Michael Sholars
Features & Opinions Editor
ActRaiser was a daring, original title back in its day.
It dared to be two games at once and it was brave enough to approach some relatively mature subject matter during a decidedly immature period in the video game industry.
Developed by Quintet and published by Enix, this 20-year-old action role-playing game for the Super Nintendo was not the first video game I’ve ever played. It is not the best game ever made for the system, nor is it the most graphically impressive. It spawned only a single (inferior) sequel and, by all accounts, it will end up as a footnote in the pages of gaming history.
But it is perhaps for all of these reasons that I love the game so much.
I’ve beaten it at least a dozen times throughout my life and I have the entire soundtrack uploaded on my iPod. Above all else, I love ActRaiser because it inspired my first ontological crisis at the tender age of seven.
The plot of ActRaiser is simple, but effective: you play as “The Master,” a guardian entity that created the world. A nameless angel informs you that in your absence, a demon named Tanzra has wrought chaos and misfortune across the land and it’s time for you to restore balance.
To understand why this storyline might have been controversial, you must understand the video-gaming climate into which ActRaiser was released: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had sold millions, Mario was now a more recognizable figure than Mickey Mouse, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) had just been released a few months earlier. Nintendo was, essentially, an unstoppable force. Nintendo called the shots and game developers had no choice but to play by their rules. This would have been fine if Nintendo hadn’t quickly built a reputation for ridiculously stringent censorship rules.
Any game released on a Nintendo system had to have all traces of violence, religious or sexual references or any random act that the company’s censorship committee found unsavoury removed. This eventually lead to a whitewashed version of the ultra-violent fighting game Mortal Kombat 2 for the SNES that had all of the notoriously bloody finishing moves, known as “fatalities”, removed, and all of the red blood replaced with white “sweat.”
In ActRaiser’s original Japanese version, the protagonist was named God” and his adversary was “Satan” As you marvel at the sheer ingenuity that went into that naming scheme, consider that despite those name changes, Enix essentially released a SNES game about God fighting Satan and his minions in the middle of Nintendo’s draconian censorship policy days.
Not only was it high concept, it was also quite fun to play.
ActRaiser’s gameplay was divided between two very different segments. In the action stages, it played like a typical 16-bit platform would. You controlled The Master-or rather, a reanimated statue of the deity – ran from left to right, hitting enemies with your sword, and eventually defeating the boss demon that was the source of misery for the local villagers. To reach those action stages, you needed to play segments that could only be described as SimCity with angels.
Each town had its own mini-storyline, which would often affect the game as a whole. In the desert town, one of the villagers becomes lost in the desert. Although you bring a miraculous rainfall in order to give him water, he still dies. In their grief, the villagers invent the concept of music and the resulting song is so beautiful that it stops a civil war in another town later on in the game.
On the topic of beautiful music, ActRaiser had a soundtrack worthy of its subject matter, with sweeping orchestral tunes that confidently showed off the capabilities of the SNES’ primitive sound chip.
Finally, the most affecting part of playing ActRaiser for me was watching the ending sequence. After defeating Tanzra, The Master realizes that all of his temples are empty. Indeed, he feels himself growing weaker, as people have stopped worshipping him. As a montage of all the towns you have saved plays across the screen, your angel muses “people may be most happy when not in need of help from their master, or when they have forgotten him.”
With that, the camera pulls up into the sky and the credits roll. The ending of ActRaiser still sticks with me today, not just because of how brave it was at the time, but because of the lengthy conversation it prompted me to have with my mom about the nature of God. It probably wasn’t groundbreaking stuff – I was seven years old – but the fact that a video game could lead to a discussion about real issues was unheard of at the time, Actrasier has earned Actraiser a permanent place in my gaming library.
