Okay I took a while to finally review this, but here we go!

I haven’t played Gotta Protectors on 3DS, but this isn’t my first tango with this series. My first time was playing a free NES rom some years ago called Amazon’s Running Diet, an infinite runner kind of game where the Amazon character needs to run to lose weight, but also avoid cake while running. Limited Run Games released a cartridge version of it, which they censored because they’re losers.

So anyways, I picked this up on launch, having previously no idea it existed and not listing it in the April release post. Let’s talk about it now that I took over a month to finish it!

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!