When I say "crazy" i don't mean that it was nuts. I just mean that it was a departure from almost anything else that had ever existed up to this point and honestly, there hasn't been anything like it released ever since. I have never played a game that combined city-building in a "Age of Empires" type of way with a side-scrolling action sword-fighting game all in one package.
The combination of the two almost seem like two separate games but somehow, it just kind of worked and I have very fond memories of this game to this day.
The game was called "Actraiser" and it was not something that most people even got to experience.
src
Released in 1990, Actraiser was one of the early releases for the SNES console. There was stiff competition from Sega Genesis still at this point. It was released by Enix before Squaresoft acquired them and perhaps this title was something that inspired the eventual merger.
I feel as though the idea of having a build mode or "god build mode" built into what was otherwise an action game was a wise but daring decision and it might have been inspired by the popularity of other building games such as SimCity, which was all the rage in the early 90's.
src
The game begins with you building a city and helping it to thrive while operating an angel of sorts to build buildings as well as fight off invading baddies that were easily dispatched if you were simply paying attention. The final objective of all of these building stages was to advance your city to a certain point and then move on to the point where you send your god-like spirit into a warrior form and go through side-scrolling stages to defeat the bosses of the land.
This part of the game is actually kind of lame and wonky and if the game had been released with ONLY the side-scrolling parts I am quite certain that the game would have been a complete failure.
src
These sections of the game weren't necessarily bad, but they just weren't anything special. The controls were a little bit off and there wasn't really much to the combat. To be honest our expectations were so low back in the 1990's that we probably would have enjoyed it anyway but the point being that while the graphics were more crisp than the NES on the Super Nintendo, there just wasn't anything particularly novel about a side-scrolling anything at this point in time.
src
It was basically the same as any other adventure game of this sort in that you would run to the right killing stuff until you eventually faced off against a boss. There was some rather tedious platforming that was a bit annoying but at least they didn't have the dreaded "knockback" any time you took damage. That was a bit of a problem back in the late 80's and early 90's and games like Ninja Gaiden took frustration to a whole new level by including this very annoying aspect into games.
The real fun in these games was actually the city building and for me and anyone else that I knew that played this game we kind of did the action sequences because we had to in order to advance. The real meat and potatoes was the city-building sections. I suppose that side-scrolling stuff made you appreciate the fun aspect of city building by breaking it up a bit because I don't think that would have stayed as fun as it was for as long as it did if it hadn't been for the action areas.
src
It all appears so silly these days but these were actually cutting-edge graphics for the time period.
To fully understand / appreciate how the game worked I think a video of gameplay is required.
That guy plays through the entire game but if you just watch the first 20 minutes and skip around I think you will get the point about how the city building was definitely a lot better than the action sections.
The fact that they were able to pull this off with gamepad shows how innovative they were at Enix because normally this sort of thing would only be fun to me using a keyboard and a mouse and that is the way it is today for me also. I loved Starcraft on PC but it was a mess on consoles.
Actraiser is one of those games that kind of surprised the people that bought it and I believe the success of the game was actually kind of a surprise to the developers as well because it was just popular enough to dictate the creation of a sequel, which I sadly never played. Perhaps I will have to emulate that later on today.
I am a big believer that sometimes things are better left in your memories though because even though I have extremely fond memories of playing this game way back when, I would imagine it would bore me pretty quickly these days. I wouldn't mind if they did an updated version of it though and it appears as though they did precisely that with a mobile game around 20 years ago but kind of screwed it up by making it a tower defense game rather than a city building game. I never played it and I have no intention of doing so.