Collection essentials #166: ActRaiser (SNES)

ActRaiser was a strong early release for the Super Nintendo from developer Quintet. Not only was it technically impressive and well-made, but there isn’t much out there in the gaming world quite like it to this day, due to how it combines two different genres into one.

A lot of the design of ActRaiser’s world and characters takes inspiration from religion and mythology. The main antagonist and protagonist were called God and Satan in the original release, and they were renamed as “The Master” and “Tanzra” upon being localized into English to avoid controversy. Many of the game’s bosses come from mythological creatures such as the Minotaur.

When you start up ActRaiser, it seems like a fairly normal side-scrolling action platformer, as The Master manifests himself as a dude armed with a sword and goes around kicking butt. After you beat a level, though, the game shifts to something completely different. ActRaiser has “sim” sections where The Master and his servants try to help humans to build a civilization. These sections are done from an overhead view as you control your servant cherub who flies around shooting bad guys while giving orders to the lowly people. Sometimes you can divinely intervene by, for example, manipulating the weather to help out the humans. These people are not just mindless soulless drones either, as sometimes they will converse with you directly. What makes this game work is that progress in these simulation stages will grant you permanent power-ups for the action stages!

This is something I’m going to start saying pretty often: this game has an excellent soundtrack. ActRaiser takes full advantage of the SNES’s sound capabilities, and the music really enhances the experience in a particular way that the NES could not, and even the Sega Genesis probably would have struggled to capture the same type of vibe that ActRaiser creates with its tunes.

ActRaiser saw some modest success in terms of sales, but wasn’t quite a household name. It did sell enough to get a sequel made, but the sequel lacked the sim elements so it wasn’t as unique, and it failed to turn ActRaiser into a long-running series. Fairly recently, however, a remake of the original game was made for modern platforms called “ActRaiser Renaissance”, though it seems the general consensus is that it’s not as good as the original.

I didn’t know about ActRaiser as a young kid. It wasn’t until my teenage years when I finally had the internet at home that I discovered it. I wound up getting it on eBay a little bit before I turned 16, and I played it not long after. I wouldn’t call it one of my top favorites on the console, but that says a lot more about the strength of the SNES library than it does about the game. I’ve only played through it once, and it’s a strong candidate to be replayed someday. A totally unique, super cool SNES essential.