ActRaiser

ActRaiser

1991

Quintet/Enix

Action/City Sim

I've been watching some old episodes of Nick Arcade on Youtube lately, and two things stand out to me about that show now. One is how little a show called Nick Arcade actually featured gaming, and the other is how when they actually did have any gaming, it was usually ActRaiser. From these segments I thought that this was another run of the mill action games, but it ended up being one of the most innovative games that I've played, to this day.

You start this game flying around an overworld. There are about 5 different cities, but they only become available at a certain level. The overworld music is hauntingly beautiful (I read that this game's soundtrack was in fact award winning when it came out.) You start with the first city of Fillmore

A helpful little angel tells you that you have to rid the city of monsters before people can start inhabiting it, so you enter the first action sequence.

In the game's action sequences, the angel inhabits a statue with a sword and is controlled by the player. These sequences are actually the weakest part of the game, but they are still enjoyable and present a decent level of challenge, especially the boss at the end of the action sequence. It took me 4 attempts to beat the boss, so you actually do get a sense of satisfaction from it.

After beating the monster boss, people begin moving into the city. This is the point where the game gets really innovative. It switches from a straightforward action game, to a god simulator/urban planning game. I don't think that very many games from this era featured such a high level of genre bending. When in the city planning stages, you control the angel in a zoomed in version of the overworld and you can use the angel to shoot arrows at assorted flying monsters.  You can also direct the citizens of the city to expand their road network in various directions and to destroy the lairs of the flying monsters which stops the monsters from spawning. You occasionally have to use your god powers to assist the citizens as well (Lightning to clear brush so that the city can expand further, rain to put out burning buildings, etc.)

This continues until you level up and are able to go to the next city. I honestly really enjoyed playing this game and played it for a quite a bit longer than usual for my reviews. Up next, we will see if ActRaiser's sequel can live up to the innovation of the original.

9/10

The 7th Saga

The 7th Saga

1993

Produce/Enix

Genre: RPG

I have a funny story. When I was a kid, maybe a year or 2 after the SNES was first release, my dad had a friend at work who was a huge Nintendo fan and had almost every game available. Sometimes my dad would bring home games that his coworker had lent him for me to play for a while, one of them was a RPG, I can't really remember much about this RPG, but I loved playing it and I feel like I would know it if I saw it, so I was excited by The 7th Saga because it very well might have been my long lost SNES RPG. Although, having played it for a bit, I definitely don't think this game is it.

The game begins with out choosing a character and going out into this town. The king comes to talk to you and says he needs your help finding some magic runes or something. I don't know, I could never really get into fantasy RPG plots, they're always the same basic thing: Hero needs to find magic widget, hero meets part, hero does Lord of the Rings'esque walking around, hero fights big boss, the end.

This is the overworld screen. Probably the coolest feature of this game is that rather than having random battles in the overworld screen like RPGs usually do, In this game you have that nice radar to your upper right which shows the position of battles relative to your character. you generally still can't avoid them though as the enemies move much faster than your character and seem to swarm towards him. A nice visual touch is that when a battle begins, there is a cool mode 7 animation of the move from overhead to 3rd person perspective with the overworld map, so that wherever you are on the overworld map will appear as the background in battles as seen below.

The battles are standard RPG turn based battles, nothing really to write about them.

One of the most defining characteristics of this game is it's difficulty. I'm not a huge RPG guy but I've certainly played plenty of them and usually can get by just fine in them, but in this game I honestly had difficulty right off the bat as even two to three battles with early enemies will completely drain your health. The 7th Saga's Wikipedia article states that difficulty only increases later in the game (Including one frustrating part of the game where it can easily be rendered unplayable due to it's impossible difficulty). I know it's tough to give a fair critique of this sort of game having played it for only a short period of time, but hey, the purpose of this whole blog is just to give a short review, if you want in depth stuff you can get it at IGN or something.

The game's audio is definitely a high point for me. The song that plays in the first town is especially catchy. Overall I found the difficulty level to be too high too early on to really get pulled into this otherwise relatively innovative RPG

4/10