By Justin Polak
Co-founder, Ambassador of the Mushroom Kingdom

As of this writing, I will be turning 29 tomorrow. I am coming to accept the fact that I am getting older, hopefully wiser and that some of my favorite video games are roughly two decades old. Sure, I recently wrote an article about that kind of goes against nostalgia, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like to dabble in the past. I guess I feel like I came across as a little harsh in that last article, so I suppose it’s only fair that I show that while I dislike people clinging to the past to justify present opinions, I am not against the idea of remembering good times.

I wanted a Super Nintendo more than anything in the world, like most children, when it came out in the summer of 1991. I got my first taste of the console first hand at — where else — a cousin’s house. Obviously, what sold me was the standard Mario game at the time, Super Mario World, and Final Fantasy IV (back when we all thought it was Final Fantasy II) enamored me. However, there was a third game that filled me thoughts throughout the days when I was yearning to own the system.

ActRaiser was a very unique game for its time, and still has a charm to it today. Developed by Enix long before the Squaresoft/Enix merger, the game had you control a being known as “The Master”, which you could name, leading to kids such as myself to name it absurdly as possible. Thanks to a battle fought long ago against Tanzara, an evil deity, The Master falls into a deep slumber to recover from the battle. In time, the people of the world stop believing in The Master, and each area is controlled by six of Tanzara’s subordinates.

I’ll cut to the chase in case you haven’t figured it out. You basically control God who is waging war against Satan and six of his top buddies. The censorship policies of Nintendo of America were pretty strict in those days, so some mild wordplay was needed. I can understand why Nintendo tried to disguise the plot, but I am positive that many players assumed they were playing a game based off of Christian beliefs anyway.

Moving on, when God woke up, the lack of faith from the people meant that he was severely weakened, and had no power. As expected, God regains his power as the game goes on, but the way the gameplay unfolds moved in a different direction than one would think at the time.

Upon first playing the game, you enter in God’s name. The only real option that is available to you is to fight monsters, so away you go. What follows is a standard side scrolling action game. You slice enemies with your sword, you lose life, you gain life, you earn an extra guy, you fight a boss at the end of the level and you even accumulate unnecessary points! However, your next task isn’t to fight through another stage, but to build a thriving population on the area you just liberated.

When in sim mode, you control an angel that serves your every need. With his help, you can direct people to build a town, cast acquired spells when needed and fend off monsters that seek to put a stop to your progress. Scattered throughout several lairs on the map, a way to permanently quell the menace is to direct your followers to the lair’s themselves. They will automatically seal them, and in most cases learn how to build better homes in the process. The better the homes, the more population fills your world. You want to make sure you squeeze as many people as you can into that map because your level depends on how many citizens live and breathe safely.

Though it’s not nearly as complex as even the first Sim City, even if we are talking about the SNES version, the sim mode was a huge draw for ActRaiser. Many people were disappointed when ActRaiser II turned out to be a simple action game, including myself. Though the mechanics are simple when you get the hang of things, it is incredibly satisfying to build a strong civilization in each area. It may seem cruel, but a good way many players leveled up quickly was by purposely destroying older houses, thus having a higher overall population once the best houses were rebuilt over the scorch marks of the old.

The game’s design also had you bouncing back and forth between maps at certain points. Since the game had religious themes, you had the ability to check in with your people worshiping you. The two town leaders would offer a variety of items to aid you on rebuilding the world. Some items, however, where instrumental on solving another area’s problem. Plus, each area included small story segments which somewhat personified each area. In addition to that, every place you rebuild has a distinct flavor to it. Though the environments seem pretty standard and cliché today, you have to admit there is a reason desert, jungle, fire and ice based areas still work.

When all the monster lairs are sealed, a huge crisis immediately presents itself, and the only way to solve it is to fly right back into action mode and play another side scrolling stage that faces you off with one of Satan’s buddies. I’ve always felt that the level design and graphics really shone through in every Act 2 level. So much effort and detail is poured into every area, it’s unbelievable. Even if I play this game today, I still get impressed by certain backgrounds that perfectly utilized Mode 7, a graphics tool that presented the illusion of depth, thus artificially making some elements to appear to be in 3D (see, Nintendo’s obsession with 3D isn’t a recent trend)!

Perhaps the best part of this game is the sound effects and music. Frequent readers may have come familiar with my obsession of video game music, but the game’s excellent score by Yuzo Koshiro didn’t draw me in simply because I love the way it sounds, and believe me, I do. What amazed me was the sheer quality of it. Keep in mind that this game was released very early in the lifetime of the SNES, and it still managed to outshine the sound quality of much later titles. The music seriously does sound less midi-based and more like it was created with a limited orchestra. When you get hit, your character even lets out a very realistic sounding grunt. Yes, today this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but back when the SNES was only a few months old, this was a major technical achievement.

Lastly, what I have come to appreciate over time is the religious theme throughout this game. As said above, the US version got censored, but it was still very apparent that you were a good god facing off against an evil one. Religion is a subject that few games tackle, and when it does, it’s generally found in JRPG storyline that showcases how religion can easily be misused in the wrong hands, or worse, created by the wrong person. It’s nice to see a basic struggle of good versus evil presented in a mature way, censored or not. The ending is what chills me the most, and I feel it points out a sad truth about humanity. If you haven’t played the game and plan on doing so, skip the next paragraph.

After evil is vanquished, God and his angel helper revisit each area and reminisce on the trials they faced and certain people that stood out to them. After their tour is over, they notice that no one goes to any shrine to worship them because all of the world’s problems are solved. God and the angel decide to leave the world again, knowing that the people may need their assistance once more. I found it slightly bittersweet that even after the world was rebuilt from complete decimation, humanity grew complacent, despite there being absolute proof that not only God exists, but he fights for them as hard as possible. I may be reading too much into this, but perhaps the developers were saying that even if people get exactly what they want, they are doomed to stay on a path where the same problems will repeat themselves.

If you own a Wii, it’s the best legal way to get a copy of this game right now through the Virtual Console service. If you’ve never experienced ActRaiser before, it goes without saying at this point that I think it’s a worthy purchase. The game isn’t exactly unknown, but it’s one of those gems that have been buried under more popular titles as the years have gone on. Who knew playing god could be so much fun?

Front page image from sydlexia.com, screensh0ts from mobygames.com.