Burn out from a burn out.

Bad games’ll do that to ya. 


Playing old ass JRPGs is long and tiring. Sometimes you need to do something different. This week, I played a puzzle game from my youth that I never beat, Goof Troop. I finally beat it! After that, I played a new game. ...from 1990. It was a sorta RPG that tertiaryly applied to the genre because of vibes. It’s not an RPG. This is good because it sucks. 

Actraiser is not a good game. 

Let’s start with the majority of the gameplay: platforming. It is unpolished and rough. It’s slow, and the jump sometimes just does things. And the way it (doesn’t) interact with the combat is maddening. Attacks are fast, but there are only two animations. You can crouch to stack snakes, but a basic sword swing is your usual move. You can’t attack up or directly down. The jumping attack works about thirty percent of the time and rarely connects, even if it goes off. The animation is too fast, so you need to be very precise… with a wonky attack. Rad. Even then, hit boxes are also weird. Maybe they’re too precise, so that’s good, but our hurt box isn’t in our favor. It’s such a clunky experience. 

But that’s half the game! The other side of Actraiser is a rudimentary city builder. You guide six different locations around an area, growing them and dealing with their unique problems. They build their homes and farms with no input from you, besides a general location. There are no unique buildings for you, and they’ll never construct anything more. Your only action is knocking down obsolete homes, which they’ll replace with higher density ones. You also destroy obstacles with your god power over the weather. Ideally, guide them to the monster lairs around the map to make their home peaceful. And also give them wheat. And that’s it. Guide villagers, wait for their population to rise up, which also raises your HP, then go side scrolling hack ’n’ slashing in a dungeon. Rinse and repeat for too long. 

“But why,” you ask? Because revenge. The big bad guy, Tamzra, killed you. So now you need to build up your power through faith from the villages, beat up Tamara’s friends, and then kill him. No twists, no turns, no shocks. It’s a sandwich that’s only half a piece of wheat bread.

But at least it looks pretty nice. Barebones as HFIL, but sprites are neat to look at, and spells are flashy, especially for a de jure SNES launch title. I also found the music to be… fine. I only liked one song, which is a great track, but the rest didn’t make me like the game more. 

But maybe the worst part of Actraiser is that it keeps score, like an arcade game, for every dungeon. This means nothing to the overall experience, and it doesn’t even tell you your grand total. At the end, after you’ve gone through the painfully difficult boss rush, you just stand on a rock overlooking the sea. You never see your final score. 

But I’ll show you mine. 20/50. Actraiser is a difficult, empty, unfun mush mash that isn’t rewarding. I get that this is pretty much a tech demo for the Super Nintendo, releasing within a month of the system’s launch. But F-Zero showed that a tech demo can be amazing. And Super Mario World showed they could be GOATs. Actraiser just sucks.