I think I need to be the singular voice of dissent towards this game. Not because it’s bad, far from it, but it’s a major symptom of a malady that has been turning the entire gaming industry to shit for many years.

While there was excitement for this game when it was announced, and it’s seemingly doing amazing (consistently staying above Super Mario Wonder on the eshop), it’s also something of a “why would you do this” kind of game.

So let’s talk about it!

As a big fan of SNES RPGs, this is one that I’ve always wanted to try, but never have. There was a translated rom (which is how I got into some of the classics like FF5, Seiken Densetsu 3 and a few others) but still this is one I never ended up checking out for some reason.

I was pretty excited when this was recently announced at a Nintendo Direct, using the HD-2D style.

Well let’s see what I’ve been missing all this time!

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!