ActRaiser

Imagine you're not a hero with a sword but a god himself, descended to earth to wrest the world from the clutches of demons. This is exactly the audacious idea that ActRaiser, from the studio Quintet, brought — one of the most distinctive titles of the entire Super Nintendo era.

The genius of ActRaiser lies in the way it blends two seemingly incompatible genres. In the action part you enter the stone statue of a warrior and, in a classic side-scrolling platformer with a sword, clear the landscape of monsters and defeat the bosses who hold power over individual regions. Once the land is cleansed of evil, the game transforms into a city-building god game: from above you watch over the people, guide them in founding towns, drain swamps, burn forests and protect your charges from enemy raids using divine miracles. As civilization grows and offers sacrifices, your hero grows stronger for further action expeditions.

This alternation of pace is brilliant precisely because each part gives the other meaning. You fight so that people can live; and the better they thrive, the stronger you become. This creates the rare feeling that your deeds truly affect a world you watch grow from the first hut to a flourishing settlement.

An extraordinary chapter is the music of Yuzo Koshiro. His orchestral, monumental compositions rank among the absolute peak of the SNES sound chip and are still cited as an example of what the console was capable of in the hands of a brilliant composer. The soundtrack elevates ActRaiser from a good game into an unforgettable experience.

ActRaiser remains one of a kind, because no one ever managed to fully repeat its bold combination of action and building. The sequel, ActRaiser 2, dropped the building component entirely and bet solely on action, thereby paradoxically confirming how original the first instalment was. That is why the game holds cult status among connoisseurs.

Why play it: For an unusual, and today practically unrepeated, mix of action platformer and civilization building, crowned by one of the best orchestral soundtracks on the SNES.