 Act Razor for Super Nintendo has long been one of the most interesting, unique, and ambitious games made for the system. You play as God, you fight demons and creatures and bosses, and with the help of this little angel helper, you guide your people to prosperity by helping them seal off monster layers and by completing tasks that build up their faith by introducing farming, music, clothing, medicine, all sorts of stuff. With the entire play through going back and forth between town building simulation segments, and side-scrolling action levels. It's a good time, it's a great game on its own, and it also felt like the start of a really promising series. There's just so much to build on and improve here. Actraiser 2 was released a few years later, but that was a straight-ahead action platformer. It's still a decent game, but it just didn't feel like Actraiser. It didn't really capitalize on the ideas of the first game. Well, here we are decades later with Sonic Power to developing Actraiser Renaissance published by Square Enix, available for Switch, PS4, Steam, Android, and iOS. And curiously, right away, you'll see the graphics appear to be pre-rendered. Okay, that's a choice, I guess. I don't really mind because, you know, that's kind of what I'm used to, but apparently when this game was first released, there were all sorts of stuttering issues with scrolling, but that's since been patched for the most part. But still, right away we're off to a bit of a shaky start, but hey, at least the music sounds awesome. The original composer, Yuzo Koshiro, is back, and as usual, his work does not disappoint. The game starts very similarly to the original, where you meet your angel helper, go down to the surface to kill some monsters, only in this game you get lots and lots of helper text, and lots and lots of dialogue from villagers. If you find this kind of thing annoying, keep in mind that the whole playthrough isn't this text-heavy, just the first few sections to introduce how stuff works. The game controls similarly to the original with a few extra inputs, your sword attacks are a bit more varied, and you can quickly evade enemies, which comes in handy. After you beat the first boss, then it's up to you to guide your villagers over to these monster layers to seal them up. In the meantime, you have to protect them with your angel helper by shooting these demons flying around, and that grants you points that you can use to eradicate the monsters for good. You also use those points to get rid of environmental hazards in the way, using a set of god powers like lightning, rain, sunlight, and so on. Your villagers slowly build up their town and provide you with resources to help defend themselves against more waves of infading monsters, so you gotta fly around, gather stuff, and place barricades, towers, gatehouses, and yep, suddenly you're playing a tower defense game. The monsters slowly wander in from off the map, you keep gathering resources and setting up defenses, and it's all very tedious and downright boring, and alright, I gotta rant for a bit, so excuse the editorial. Now, when playing the original back in 1991, even as a kid, I had someone of a reasonable understanding that the town building simulation is going to be limited. It's very basic stuff because, uh, it kinda had to be, but it still had its charm, especially when you had to help out individual villagers with specific tasks. The pipe dream, at least for me, was that any sort of sequel or follow-up was going to make the town building sim sections a lot more intricate, like maybe include specific building types, or create different types of soldiers, and have better resource management specific to wood, or gold, or food, or whatever, and just, you know, have a lot more stuff to do. But instead, the direct sequel Actraiser 2 just abandoned the town building altogether, a big disappointment. But hey, maybe Actraiser Renaissance can right that wrong, bring back the town sim sections and make them closer to a real-time strategy game like Age of Empires, right? But no, that's not what happened. The town building sections are back, but they're pretty much the same as the first game, for better or for worse. Instead of adding a lot more detail to that part of the game, we get these long, boring tower defense sections, and yeah. I don't know about you, but I got a little burnt out on tower defense back in the 2000s when I was killing time at work playing desktop tower defense. I mean, to be fair, this is a lot better than SoulSeraf, a quote-unquote spiritual sequel to Actraiser that was a total dud, but still, enough with the tower defense stuff, please. Alright, there are still plenty of positives in this game, though. Like to give one example, I do like the addition of having a hero you can guide around in this mode, so you're not just left sitting around waiting for your setup to fall apart. But again, I would have liked to have seen a lot more of that to help make these sections more engaging. And yeah, the side-scrolling action levels are fantastic, especially the boss fights, and they offer just the right amount of challenge. And despite how often this game will interrupt whatever it is you're doing, I did appreciate the insights into the actual villagers that you're helping. And if you complete the game, there's also an extra world called Elca Leon that you can play for, so that's pretty cool. But yeah, Actraiser Renaissance is a tricky one to recommend. The music is awesome. The action levels are great, the boss fights are fun, but the ratio between that part of the game and the boring tower defense sections is something like 3070. One of the best things about the original game is how smoothly it was paced between the action and sim sections, but the balance here just feels completely off. I got real tired with the sim sections. But I did enjoy the rest of the game quite a bit. I just wish there was more of it. So I'll say if you really, really enjoyed Actraiser on Super Nintendo, then I think you'll enjoy this game. But if you're merely looking at this game as a curiosity, then I can't help but think that you're likely to find yourself bored and frustrated. Unless, you know, you're longing for those new grounds days of Bloons Tower Defense. I think Actraiser Renaissance is at least a step in the right direction, but not enough of one. And in my opinion, there's still a lot to improve here. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a follow-up that finally takes full advantage of all the great ideas in the original Actraiser. Alright, that's all for now. I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.