LogFAQs > #973327793

ActRaiser

Another replay but I recently started playing ActRaiser Renaissance on steam and as is my wont I felt compelled to quickly replay the original to better judge how different it was and whether it was an improvement. I remembered the original only being a few hours long; I was right, this was another example of a game where I previously got to the final boss and then never actually beat it, it probably helped that this time I played it over two sessions instead of just one like I did originally.

The platforming/action sections which are the first thing you experience in the game do feel fairly clunky even by the standards of the time I think, especially your weapon reach; a problem I've noticed being unusually common for me in games I've played as of late is playing a platformer where you're a sword user and doing a long string of attacks where the thing I'm trying to hit is just barely out of my weapon range (Blasphemous has this too). The upside is that most of the levels are designed to compensate for the clunkiness by giving you health refills at convenient intervals and occasionally extra lives, though this doesn't matter much as you can just restart the level with no penalty if you run out of lives. Bosses can be a bit annoying/tedious with trying to damage them and stay alive, but for a lot of them you can just out-DPS them or find the right magic to use to just nuke them unceremoniously.

The town sim is honestly the more distinctive and memorable part of the game for me, maybe it's just the monkey brain satisfaction of seeing everything progress and flourish just the right way after I've cleared the path for it. The way it actually proceeds is pretty simple but the presentation with the dialogue you have with your followers as you expand is really nice worldbuilding. Weirdly enough this is the part of the game where you can upgrade your character for the action sections which I reckon I have significantly more to say about after this new run; you need to get offerings from your followers to upgrade your lives and magic capacity and get new spells, and most of the time you get this from events which are practically automatic or require some pretty straightforward nudging on your part but others just feel like total non sequiturs, like hitting one of your own temples with lightning to scare one of your followers into giving up an item that he'd been secretly keeping even though you get no hint that that's what will happen.

One more thing that I only really learned about in this new run that feels bizarre to me is the way the world population system works; you need to raise the world population to increase your own level and raise your health, but what determines the max population for each area is not only the type and number of structures that are present (you need to go out of your way to demolish less advanced structures so that they're rebuilt as newer ones) but also... the score you get for the action sections for that area. Which you get no in-game indication that these two mechanics are in any way connected. You also can't redo action stages without restarting the entire game. This wouldn't be too much of a hangup for me if not for the fact that unless you do some pretty deliberate minmaxing in that regard it's impossible to hit the upper level threshold of 17, for which you need to hit 4600 world pop (I was about 100 short of this in the end, and about 150 short of what's apparently the upper threshold for maximum possible world pop, according to retroachievements anyway).

So that felt pretty weird and undermined the straightforward enjoyment of the game for me a bit, but even with this slightly-less-than-perfect build I managed to actually follow through and beat the final boss this time around. Thankfully level 16 was enough for the "DPS race with some judicious pattern recognition use" strategy to work. Overall it's a pretty cool experience that's largely carried by the uniqueness of the gameplay and the world and how good the music is. Will probably play again at some point and maybe attempt the minmaxing nonsense now that I'm at least aware of it.