Been a while eh?
Despite this being my full first year of full-time employment, having a bunch of other hobbies I've been giving time to, and also playing some long-term "arcade/ranked" games that don't have fixed endings, I've actually beaten a ton of games this year and am positioned to beat even more. This might even be the most games I've beaten in a single year ! It's looking to be well over 20 (on top of a few arcade games I can review). I've also been able to give off-the-cuff reviews of them already on my
backloggd so I already have some rough draft foundations to help me make reviews lol.
In an effort to not have to place a ton of pressure on getting all my reviews for 2026 out at once when the year ends and inevitably procrastinating like I have with 2024 and 2025, I'm gonna gradually bring over some of these reviews (with a lot of extra polish mind you) and
try to keep a good pace of posting them throughout the rest of the year.
Also before I forget, my rating system:
10/10 - Contender for my single all-time fav
9/10 - Would pop into my head if asked for a longer list of all-time favs
8/10- "I loved this game."
7/10 - VERY good game, didn't quite love
6/10 - "This game is good."
5/10 -
4/10 - I didn't really like it :/
3/10 - "This game is bad."
2/10 - A truly awful game, but at the same time it's important to recognize that these works are made by people and I have to commend the sheer amount of effort that went into making this game. No artist deserves harassment over their efforts, even if they didn't fully pan out in the end.
0-1/10 - never mind i think harassment can be justified
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"People are so silly...they cause the fire, and then beg you to help them extinguish it."
: Quintet
Publisher: Enix
System: SNES, playing on an original cart.
Completion Notes: Cleared on April 5th 2026. Beat the game at Level 15
You would think ActRaiser is some Obscure Ultra Expensive Hidden Gem that got overlooked and no one played and is now in retrospect considered a masterpiece. That is not quite the case, as ActRaiser seemed to be relatively popular thanks to being one of the very few games available in the SNES's launch year, so it must have been kinda hard to ignore as it does have a following, got a sequel, and the cart isn't too too expensive (floats around $35-50 nowadays)
ActRaiser is the debut game of Quintet, being founded by ex-developers of the Ys games and a rather interesting footnote in gaming history. Their life and noteworthy gameography was almost entirely limited to the SNES, developing games for it from the very beginning to its twilight years. These games are connected by having
some RPG elements (often Action RPGs), being of relatively high quality, and exploring abstract themes, namely religion, existentialism, and especially The Human Condition...in the early 90s mind you! Even Final Fantasy VI was years away, and as we'll see, this was still at the height of Nintendo of America's Pre-ESRB "No Religion Allowed" Censorship. While Quintet isn't a
super well-known developer these days (their next game Soul Blazer fell into the Obscure Ultra Expensive Hidden Gem camp), at the time they certainly attracted some buzz, to the point where their final SNES games Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma were both localized and co-published by Nintendo themselves! The legend himself Dan Owsen is credited on both games, and apparently Terranigma's translation was also the first ever game credit of a guy named Hiro Nakamura, who would go on to work on the localizations for basically every Pokemon game in Gens 1 to 3 before straight-up working as a game designer for Gens 4 to 6...all roads lead back to Pokemon I suppose.
I digress, but feel free to let me know if I should finish my review of Illusion of Gaia (loved my first playthrough of it in 2025, but as I'm sure anyone else who loves the game can tell you, it's surprisingly hard to try and discuss lol). Quintet is such a fascinating company, and their brief popularity really isn't a surprise given how good of a SNES game they could make on their first try within months of the system's release in ActRaiser.
Press Start on the title screen and you're immediately thrust into a view of the clouds,
a heavenly glorious organ piece, and a cherub explaining the straightforward premise: You are
God "The Master", as the English localization puts it, and your goal is to vanquish the monsters and demons led by
Satan "Tanzra" plaguing the world so that humans can live across the world peacefully.
Achieving this is done in two ways, and forms the basis for what makes ActRaiser stands out: This game has two different kinds of gameplay segments. After finishing the cherub's shpeal, you will take a
Mode 7 descent straight into the first of these: The Action sections.
These action platforming segments are really simple and straightforward, just jumping and one attack (and magic spells which are basically just limited ammo screen-clearing attacks). There's six areas each containing two platforming sections; each of these is visually distinctive and every single one ends with a boss fight. Even if these levels never get particularly spicy with their design, the controls are largely responsive, your actions feel good to use, and the levels have just enough simple gimmicks to add variety. It all makes for a satisfying playthrough when combined with the visuals, which while not super intricate, are certainly well-crafted and colorful for such an early SNES game. Remember: This was only a few months after the launch titles Super Mario World and F-Zero.
While we're talking about the aesthetics and the sheer satisfaction of playing the game, I of course have to mention the music by legendary Streets of Rage composer Yuzo Koshiro. The song that plays for the very first level
Fillmore is obviously iconic, between the organs, epic but smooth orchestra hits, and that slap bass line to give it some groove and accentuate its catchiness. Admittedly I'm not as big on the songs beyond Fillmore, but some other ones I like include the unsettling
Aitos, the pummeling horns of
Bloodpool, the oddly serene calm-before-the-storm
North Wall, and the climactic (and heavily Star Wars-inspired)
All Over The World. Fun fact, Final Fantasy IV was originally going to use low-ish quality samples ala Super Mario World, but after hearing the true capabilities of the SNES in ActRaiser specifically, Square's developers were inspired to vastly improve their game's sound quality, of course resulting in another fantastic set of RPG tunes (and paving the way for FFVI's soundtrack).
Although the levels in this game are definitely non-trivial, especially the final "main" level, the bosses in this game are piss easy. Their patterns are way too basic and repetitive, and they also deal way too little damage (which apparently is a change made to the international versions, they actually dealt more in the Japanese version). This means every boss in the game can either be facetanked due to the sheer amount of health you get to work with, easily manipulated by using a specific positioning/movement strategy, or some combination of the two. This leads into my main issue with ActRaiser's action: While I do really appreciate the charming early 16-bit vibes this game exudes and can forgive the clunk factor I'll be exploring to an extent, I ultimately feel like Quintet just weren't very experienced with 2D action design.
The levels suffer from a bit of screen crunch, and it's also hard to get a pulse on what hazards simply deal damage to you and what's an instant kill. The sheer amount of enemies and their agility in the levels is not helped by The Master having pisspoor I-Frames after getting hit, leading to you getting damaged repeatedly. Knockback also feels inconsistent; sometimes you'll get hit and be able to move along just fine, and other times you'll find yourself careening down and losing about 30 seconds of vertical progress. Finally, despite how The Master seems to control well when you're in a flow, they just don't operate well in a pinch. I found them weirdly stiff when I was trying to quickly change the direction they were facing for boss fights, and the sword arc hitboxes are a bit finnicky; you have wayyyy less range when crouching instead of standing (which is bad for defensive reasons given The Master's bigass sprite), and the jump slash hitbox doesn't seem to be active while you're jumping up.
Thankfully, you won't have to linger on frustrating action design for too long. In between these platforming segments, you have the Sim sections, in which you take control of the angel from earlier and shoot down any monsters that will try to come and invade the city, while also guiding the citizens where to go on the grid, usually developing the city but also giving them the chance to take out any monster spawners on the field. You also have a menu of "miracles" you can perform that allow you to develop the land to make it habitable (lightning and earthquakes and destroy obstacles, rain to help crops, etc). While many people call these "City-Building" or "God Sim" sections, because of the angel shooting and the guiding of townfolk, in practice it feels more like a really primitive (but still quite fun) RTS. These segments are a really nice breather from the action thanks to its more lowkey nature and the fact that there's basically no failure condition; the monsters only impede your progress a bit and don't kill you outright, since your stamina automatically refills with time. Once a town is developed, their people will tell you that they can take care of themselves and ask you to move on to the next area, so these sections usually don't overstay their welcome...
...Well, besides the last one in Northwall, which can get kinda annoying with these annoying skull enemies that move fast and deal boatloads of damage, making it difficult to develop out the city at first. You do need to develop your cities to a certain extent in order to reach and clear every level. But even if you wanted to do the bare minimum at this point of the city sections, you can't really afford to because developing the towns is also how you level up and increase your health for the action sections. So you find yourself waiting around and grinding for a few minutes just to make sure you're fully leveled up for the final level and boss fights.
But why grind you may ask? It's because this game does actually have a pretty big difficulty spike right at the end: You need to refight all six of the major bosses leading up to the final boss on the limited number of lives you have, and naturally you will need every last bit of help you can get for it. For what it's worth, while it does offer a challenge, I don't think ActRaiser's finale is anywhere near as hard as people like SNESDrunk hype it up to be; that final boss is tricky, but once you understand how you're supposed to deal damage with it and the fact that you can destroy some of its orbs, you can get a lot of leeway by just abusing the insane amount of I-Frames that the starstorm attack gives you.
While you develop the town, your temple will be visited by people praying. This usually serves to give you offerings in the form of items, be they tradeables or skills for the action sections, or asking you to perform a particular kind of miracle, or talk about how the town has developed and they can give things to the neighboring towns. But sometimes the prayers are...rather strange. At least from what you might expect for a retro video game. You'll hear people talk about historical discoveries and inventions they've made, such as this strange thing called "music" and how it seems to ease the soul, and their personal fears and emotions, like a couple's son strangely disappearing or tensions and fights amongst the people living in the world. These can play into a town's individual story that comes to a head in the level and boss that comes at the end of that town section, where you'll learn the fate of the son and what happened to the people who were led astray. But given how light the plot is overall, they often just feel like these odd little moments and ideas that stir the soul. As mentioned, Quintet really liked to explore the human condition and the progress of civilization in their works, and naturally these temple segments will make you think about the nature of religion and prayer. For a game that came out very early on in the SNES's library and thus doesn't have any individual pieces that are particularly crazy, it's really nice to see these more complicated subjects sprinkled in as you play.
And I think that's the strength of ActRaiser: Its individual pieces are simple, but it's so inspired to blend them together at all that it gives the game its identity, and makes the overall game more than the sum of its parts. ActRaiser isn't a particularly difficult game, and I love these comfy retro games that I can blast through in a single day, which was the case with ActRaiser; I started it in the afternoon and it took maybe 6 hours to finish. It's fun to move on forward and slash down enemies and take out bosses with minimal resistance, it's fun to break up the action for a few minutes with these chill town segments. Derek from Stop Skeletons was right in that this game very much exudes early-SNES vibes; while I don't think these retro vibes are as immaculate as those in, say, Castle of Illusion or Super Mario Land, ActRaiser is also a far more involved game than either of them lol.
And while the story is simple and lightly touches of those heavy themes characteristic of Quintet, it's the oddly bittersweet ending that makes it memorable. After traveling to see the towns and remember the people you've helped out and their small vignettes, as you do in RPG endings, you decide to actually check in one only to find...
I mean, what comment could I possibly add? (I guess if i wanted to make a shitty joke i could say
"But Nobody Came...") Who says a simplistic retro story can't have such a brilliant mic drop of an ending?
Fun and pretty easy, if you're new to retro gaming and want to try a cult classic, this is definitely a "Good Choice"
- Mario Party 5 Voice
