ActRaiser

North American box art.

ActRaiser, known in Japan as アクトレイザー [Akutoreiza], is multi-genre game with a fantasy theme developed by Quintet and published by Enix on 1990-12-16. The game has two modes, one section plays as a real-time strategy where you build a city while fighting monsters, the other mode is an action platformer hack-and-slash.

I never played the game when it came out, but I saw it highly ranked online and decided to try it out. I took awhile to get down the boss battles, but I eventually beat the game, and enjoyed it.

Status

I own this game, have beaten it on standard difficulty.

Review

Overall: 7/10
Best Version: SNES

Good

Over all, the game has good graphics, nice music, and is fun to play.
It's always a gamble making a multi-genre game, but I enjoyed both modes in ActRaiser. The strategy portion was a bit too easy for my tastes, but fun, and the platformer portion was more interesting and challenging.
The use of very large sprites really helps remind you that you're no longer playing and 8-bit game.

Bad

The game is painfully scripted. For a fantasy game, there is very little adventure.

Ugly

Nothing.

Media

Box Art

The original Japanese box art has a nice collage layout, and a good logo, but the art is pretty bad. The faces look pretty ugly, and the color palette jumps all over the place.
The North American box art isn't great either. The logo is good, and the colors are better, but it just shows lightning over the pyramids, not exactly a portent of the game.