Actraiser Renaissance

I really wanted to like this game. It's not awful, but I don't think I would ever recommend anyone to play it. The "upgrades" from the original game are either worse than the original, or just a sidegrade. In trying to flesh out stories, they somehow made it less interesting. No longer is there any exploration of the sim abilities, you just get a quest and it tells you exactly what to do every time. The graphics are fine for the most part, but somehow they managed to make the citizens have less personality than the white pixel stickmen from the original. The new takes on the music are fine, I think they did a good job, and it's very cool that you can choose which versions of the music you want. The updated combat spells are cool, but the updated combat doesn't actually make for better combat than the original sadly, and often runs into extremely unbalanced fights (I played on hard, maybe this is different on other difficulties.

I stuck this out for the top shelf femboy angel, but this remake sucks. All the tower defense stuff is really bad, the graphics are mostly hideous (top shelf femboy angel aside) and they really could have taken the opportunity to make the action sequences have tighter controls and a little more challenge. 15 hours of blech.

It's not awful, but it just makes me want to play the original SNES version. I'm not big on the anime art and drama stuff they added either. The town part of the game is so much worse with near-constant interruptions for bland story or really basic tutorial information that drags on and on. The original had a few annoying interruptions like this, but it's multitudes worse in this version since they felt the need to add so much more dialogue and unnecessary characters. It's fine I guess, but the original is so much better.

I found the combat updates in this version to take the game too far away from the original. I did not enjoy playing it and have requested a refund after playing the first stage.

Act Raiser on SNES could benefit from a remake. It is an ambitious genre fusion of castlevania-esque action platformer and city builder RPG. Act Raiser had a great ost with nostalgic synths and midi instruments, and while the visuals are not the most detailed in the city builder sections, its look and feel are both full of old school charm. That said, the game has its annoyances, like regular (but short) interruptions from NPCs, repeated use of the same song for city building sections (though it beloved by fans and light on the ears), as well as a limited variety of things that can be done to kill time in a fun way during the city building sections. Levels themselves were pretty short, and without the city building, the game would be extremely short. Set pieces were well chosen to make every platforming level stand out decently from one another, and I could see a kid in the 90s vibing with the journey to defeat Tanzra. The story consists of simple scenarios in different realms, and culminates in a simple defeat-the-evil-leader type finale. However, the ending showcases all you accomplished as a Master through guiding humanity across the realms. Then it leaves the player the with a …

Almost a good game. This is one of those titles I really want to like as I'm a huge fan of the original. However they integrated an RTS style portion of the game and it has some serious flaws. You get hero NPCs to help with your towers and such who, when they die, results in a defeat for the round. This is cool and all, until you run into a round where there's a flying enemy that can one-shot your hero. Dude just flies over, one-taps my hero, game over. Unless there's some kind of opaque thing I'm supposed to do here, I'm pretty sure I just found a soft-lock for the game.