A spiritual successor to ActRaiser, which I finished the remake of not that long ago and boy, do I appreciate ActRaiser so much more after playing this. I wasn't glad at the end, it was frustrating. So basically the game tells the story of Helios, the son of man and god that is one of the last old gods that came with Father Sky and Mother Earth that drove away chaos and created mankind, but after they left the new gods appeared and scattered humanity across the continents leaving Helios to protect mankind.
In ActRaiser fashion you do this by going through an action scene where Helios in an angel form defeat monsters and in the end fight a boss. After that you enter the world stage where you help the humans through building farms, houses and defence towers to fight off the waves of enemies that the new gods sends to you. You open their lairs and there is new action scenes and in the final lair you defeat the area boss. Rinse and repeat for stages, that eerily follows the same progress like ActRaiser. You have the plains, followed by a desert, followed an island, then a mountain range and finally a snow area.
I don't know if this game cross mingled with the remake since I feel that certain aspects, like the tower defence and characters speaking made it over to the remake. Of course there is some problems that they missed that made ActRaiser better. First off, the story. A god that slept for unknown time after a stalemate with the devil that then wakes up and has to protect its people are a more intriguing start. What is Helios excuse in this game for not interfering earlier? Another thing that the world was more connected in ActRaiser, you had to progress a bit in each zone to get for example music from the desert to use in BloodPool to calm the citizens and you connected the starting area with DeadPool through creating roads and so on. And also, even if its fun to have more control over buildings and such, it's a dissonance in the story since you hardly impact the people with miracles, you just build and the reason you build is that you have to create the defence, and your limit is actually how much wood there is in any given stage. So quickly I learned that you cut down the wood as fast as possible, then build defence towers (and I mostly just got the basic arrow towers since it did its job). No SimCity or Civilization here. Which causes another problem in storytelling. In the original ActRaiser, the larger the population, the more worshipper and the greater power you had. Here? Upgrade through the action scenes. Why do I care about the people again?
But all that is small nitpicks that don't affect the overall enjoyment of the game, no, the thing that makes me mad is the combat in the action scenes. I hate the enemies. You have arrows flying everywhere from traps and enemies out of reach that you have to avoid. Don't get me started on the final stages where you have exploding enemies that blows up in your face or the kamikaze bats that been there since the first action scene (gives me Dragon Quest II flashbacks). Bosses are a bit boring since it's basically swipe at them with your sword and block with your shield with one exception, the damn Queen of Ice, a giant owl which you have to fight over a pit of spikes with moving plattforms. And you have to fight her twice, thank god there was a save before and I could chose to fight her first in the damn boss rush mode. Her lair was the most annoying of them all since there was no save so after every defeat you had to go through that stage of endurance again and again, was so close to quiting the game then. But I didn't and finished the whole game.
Never gonna play this game again. Graphics is alright, but the music is lacking in comparison to ActRaiser, which is kinda funny since the main theme was composed by the original composer of Actraisers music. The game is to frustrating, but it was cheap since it was on sale and I think I pretty much used some gold points for it. Could have saved it for a better game, but they can't all be winners.
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