Square Enix's decision to remake and expand the classic Super Nintendo game ActRaiser under the new title of Actraiser Renaissance caught many gamers by surprise. Fans of the original game may have initially appeared to be delighted with the announcement, but the month since Actraiser Renaissance's release has seen mixed reactions from players. It seems that the changes Square Enix made to the original's gameplay and graphics have led to some division among fans.
Actraiser Renaissance's unique structure may have made some division inevitable—after all, the gameplay is literally divided into three different types. Players jump between side-scrolling combat sections where they must slay threats to the world, city-building sections where the world is repopulated, and new tower defense sections that weren't in the original ActRaiser. After releasing recently, fans were expecting better rehashed gameplay elements to come as a result.
Actraiser Renaissance's Tower Defense Mechanics
Several fans, including veterans who enjoyed the original ActRaiser, have argued that the main issue with the remake is the added tower defense elements. Not only are the tower defense sequences mandatory, meaning they can prevent players from advancing any further in the game until they are cleared, but they also feature major gameplay flaws. Players have little control over where they can place gatehouses, blockhouses, and the like, monsters can only be directly attacked with Miracles, and using Miracles is made unnecessarily difficult by the lack of passive SP regeneration. Making matters worse, hero characters will only attack monsters if the player is micromanaging their location, it generally requires more than one Miracle to take down a single monster, and there are a lot of potential failure parameters to manage. There are a lot of tower defense sections, too, to the point that players may find themselves spending more time on them than any other aspect of the game.
However, there are still noticeable issues even outside the tower defense mechanics, including the inability to relax and direct a town due to the constant fear of random encounters, the very noticeable tutorial interruptions, and the game not allowing players to lead their people to a monster lair and clear it out before a certain number of tower defense stages have been completed. There have also been complaints that the game's visual presentation, which bears a resemblance to claymation, is often intentionally stiff and features some questionable enemy designs. Some players also found that Actraiser Renaissance's battle graphics did not look good on a 55" TV.
Actraiser Renaissance's Fake Difficulty
Other Square Enix games have added pay-to-win functions, but Actraiser Renaissance has indulged in another frustrating flaw of modern gaming: fake difficulty created through inscrutable and uncreative applications of hard mode. Some players even warned newcomers not to try hard mode, claiming that it simply doubled the attack and health of enemies in the platforming section. This leads to battles dragging out, ruining the overall pace of the game, and turning boss battles into more of a test of patience than a test of skills. Other players strongly felt that the game had been noticeably designed for mobile first, best seen in the PC port and would explain why the anime-inspired character designs could be mistaken for the cast of a mobile gacha game.
It may also interest fans to hear that the tower defense sections, despite being so heavily focused on in the game, do not appear to be affected by the transition to hard mode. This may suggest that they were already difficult enough that adding hard versions was deemed unnecessary. It's also possible that the tower defense portions were added onto the game after most of the difficulty had already been established. Whatever the case, Square Enix fans who would prefer their fantasy worlds with a little less tower defense may prefer exploring Final Fantasy 14 with Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Actraiser Renaissance is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, and Switch.