LogFAQs > #973401279

ActRaiser Renaissance

Been wanting to play this one for a while as I quite liked the original when I first played it. It's certainly different.

The action sections are fairly faithful recreations of the originals (not 1:1 mapwise, but quite close progression-beatwise), with the most obvious difference being the graphics. TBH those stood out to me in a not-great way at first as they largely consist of 3D renders converted into sprites, like you'd see in Donkey Kong Country, except they're conspicuously significantly lower res than even that so all the characters just look kinda blurry and uneven compared to the tight spritework of the original. Controls are a bit clunky too, but having quickly replayed the original definitely helped with adjusting to that sooner than later.

The town sim is still the meat of the game where you'll spend the vast majority of your time, and is where the most significant changes come in. A good chunk of it still follows the same kind of flow as the original, but the gameplay is effectively doubled by the new siege/raid quests, which are basically tower defense, but which suffer from a good few hit and miss factors. You can build forts to block or attack enemies, which you'd think you'd be allowed to place wherever you want for the sake of strategy, but instead you can only place each type of fort in a seemingly arbitrary predetermined set of positions which may end up leaving some of the paths wide open. During the actual sieges you can also place fragile, easily-replaced palisades on the roads to further stall your enemies, although this suffers from the same limitation. Combine this with the fact that as in the original, you have no direct control over just where your important resource-producing facilities (farms and workshops) will be built, and things can get a bit frustrating when the odds decide to stack against you. There's always about 5 sieges to go through in each area in addition to overseeing the town's expansion and completing other tasks, so it can feel like a bit of a padded chore.

One upside to this addition though is that in each area you get to recruit and command a hero character, at first this just serves to give you an additional crutch in clearing out the monsters faster but it quickly turns into elemental rock paper scissors as you unlock the three types of heroes you can summon for this (melee, ranged, and magic) which feels a lot more strategic and controllable than placing your gates and towers does. The heroes also play into the new stories/dialogue that each area has, which again pretty much largely follow the beats and lead to the same outcomes as in the original, but giving the world some more development and depth without bringing any crazy radical changes into it. Another semi-related minor addition in the town sim is that monster lairs are no longer automatically sealed and are instead timed mini-action stages that get progressively harder, but never to the point that it feels overbearing.

Something else significant is that there is one new area in this version which is only accessible in postgame. My prior comments pretty much apply there; it has the most gimmicky monster lair stages and one of the worst sieges in the game that easily took me the highest number of retries, as it requires you to defend your farms which are extremely fragile and as stated can and will be built anywhere on the map where there's enough room, even if that happens to be an abysmal position relative to available defense placements. There were two additional sieges after that which felt like a joke in comparison (can I call this a Bloodbane moment?).

The story for this new area also develops somewhat disappointingly, as there's only one action stage at the end instead of the usual two, there's no new hero to recruit, it's established that it takes place in a setting where neither humans nor the monster servants of the main game's villain had ever set foot, and the story mostly concerns the mystery of why there are monsters that show up and start attacking the settlers anyway which turns out to be because some mysterious being (literally called "Unknown" in the boss fight) that may or may not be another god/angel like yourself had been hiding there.

It's definitely nowhere near as satisfying as the conclusion to the main game but I guess that's something of a trend in somewhat recent RPG remasters (looking at you, Xenoblade Future Connected) but at least it gives me an excuse to mention another positive, which is that not only is all the music from the original included in both original chiptune and new arranged versions, there are also a good chunk of new compositions which exist in both formats as well, courtesy of Yuzo Koshiro who returned to contribute to this project. I'm quite partial to a few of the new compositions, particularly the new town themes for Aitos and Marahna, and especially in the SNES style.

There's a few extra details I could mention like how the angel now has a charge attack that I forgot existed 99% of the time and how a lot of the postgame quests/achievements are some of the most pointless stuff you'll ever see as they call for grinding/doing "I vant you to keel seex snow moose" quests at a point where you've already done everything that matters, but hey, don't gotta feel bad at all for ignoring those altogether. Overall, I'd say I'd recommend it to fans of the original if you think you can adjust to the dumb siege quests (which is ironically not too difficult because of how dumbed down they feel) and just feel like you want more out of the classic that was the original.