Wow, this game sure came out of nowhere. Actraiser is one of those SNES gems that if you played it you know and if you didn't you've probably just never heard of it. It's the first of several games developed by Quintet and published by Enix. You play as the Lord of Light, a God that's come to smite demons and seed humanity. Being an early SNES game it's quite experimental. The game is separated into 2 phases, and action phase which plays pretty similar to Castlevania and a simulation phase where you build a city. In the action segments movement is clunky and requires a bit of plotting and while it never feels great it's good enough to enjoy in short bursts. The meat of the game is the simulation phase where you guide your humans into building out a city. This part always seemed like there was more to do than there actually was but really it's just chill. You control a little churub flying above the land with a bow and arrow, shooting down enemies and grabbing items that spawn from the farm and factories. Enemies spawn every so often and will destroy buildings if you let them linger for too long. There's not really any penalty though, just lost time and killing them is easy so you may not ever see them actually attack. It's more of a distraction to keep you busy as things happen on the ground. Otherwise you just tell the people which way to expand and they build buildings in a psuedo-random way which increases your population score. As you progress you'll remove the enemy spawners, and get upgrades to you civilization to make better buildings which requires you clean up the old ones by destroying them with Godly fury. This is book-ended by another action stage and boss. Despite it's simplicity there's really something compelling about it. It's an easy game to get into and it makes it feel like you are doing more than you are.
Then comes Actraiser Renaissance. A game that nobody really expected to see and appeared fully playable the same day it was announced. It's a remake of the original so pretty much everything still applies but they also added some new layers to formula. The action stages while still clunky give you a lot more in terms of movement. You can attack up and down, guard and back dash, all new moves. These make combat more fun. However, I think the balance at least on normal is too easy. Most of the time you can just spam attacks and it's often easier to take damage and murder the harder enemies during the invulnerability frames. Once you get magic that's just another layer of spam that can shred a number of bosses. None of it is bad and if you want to play careful the bosses can be fun but there's rarely any need to.
The town building also gets upgrades. While it's the same basic progression it's divided up by tower defense sections. As your city grows you can place towers and gates to stop oncoming raids from enemies. Unfortunately the spawns are not known before hand so it's mostly about being lucky with placement and compensating if you want to succeed the first time. If you fail there's no penalty so you can re-arrange your defenses knowing where the enemies came from. I think it could have used a little more before-knowledge to make it actually strategic. As is it's fine, they segments aren't long but it can be annoying to fail because you didn't know what was coming. In addition there are hero units. Each town you build follows the story of one hero. It's nice little backstory add and fleshes things out. The hero is really there for the tower defense parts though. You can guide them to locations in your town to fight off attackers. As you get further you can even summon more than one to the battlefield. This mechanic works by building up a gauge from killing enemies and once you max it you get your pick of who to unleash. This also suffers from the same issues as you might pick a character good for the current wave but might be ill-suited to the whole battle. In fact, I took particular issue with flying enemies. Many of the flying enemies are magic resistant so there's really only one character you can pick if you see them, with the ground enemies you have more ability to experiment. Irritatingly, on occasion they will start out with a wave that's resistant to your current character making it really difficult to earn the summon. In these cases you can also use miracles. The same abilities you use to help townfolk and level their buildings can be used against enemies in battle. This adds some frantic interactivity as you try to time the most effective shot and gather magic bottles from your farms. But the cooldowns are long and you won't always kill the enemies so it can feel frustrating. Still, there's a decent challenge to be had, issues aside and I think it's a good addition that adds to the game.
Otherwise there's not much else. Completing tasks will net you more experience points both for yourself and for your heroes. Leveling up gives more HP and damage to heroes and more HP and MP to you. Leveling yourself up also increase the MP you have in the town sections which can drastically reduce the time spent waiting around, killing enemies for MP bonuses so that you can destroy more trees or buildings. The only real penalty here is time. Small, almost trivial setbacks. So in most cases it's again just a chill game. There's not really danger, and once you see what's coming it's usually pretty easy to compensate.
The presentation is probably the oddest part. Characters appear to be sprites of rendered models making it feel almost like a high-res Donkey Kong Country. The sprites can oddly clash with the background with what appear to be compression artifacts. It's really a strange choice. The backgrounds can look quite good but it's also not always easy to tell what is in the foreground, what's a wall and what's something you can walk through. Of everything this is the weakest part. It can even chug at inexplicable times. It doesn't detract from anything though. I never really noticed it during the action phase, only in the slow paced city building parts but it's still just odd it's there at all. The game has a real indie feeling to it. On the other hand the strongest part is the music. Redone (but with classic versions) by Yuzo Koshiro, the soundtrack is absolutely amazing.
I'm really glad this came out. It's not something I really thought I wanted until it did. It has some rough edges like the first game but it's also endearing in the same way. It really channeled the feeling of Actraiser's genre mish-mash getting things just good enough they are fun to play but not lasting so long that the issues get to you.
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