I'll be honest, when I created the rating scheme and made a rating higher than A+ I had a single game in mind for that rating. People may suspect that game would be Final Fantasy II (us) or Final Fantasy III (us) and while those games may still earn an S rating they weren't the reason I created it. ActRaiser was.
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| 8 characters allowed in a name? Sweet! |
Did ActRaiser hold up to my memory as being truly awesome? Let me put it this way... The timing worked out such that ActRaiser would be posted during the first weekend of the new World of Warcraft expansion. I have a ton of stuff to do in WoW to get ready for it... And I still played ActRaiser through to completion. That's the first game in this little adventure that got played all the way through.
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| God statue, activate! |
ActRaiser is a game with two very distinct segments. The core of the game is a platformer where you, as the god of the world, send your spirit to inhabit a statue. The statue has a big sword and you run around chopping the bad guys. The platformer game is very solid but unspectacular. It doesn't have a lot of bells or whistles but it also doesn't have any flaws. Movement is smooth. You have a lot of control in your jumps. You don't have any special sword attacks or anything but the attack animation works well. You have good range with your sword and you never get into a situation where you know what to attack but can't make yourself attack it.
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| Love the constellation boss! |
You have no defensive moves. God statue doesn't have a shield, just a huge sword. You will take hits when playing ActRaiser. Lots of them. Most of the boss fights devolve into finding a pattern where you can inflict more damage than you take in a trade and then repeating. Finding a way to do damage without taking any back is hard if not impossible. But the game plays fair. There are always ways to trade favourably.
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| Suck it, Bat-cave! |
The other part of the game is a city building simulator. Here you control an angel servant who works to direct the human population of the planet. As you get more people to follow your religion you gain power. You can increase your maximum health during the platformer levels. You can learn special spells to use while platforming, and you can learn more charges of those spells. There are 6 different cities you get to develop as you play the game and each one has storylines that play out as you develop them.
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| You'd think after the 30th time I'd start expecting it... |
Each of the 6 cities has two different platformer levels associated with them. The first level unlocks the city and lets you start developing it. The second level is the big boss of the zone and unlocks the maximum potential of the city.
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| It's the final countdown! |
Clear out all 12 of the platformer levels to unlock the boss stage. Here you fight, without healing, sped up versions of the big bads from each of the 6 cities. And then, the head demon guy himself. I lost the first time through (using 2 of my 7 magic points on a wipe was a pretty big blunder) but came back to win on my second try.
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| Victory! |
If this game was just the platformer it would be worse than Super Mario World but still a pretty solid game. If this game was just the city builder it would be about on par with Populous. The two combined into one game with interesting plot? With the two building off each other? It's fantastic. I can't recall ever playing a game that puts two different genres together in such a smooth fashion. And it's such an early title, too! I really think anyone who hasn't played this game before should track it down and give it a spin. It's worth the time. Heck, people who have played it before should probably play it again. I had a blast playing it again.
Rating: S
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