This was such a surprising release. It just popped up randomly in a Nintendo Direct without ever being announced first but, not only that, it also came out right then and there. For those who don’t know, Actraiser is one of the ultimate SNES classics. A game that combines side-scrolling action platformer gameplay with city building simulation and is good in both aspects. It’s great. The sequel was great too, but very different, focusing entirely on the action segments and making those really cool and unique, but having no city-building.

My headcannon for why this even exists is that Yuzo Koshiro, the amazing composer that made the music for the original game (and a lot more, look him up), recently made an Actraiser-inspired track for Korone of Hololive (which is awesome, btw), and decided he wanted to make one more, but had nothing to put it in, so he bullied Squeenix to remaster the original game and add a level to put the song in. Prove me wrong (yeah this is probably not real but I think it’s funny so that’s what I’m going with).

Well, this is a remake of one of my favorite games, so let’s see if they did it justice!

Developer and Publisher: Square Enix (the title screen also lists Quintet, the devs of the original)
Release date: September 23rd 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version played)
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer + City Building Simulator

Looking at the trailer for this, I thought it was a remaster. Just “better” graphics and not much else that’s new. In fact, the graphics in the trailer looked… weirdly cheap. But then you pay attention and you notice some things that are different, a few moments in city-building, and the fact that you have an expanded moveset in side-scrolling levels. So in fact this is a remake, rather than a remaster. Either way, the trailer hyped me up, and I got it as one of my “waiting for Metroid Dread” games.

Graphically it’s definitely a bit above the SNES original. It has these very nice anime-style portraits that are really nice and detailed, unlike the tiny sprites of the original you could only see from afar (and were the same in every area). The environments are more realistic looking, to attempt to fit with the design of the characters and enemies, though that makes many of the areas look a bit generic and not as stylized as the SNES version. Enemies and your own character, God, are these 3D models that are digitized, like a mix between Donkey Kong Country and Mortal Kombat. God himself, with his cool armor and sword, has a bit of a pixelated look to him. There’s some cases where monsters and you don’t quite fit, but generally it actually doesn’t look too bad. I prefer the SNES graphics for the side-scrolling levels, but these aren’t bad. Specifically the bosses all look really good. The whole digitized feel is a weird decision, but I don’t mind it. Doesn’t end up looking quite as cheap as the trailer led me to believe. One thing I will note is that I noticed a lot of people talking about a weird stutter in side-scrolling levels when the screen scrolls… it happens, but it’s nowhere near as bad as what I heard. It’s barely worth mentioning. In handheld is just doesn’t happen in most levels.

The story is pretty simplistic. Basically you’re God, coming back to the world which has very few living people left and the land is overrun by monsters. You come down in warrior form to fight enemies, create 2 people to start building up humanity in the area, and helping humanity with their prayers and problems. Each area does have a champion, an actual character (something that wasn’t much of a thing in the original game, with a couple very small exceptions) who has their own goal in the area, where they’ll be helping the local populace fighting enemy hordes and such. Your personal goal is to fight the champions of Tanzra… or, in the original japanese version, Satan (thank you 90s game censorship not letting me kill Satan). Fighting all the champions opens the way to Death Heim, where Tanzra/Satan lives, and you can fight him, and save the world from his evil monsters. The story is deeper than the original game’s with the champions being around and having a personality. There’s some things it actually doesn’t do quite as well (the way music is created is the same, but it lacks the impact it did on the SNES version, because it happens so long after the guy dies), but having actual characters definitely helps. Like, you actually see Teddy in this one, while he mostly appears in dialogue in the original.

There’s 2 gameplay styles here, like I’ve mentioned already. Each area of the world has 3 “segments”. First you have a side-scrolling action level which ends on a boss fight, then you have the big long city-building simulator segment, and once you finish a certain quest in the city-building segment, you get access to the Act 2 side-scrolling level, where you fight Satan’s champion for the area.

Side-scrolling levels are pretty simple gameplay-wise. You can jump, attack, use magic and backstep. Attacking was very expanded here compared to the original, which had… 3 attacks: Slash, slash in the air, and slash while crouching, very varied. Here you have a combo attack, if you press forward for the third hit you get a lunge, you have a launcher, an air slash, a downward slam kinda thing like Dante’s Helm Breaker, and of course the crouching slash… A weird thing about these attacks is that a lot of them offer a LOT of invincibility frames, like you can literally stay in an enemy and span crouch slashes and never get hit if your positioning is good enough. The backstep gives a good pile of invincibility, though I didn’t find it to be that useful, since you have a good bit of cooldown in-between uses. Magic makes you invincible during casting which is useful, though the spells aren’t that great generally. Specifically, the Stardust spell was broken as hell in the original game because when the fireballs from the sky hit the ground there was a small explosion, so you’re get a ton of hits on grounded enemies, here they just go through and they’re slow, so it feels you don’t get much damage from this anymore. There’s still use for magic, but it’s not your main option to attack bosses anymore.

Also there’s a new element here with the crystals enemies drop (and some environmental objects). Get enough and you level up a bit, each level increasing either physical attack, magic attack, or both. Getting that level to 100% increases both magic and physical damage by 100%, but also gives you a free revive if you die (you get back up on the spot you died), making boss battles way easier. Also each level has 3 pickups you can find which increase your max MP, so you can do more spells. Those are permanent upgrades. Very nice.

City-building is the slow, calming portion of the game. It’s quite a bit different from the original game though, in some aspects. Here it functions on a quest system. Sometimes when you get to building time (which happens based on when an hourglass ends on top of the screen) your people will talk to you, asking you to do things. Some of these quests progress the story, so you need to progress enough to get to Act 2. Quests can range from getting enough population to giving away resources to grabbing fruit to fending off a monster horde, and more.

In this mode you control your loyal angel servant, who can fly around, shoot arrows, and acts as a mouse cursor for you to point and click at things. Generally you’ll need to use miracles to affect things in the environment, like lightning to destroy trees and rocks, or rain to clear out heavy sand in the deserts, or the sun to dry out swamps. You can order your people to build in the directions you want, starting from your temple, in any space that doesn’t have environmental obstacles. In the original you could order them to clear out monster lairs, here you have to wait for the story to progress enough to be able to do so. One change here is that the people don’t close the monster lair themselves like they used to, instead you have to go in and fight a few enemies. It’s a bit of a waste of time for kinda no reason. Another thing that’s slow is the hourglass that determines building time, you’re very frequently just waiting for that to happen.

How population progresses here is different. The people will build farms and workshops. Farms increase your max population and they produce food (which recovers SP) and potions (which recover SP). Workshops produce resources (which you use to build and upgrade forts) and palisades (which you use in horde raids). Certain quests will increase your civilization level. What a higher level means is that your populace can build better houses, farms and workshops. However, they won’t upgrade current buildings. Instead, you gotta use your miracles to KILL EVERYONE, and then better buildings will get built. This means having to wait for several build cycles, because, at most, you’ll get one farm and one workshop per build cycle… so just wait a few minutes for your city to repopulate each time you get a civilization level. There’s some minor ways to control whether your popular will build farms or workshops, but generally you just gotta hope they’ll build the one you want.

So one thing that happens several times per area is monster hordes. Basically, enemies will pop up to attack your city and the angel can’t shoot arrows at those enemies. The Hero of the current city can be ordered around to basically go to a spot and protect it. You also set up forts, which can be placed in different places. Gatehouses directly on roads, while mage towers and arrow towers can be placed where houses go. You gotta be careful about placement since it prevents building in small areas (and you can destroy a building to build a fort). Gatehouses stop ground enemies from passing through and hits them back, while the mage and arrows one shoot enemies that pass by. You can use 2 types palisades, which go on the roads and stop enemies from progressing (though those have very little HP). One type of palisade actually draws monsters to it, so placing it near arrow towers can be a good way to deal with enemies. At first you only have one hero, but in following areas you can summon a hero from a completed area to help defend from the horde (which requires filling a meter by killing enemies). You can also use miracles to help fight the enemies, though a lot of the enemies can take many hits before dying (and some are weak to specific miracles). Also doing quests lets you level up heroes, yay. The horde battles… I could do without them. All but, like, 2 of them are super easy, and overall just feel like wasting time. It’s weird because they’re annoying due to a few aspects, specifically having no idea where enemies will spawn from so you can’t prepare well… but at the same time they’re so easy it barely matters.

In the end of it all, doing quests gives you faith, and enough faith gives you levels. I’m honestly kinda unclear on the effect of levels. I believe it gives your angel extra SP and HP which is good to do more miracles, but I think it also makes you a little bit stronger in side-scrolling levels, also giving a bit more SP and HP. So there’s a link between the two gameplay style, alongside learning new spells before every Act 2.

So you got fun side-scrolling, and okay city-building until you get to the filler. The filler is the big problem here, with the horde battles not feeling like they have a good place here, and the “waiting to get resources to build forts because resource drops from workshops are random” and the “waiting for farms to drop fruits for quests where you need to gather fruit” and more… This is a case where a bit of streamlining would have been good. The original’s city-building was just better.

Also, this game does have new content. After beating Satan, you can go to a new area. It has only one Act, though first you need to go through the city-building with a ton of horde battles and stuff. The Act is worth it, because it has a cool new music track from Yuzo Koshiro and a pretty cool boss battle, but it’s a lot of filler before you get to do it.

Overall

This remake was good, but flawed. The gameplay itself, solid. The story, not bad, they actually put more of it here and had… characters. The problem here would be the updated city building. At its core it works well, but there’s so much artificial waiting now. “Days” pass too slowly, having to wait for random drops like materials and fruits is annoying, having to wait for new quests, having to manually go and seal monster lairs, having to do horde battles… it just takes SO long in-between act 1 and act 2 of each area. This game is probably 4-5 hours too long, because there’s just SO MUCH FILLER. There’s extra filler if you want to 100% every area, as they tend to give you quests where you need to kill enough of certain enemy types, which will require replaying levels several times, kinda pointlessly.

Not to say this is all bad, it’s not. Even if the game feels WAY too slow, it’s still really fun. The side-scrolling levels are actually probably better gameplay-wise, the city-building still has that calming feel of the original and Yuzo Koshiro’s music is still amazing even in its new orchestral versions.

You know what’s weird? That there’s STILL almost no games quite like this. There was SolSeraph 2 years ago which was an obvious Actraiser clone, and that was… okay. Felt a bit cheaper. Then this year there was Smelter, which was pretty good in the side-scrolling levels, but the “strategy” portions were basically a pretty meh tower defense game. It’s just strange how the best game in the style of the original Actraiser (other than Actraiser itself still being the best) is Actraiser’s remake. Even Actraiser 2 wasn’t a game in the style of Actraiser.

I recommend this game despite my issues with it. It’s good stuff. Please buy it so that maybe an Actraiser 3 can be made and they can fix the huge amount of filler this game has. BUT I will say the original’s better, play that one too.