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Best of Two Worlds

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I love this game so much, and have for years. It has two modes which are just so awesome. First, you have the side-scroller/action stages. These are awesome and a good deal of them require a decent amount of skills. Then there is the city-building/sim mode. It's so fun to play, but I've been told the sim part is boring to watch.
However, you're out on a mission to save the people and your world from demons and evil Gods. You encounter all kinds of neat scenarios in the world you preside over. People turn their backs because the other gods promise happiness, favored citizens are up for sacrifice, plauges, and family feuds.
This is one of the best and most original games I've ever played.

Original fun.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 31, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed this game when it was initially released with three other people, they just watched, as if the game was a fantasy movie unfolding. Challenging and satisfyingly graphical for its time, Actraiser is better than its sequel. It is simple fun and diverse, with several levels and great background music. Worth having.

I like Actraiser, a lot.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've always thought Actraiser was one of the better games released on the SNES. The building portion of the game is a lot like SimCity (if I remember correctly), which I always enjoyed so if you don't like that you might not like this game. The action part was kind of like Castlevania. First you do an action level, then you build, then boss-action, then action, then build, etc. Once you beat it the first time you can play just the action levels again. I thought it was pretty impressive graphically and it had a pretty good soundtrack (especially the second level, Blood Lake or something).

I always felt this was a very solid game, and if I weren't so poor I'd probably buy a copy of it to play again.

You don't like me, huh? here's some sun to burn you, and some wind to blow you away!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: January 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Yeah, I had trouble coming up with a decent introduction line. How can I explain what ActRaiser is like? Honestly, I don't have ANY experience with simulation type games. This is the only one I have ever played, and it's not even completely sim according to all the reviews! It's only part sim!

When I was a young kid and the Super NES was just released, I loved looking through the pictures in this one big gaming magazine I had, and seeing which games I wanted to buy. This is one of the games I wanted, but for some reason, it took me 10 years to eventually get the chance to play it! I guess this had to do with me losing interest in video games for a few years. The spark has returned, though, so don't fear for I am BACK!

Now, as I was saying, I didn't bother with ActRaiser when it was originally released. The type of friends I had at the time didn't think simulation type video games were cool, and since back then friendship was so extremely important to me, I ignored the game. A part of me really wanted to play this game in the early 90's, but damn it, peer pressure! Maybe it was for the best, maybe not. I can't go back in the past to find out if I'd made the right decision. I probably wouldn't have liked the game back then anyway. It took me until my early 20's to become open-minded to things I previously wrote off immediately, so I can only assume I would have shut down a simulation type game right away, in my childhood and teenage years. My friends were pretty cool, despite this.

I'm an adult now, and I'm finding out things about this game that I didn't know 15 years ago. One such thing, as people frequently point out, this is one of, if not THE very first video game to mix simulation with side scroller/action gameplay. Playing this game, it DOES feel like I'm playing something original, but I find it funny how people weren't aware of it back in 1991. I can only guess because so many creative ideas were being thrown around back then in the world of video games, that an innovation of mixing sim with action was so small and insignificant at the time, and so people didn't care or didn't notice.

People back then were too busy having fun and throwing parties for games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and Zelda: Link to the Past (games that were REALLY groundbreaking) and people probably weren't paying much attention to ActRaiser's little unique features.

But as I mention above, I haven't even bothered with any other sim-type game, so this is my first and only experience with this kind of genre. The sim parts of this game (which cover about 6 different lands) feel extremely simple. You are an angel, and you fly around shooting monsters and building towns. The entire point of this part of the game is to create towns and destroy monster lairs with your arrows, so you can gain points and become stronger for the action part of the game. You also talk to people along the way, and to be honest, sometimes it's an inconvenience because sometimes they have a LOT of information they want to give to you.

But many times they give you items, important items, which can be used for either another area of the land during the town-building parts, or for the action parts of the game. You'll eventually see that all the items the townspeople are giving to you can either be extremely helpful when fighting bosses, or extremely important for progressing to another part of the land.

The music is interesting. I think all the best music is featured during the action part of the game, and the music that plays during the simulation part of the game can get pretty boring after a while. The bosses you will encounter are very fun to fight, and some of them are slightly challenging, but I have yet to come across a boss that was REALLY hard. They all have a pattern, and the pattern you need to defeat them is usually something like finding a safe place to stand, waiting for the boss to come near you, and then slash away at him, until he's defeated. But it's still fun because the bosses have cool attacks, and they look amazing. Don't give up if you have trouble defeating a boss. Sometimes it takes a few tries but eventually you should find the pattern, and once you find it, you will have no problem defeating them the next time you play the game.

I especially love that boss where you are located on a series of ledges with a river behind you, and you have to face a giant flying snake. I also love going through the volcano level.

I should also mention that during the action part of the game you aren't the angel anymore. I guess your character is God. Sounds crazy, but I think it's true! I really don't know. My game didn't come with an instruction manuel. Supposedly you can make the bosses even easier by using some kind of special magical move on them, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet. I mean, I know it's the A button that delivers the special move (such as a fireball, in one instance) but you collect these special moves during the simulation part, and I can't figure out how to bring those moves to the action part of the game. There's gotta be a way!

Oh yeah, the music. Back to the music. If you like the music in this game check out the old rock band Genesis. No, not the Genesis with Phil Collins as the lead singer, the Genesis of the early 70's with Peter Gabriel on vocals. That band has music that reminds me of some of the level themes in this game. Check out the Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme albums to see what I mean.

This game sure makes me feel all magical inside. Maybe it's the release of the new Harry Potter movie a few months ago that got me all excited to review this game, I don't know. But according to many reviewers, this game is unique in the way it mixes two separate types of video games- simulation and action. The sim areas all feel very simple to me, and that's probably the point. The action part, while containing some rather tricky jumping movements (awkward play control!) is still the part I enjoy most.

The graphics could have been better, but we can't complain about a game that came out in the beginning of the Super NES's successful run, now can we? At the time we didn't know the system would soon release so many classics!

If this game is going for less than 10 bucks, you must buy! There must be something in this game for you to enjoy! I still find it creepy when I save my game, shut the Super NES off, come back later, turn the Super NES on, that angel asks me if I got enough rest. How did that guy KNOW I was resting?

Fun at first,but it tends to get boring quickly

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 16
Date: May 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

you create things.That's about it.You also fight these little flying lizard-things that pour our of a hole in the ground until you build a building over it.This game will keep you entertained for about an hour,then it gets boring quickly.My advice is to rent the game before buying it.

One of the best SNES games of all time.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 14, 2008
Author: Amazon User

No really. ActRaiser is up there with games like "Super Metroid", "Super Mario World" and "Axelay".

What's cooler than fighting monsters as a statue imbued with the power of God? Or building a civilization and fighting monsters as a little naked angel? Not much.

A great story, great graphics and fluid controls make this game as close to perfect as a video-game can get. A definite must-have for any self-respecting SNES owner.

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