Actraiser Renaissance adds just a little too much

When I first saw a remake of Quintet’s Actraiser announced on the September Nintendo Direct, I immediately bought it.

Why? Because Actraiser is amazing and it’s a shame there really isn’t anything else like it out there. Until now, though it being like itself is stretching things a bit.

Some of the changes were obvious from the get go. The graphics were naturally given a bit of a facelift. It’s a lush and beautiful game, with almost the look of an oil painting to it. The remastered music is top-notch; taking advantage of all the modern instrumentation options while the melody remains extremely recognisable. You know, half Soul Blazer, half Castlevania.

The game’s controls, too, were given some love. The Lord of Light moves much more smoothly and with more urgency. He has more options for basic attacks and movement, and it gives the action stages a real goose in the fun factor. The stages themselves have been changed. Some only slightly, others quite noticeably expanded. Enemies have sneakier ways of getting to you, but with freer movement in the air and a new backstep, you have more ways of avoiding those attacks.

The boss fights are given some more room to breathe (sometimes literally). Free of old technical limitations, SquareEnix dropped some huge new representations of the bosses. While there’s very little different in how they fight you, the flashiness of their attacks is so punched up you’d be excused for not recognizing how close several of them hew to the original game.

So far, so good. The enhancements and changes take a classic game and make sure it can it more appealing to a new audience without any wholesale changes to its core. However, things diverge a little more once you reach the simulation stages. This is where the substance changes more… substantially.

The HD view allows much more of the land to be seen at once, which makes it feel a bit smallish compared to the original. Your cherub buddy who takes over for these sections moves a LOT faster and hits a lot harder. Hunting enemies is further trivialized by an unnecessary powered-up three-way shot and a slight homing feature given to even single arrows.

While this half of the game is where the story happens in the original version, a heck of a lot more story is going on this time. Your assistant is far more vocal, there are far more interactions with the leaders of each settlement, and a new subplot is introduced involving hero characters in each land. Rather than the simulation only stopping to hear prayers when new gameplay elements are introduced or key items need to be found, several quests have been added. Some are in service to the hero subplots, some are just extra, and others introduce a new gameplay mode.

It’s just as well the simulation combat is much less satisfying before, because the game really wants you to be doing battle in its new sieges instead. It’s an excuse to add new buildings to manage and upgrade, a purpose for the new hero characters and the reward items that buff them, and it adds something new to the game to help the experience last longer. Which also means it grinds your momentum to a halt because the core gameplay loops were never balanced around such a thing and that part hasn’t changed.

It’s an interesting-enough idea on its own. You have to respond to rushes of enemies spawning in different parts of town and use a very limited number of fortifications, destructible barriers, deployment of your hero, and your Godly miracle abilities to manage the waves of fiends and ensure they don’t reach and raise the temple.

But all these extras will block your progress. You no longer unlock “Act II” of each zone by sealing the monster lairs, but by completing all the quests and at least four sieges (and however many random-encounter-like raids happen to come along, too).

The problem lies in the designers wanting you to spend more time preparing for and doing the sieges than doing any other part of the game. And that’s despite the bloat advancing the hero adds to the simulation section as well. While it’s nice to have new stuff, the way this has been implemented throws off the balance and timing of the game. Before, it went a little something like this:

1. Action stage to unlock new area
2. Simulation until key item unlocked
3. Use key item to advance simulation
4. Receive new ability to improve effectiveness in action stages
5. Action stage to defeat area boss

Now, it’s

1. Action stage to unlock new area
2. Simulation until hero unlocked
3. Seige
4. Simulation until key item unlocked
5. Seige
6. Use key item to advance simulation
7. Seige
8. Receive new ability to improve effectiveness in action stages
9. Seige
10. Action stage to defeat area boss

Can see the padding quite clearly now, eh? This was not an unavoidable problem, and it’s a shame the developers didn’t polish this part of an otherwise shiny game. If they were desperate to make the game take longer, I think I would have liked adding a couple of new settlements and their requisite action stages to get more oomph out of it. Perhaps even borrowing inspiration from the action-stage-only Actraiser 2 to help things along.

Overall, it’s not enough to sour the game for me, but it could have been better by keeping some of the original tightness to the experience.