You Got Your City Builder In My Platformer

Its been over thirty years since Actraiser first released on the Super Nintendo. It made an immediate impact in the early days of that system, providing a unique vision of an action RPG which happened to also be a pretty cool city builder. As the Lord of Light, you woke from a long slumber to find the world in chaos. With a trusty angel companion you had to defeat The Evil One and save the land.

A sequel followed a couple of years later but it wasn’t particularly well received, at least compared to the original. After the less than stellar reception for Actraiser 2, that was it. Outside of a virtual console release and a port to phones the series was over, cut down before it really started.

It was never really forgotten though. Just a couple years ago Sega released SolSeraph, a game clearly meant to recapture the magic of Actraiser. While it received a mixed reception it still showed there was interest in a game of this sort. Perhaps that’s why Square Enix decided to bring the series back with Actraiser Renaissance.

While not a brand new game, this is more a remake than a remaster. It features completely redone graphics which stand up beautifully, though some may miss the pixels of the original. Gameplay looks largely the same, with both the side scrolling and city building aspects still absolutely represented. New stages, and a new boss will give even long time fans something to get excited about though. As will a remastered soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro, who did the soundtrack for the original and is also known for his work on the early Ys games, Etrian Odyssey, Shenmue, and many more.

Actraiser Renaissance is out now, on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch. You can check out the first trailer below.

Andrew Thornton

Andrew has been writing about video games for nearly twenty years, contributing to publications such as DarkStation, Games Are Fun, and the E-mpire Ltd. network. He enjoys most genres but is always pulled back to classic RPG's, with his favorite games ever including Suikoden II, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Phantasy Star IV. Don't worry though, he thinks new games are cool too, with more recent favorites like Hades, Rocket League, and Splatoon 2 stealing hundreds of hours of his life. When he isn't playing games he's often watching classic movies, catching a basketball game, or reading the first twenty pages of a book before getting busy and forgetting about it.