either to kill the enemies or jump away from them. Two of the most known games in the genre on the Super Nintendo is Super Castlevania IV and Mega Man X, but there are a lot of others. One of them is Quintet's first game Actraiser, a game that added a little twist to make it a bit different from all the other action games on the Super Nintendo.

This games takes places many years after a big battle between good and evil, with the main character being the Master (or God, but the English release took away all the religious references in this game) being the fighter for good while the Tanzra the evil one (or you can just call him Satan) fight for the evil. The Master became wounded in this battle and had to escape to his sky castle for a long sleep to recover, and during all this time Tanzra's six underlings each took control to spread chaos in one of the six cities in the world.

Finally the Master have recovered enough to once again fight the evil and save the world from the evil Tanzra. With his help he got a little angel boy who will help him to make the humans fight all the evil monsters and build up their towns once again, and also make them praise you as you are the Master. In other words the goal in this game is not only just to defeat all the evil in the world, but also show the people living in the world that you are their God and they must praise you or else you won't save them.

There are two different parts in this game, and the first is like your typical action game on the Super Nintendo. The Master carries a sword that he can fight with and kills most of the enemies in just one hit. Except from duck and then attack with the sword or attacking while he's jumping there aren't any other moves the Master can do with the sword. Later in the game he will learn how to use magic, which kills almost everything it touches, but also cost magic points to use.

One each stage there are a few candlesticks that you can break in order to either just get some extra score (which is totally pointless in this game), but some can either give you more MP or recover lost health for you. There are also a few 1-ups to pick up. If an enemy takes away all your health or you fall into a trap that kills you right away, you lose one life and have to start over from one of the checkpoints in the stage. You don't get your lost MP back when you die. When you run out 1-ups you have to start from the beginning of the stage.

At the end of each stage there's a boss fight, and thankfully you get to see how much health each boss got. For most of the boss fights you have to figure out what kind of strategy you have to do in order to win this battle. Sometimes you have to wait for the boss to make an opening while you just have to kill the boss before he kills you. Of course once you've found some spells, you only have to spam magic attack at him before he dies. When the boss dies the stage is over, and if this was the first stage of the two stage in the country then the next part of the game starts.

When you've beat the first stage of a country, your job in now to with the help of your little angel companion to rebuild the city and make the humans happy that they treat you like how a god should be treated. This overmap of each country is also full of monsters that will do anything they can to destroy your city, so you have to kill them all with his little bow. In order to stop the monsters from coming back, you have to lead your people to the monsters lair and let them do the dirty work to make sure that the monster doesn't come back.

In some areas there are either snow, desert, trees or anything else that makes it impossible for the citizens to build houses on, so it up to you the master to preform different miracles to help them. These miracles is actually that you control the weather, and can make it either rain, thunder, really sunny or windy in certain areas to clear the way for the villagers. You can even create Earthquakes, that destroys all the building in the county but it might also unite islands.

Sometimes the villagers gives you an offering which is usually good items that will help you when you try to rebuild other countries, but it's also in this mode where you find all the spells and increases your MP. When you've made a city big enough you will gain a level which gives you one more health point, which means that you can take one more hit from the enemies. When you've sealed all the monster lairs in each country the villagers will tell you where one of Tanzra's six underlings is hiding and then a new action stage starts. When this stage is over you've cleared one country and can go on to another one.

Even if Actraiser is unique in it's god simulator type, the game is far from perfect. The control in the actions stages is really dull, and it gets quickly boring to swing your sword all the time to kill the enemies. The Master is also really hard to control while jumping, which makes the game difficult in the wrong way at sometimes in the game. Aside from that the game is just a bit to easy, and you quickly beat the game since you can just spam magic attacks on the bosses. The only real challenge in the action type of the game is when you are at the final battle, but even that shouldn't take many tries to beat.

The city rebuilding part of the game where you control the little angel on the other hand is fun at first, but it quickly gets boring and I think this is also impossible to not finish. It's ridiculous easy to get rid of all the monsters or figure out what to do, you just have to have patience. What was supposed to make this game more than a regular action game actually just feels like a boring commercial between the action stages instead.

When you beat the game you unlock the original difficulty that the Japanese version had, but this is only for the action stages and you never have a chance to learn any magic, which just turns this game into your average action game. Of course this just my opinion, and I think that Actraiser is still a game that deserves a try. Who knows maybe you will like it more than me?

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/15/09

Game Release: ActRaiser (US, November 1991)