ActRaiser

The Game

ActRaiser arrived in Japan in December 1990, barely a month behind the Super Famicom itself, and it does not behave like a launch-window game. Launch games are usually a safe idea executed loudly. This one is two entirely separate games sharing a cartridge, and it never really explains itself.

Half of it is a side-scrolling action game. You inhabit a stone statue, swing a sword with a satisfying amount of weight behind it, and work through themed stages that end in a boss. It is deliberate rather than fast — closer to Castlevania's measured, committed swings than to anything twitchy — and the hit detection assumes you are thinking a step ahead.

The other half is a god game. Between action stages you hover above a region as a disembodied presence, guide a small population toward building roads and houses, clear obstacles with earthquakes and lightning, and watch a settlement slowly fill in the map. It is not deep. What it is, is connected: the population you grow feeds directly back into your health and abilities in the action half, so the two modes keep handing each other momentum.

The framing that ties it together is the reason it works. You are a god recovering territory from six regional demons, and the two modes are simply the two things a god does — smiting in person, and quietly tending to the people in between. Very few games since have committed to a premise this cleanly.

Box art

Notes on the box art to follow.

The People

ActRaiser was made by Quintet, a studio founded by ex-Nihon Falcom staff, and published by Enix — the Dragon Quest company, several years before the merger with Square. Quintet went on to make Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, and the through-line from ActRaiser to all three is obvious in hindsight: creation, restoration and repopulation as mechanics rather than as backdrop. This is the game where that idea starts.

Direction came from Masaya Hashimoto, with Tomoyoshi Miyazaki on scenario — the pairing that anchored most of Quintet's output.

The soundtrack is by Yuzo Koshiro, and it is the part of ActRaiser that travelled furthest. Koshiro was already known for the Ys games, and what he wrote here — orchestral, layered, unashamedly grand — became one of the standard demonstrations of what the SNES sound hardware could actually do. Plenty of people who have never played ActRaiser know "Fillmore".

Notes for expansion: dig into the Quintet staff credits properly, and find out how much of the sim half was in the original pitch versus bolted on later.

The Press

The reviews at the time were strong, and the interesting thing is where they were strong. The action stages got respectful notices. The music got raves. The sim half is where opinion splits — some reviewers treated it as the whole point, others as the bit to get through before the next sword level.

The review cards below are placeholders. Replace them with quotes transcribed from your own copies, crediting the magazine, issue and reviewer each time.

Where it sits

It is the first entry, so there is nothing to compare it against yet. For the record: this is a game I would have happily written about out of order, which is exactly the sort of temptation the alphabet exists to prevent.

Screenshots

Screenshots to follow.