Actraiser

ActRaiser

Platform: SNES

Genre: Sidescroller/God Game

Plot Synopsis: Some evil god comes into a benevolent god’s world and wrecks up the   place, filling it with monsters and making it uninhabitable. You’re the benevolent god, ready to smite some asses.

Gameplay Score: 17/20

The game’s concept is already kind of weird– who would think to mix an RTS and a sidescroller– but it’s pretty good. The sidescrolling levels are fast-paced, and the RTS levels make interesting, if sometimes rather obvious and spelled-out, use of your powers as a god. The one problem I have with it is that it’s overly difficult. Megaman difficult. It’s also a bit short, which feels weird; it’s one of those games that seems like it should be stretched out a bit more, like Chrono Trigger. It wouldn’t have been so bad for the platforming levels, but the lack of additional village-building content was off-putting; it left me craving more villages, and more ways in which they could be interconnected. As the game stands, there are exactly five examples of Offerings from one village that actually matter in another: wheat, bridges, music, wool, and medicine. It’s a good start, but quite lacking in the interdependency that could have been possible.

Tolerability Score: 4/10

And as with any overly difficult game, half the difficulty comes from Annoying Enemies. In this case, it’s the Giant Skull in the Village Mode, which takes out five of your Angel’s health in one hit and causes an earthquake, leveling your ENTIRE CITY, if it isn’t put down. There’s also the Rock-Throwing Dwarf-Goblin-Things in the Vaguely Mountain stage, which naturally cause you to fall off the very small platform you need to traverse the entire stage on. And of course, befitting something as challenging as Megaman, there’s a mandatory boss rush, which is next-to-impossible due to getting no recharges on health or magic.

Oh, and I found out in the last Village that I could build on top of ice. But not around– yes, around, not across– a river, without getting Bridge Building 101 courses in Stupid Villager School. This annoyed me to no end, seeing as this led to me taking about a half hour more than I needed to, leading to a fun cycle where an imp destroyed my farmlands faster than I could regenerate them, a dragon destroyed houses, and a skull attacked my Angel avatar as soon as it could do anything, reducing a god to complete impotence until he finally realized that he could build on terrain that didn’t look buildable at all.

Plot Score: 5/10

Like I said, it’s basically an excuse plot for both beating up monsters and building villages; a couple of village subplots are interesting, so that bumps it up a little from the two I was going to give it. More character development is needed: the true identity of a conman, the  motivations (or lack thereof) of the villain. There’s also no foreshadowing, or information of any kind, on the bosses; even the first Zelda game let you know that somewhere there was a DODONGO that you would expose to some variety of SMOKE. Instead, you get random mythological creatures thrown in at the end of every stage.

Graphics Score: 4/5

The graphics are pretty good, but not incredible, and there’s nothing to complain about other than the damn ice.

Music Score: 5/5

The music kicks ass. No complaints here.

OVERALL SCORE: 35/50

It’s a decent game, but it’s the kind that compensates for being too short by being too hard. Still, it could do a lot worse for itself.

Ways It Could Be Better:

• Trade in a little difficulty for length, increasing the number of villages and variety of monsters.
• Develop the plot more clearly. Who is this ill-defined demon? What’s the deal, if any, with your angel?
• Make design more straightforward: don’t have ice that can’t be melted, or mysterious line drawings that are just barely blocked by mountains. In contrast, make goals less straightforward; my villagers can alert me that their windmills stopped working without spelling out for me in big neon letters that I need to use my Wind power.
• The earthquake power is stupid, because you only need it once (if you want all the HP-upgrading artifacts, it goes up to a whopping twice!) Either use it more– perhaps in the hypothetical Seventh Damn Town– or excise it for a creative use of another power.