A very conditional recommendation. This remake of Actraiser does a lot of interesting things to improve the original classic, and a bunch of other things to... ahem... change it...
Actraiser was originally a SNES game where you played a god repopulating a land, fighting monsters and building a civilization for your people. In practice, this glued two gameplay styles together. You had an action platformer that played like traditional Castlevania and then you had civilization management, and this remake keeps to that trend but changing so much from the original that it has its own identity, for better or worse.
The better part is easily within the action platforming. Apart from the rather ugly 3D model crafted sprites, this part of the game saw a lot of improvements. The levels are all shaken up with slightly different takes on the original. The same set pieces are there but now you have a few branching paths, a few new gimmicks, enough to differentiate the game. In addition you also have a few new moves that grant fairly generous iframes that allow you to play fairly aggressively. Your uppercut and down slash moves have iframes so skewed in your favor that you can use them just about anywhere it looks good to do so where most platformers like this with moves like that would have a 50/50 chance of you taking contact damage if your hit didn't kill the enemy. This design is a little rough and never quite feels natural, but it favors letting you do fun and bold moves more often than not, giving the game a really strong marriage of traditional platformer design with some modern action design concepts without compromising the former's demanding difficulty or the latter's player freedom. Even better, you can freely replay any of these action levels, something the original game lacked.
The sim segments... that's another story. In the original SNES game, these sim segments were trivial. Were they not so short and novel, they would have been totally wasted time. You had no real input or decisions to make, and all you did was draw a path for the people to build, shoot monsters, and periodically cast godly spells to destroy or improve things. Little story vignettes, that were often really effective at making you appreciate and care about your people and their struggles, tended to play out in these and really they were the only interesting things happening in this mode. (I'm hard on it but for the original game, this was a novel game design never attempted before and rarely seen since, so they remained interesting all through the playtime.) The remake expands these segments considerably, but not by actually giving you more abilities. No, these segments are drawn out about tripling the amount of cutscenes. A new hero character is introduced in every town with his own backstory and issues interacting with your people. The old stories still play out, but they run alongside these new hero character stories. Along with the sim mode giving a quest structure to constantly tell you what to do, the sim mode now tends to play for about 30 seconds of play, then "QUEST COMPLETE" fanfare, quest redeem cutscene, story cutscene, then tower defense segment, tower defense complete cutscene, cutscene explaining the next quest, then repeat the cycle. Now I will say the art and writing for these is really good, with a translation by someone who has clearly read a few books in his life... but HOLY COW they kill the pacing. You are stuck in these sim segments for hours when you could clear them in about 10-15 minutes in the original game. I cannot believe I am saying this after having played TGAA but this game is throwing me in VN segments with great art, great music, great writing, great characters, but pacing so abominable that I am having trouble finishing this damn game.
Oh right, tower defense segments, I guess I should get to those. Let me start by saying you should play on Normal, not Hard, just to make these go faster. More on that later though... These are a completely new gameplay feature for the remake and the story loves them so much you tend to have to do about five of the damn things per world, and the plot clearly spins its wheels dragging out already resolved drama to make room for one or even two more than necessary per chapter. During the sim segments you can build a few towers in your town to block enemies and shoot things, but you are limited to only a half dozen of the things and the currency for them is dropped randomly during the sim segments. You can literally be just sitting there waiting for it to drop so you can build another tower you need for the next defense segment. Most of your time in the TD gameplay is directing your hero units around and occasionally placing temporary barricades or casting spells. Having two heroes you direct to move to hotspots is fun for a while but not nearly as fun as Square thinks it is. Unfortunately, that is really the sum total of the strategy you bring to bear in these segments. Move heroes, grind to upgrade towers, and cast a spell once a decade or so. Where you can place barricades is arbitrarily limited and in at least one TD segment, the enemies could just march straight from spawn to my base without allowing me to place a barricade anywhere along their route. There is no strategy to this mode and for some reason Square thinks the "Hard" difficulty should apply to this dismal mode, boosting the stats of the enemies for no reason and as no test of skill. You can freely change the difficulty if you insist on playing Hard in the action scenes for gamer cred though.
I really like most of Actraiser Renaissance. Lots of love and talent went into it along with the some of the goofy madness that made old school game design experimental and fun, but the bad parts are considerable. Even if you're skipping cutscenes (And I don't recommend it. Without the story parts, the sim segments of even the original Actraiser would have had nothing of value to them at all.), the pacing of the bloated sim segments is almost unbearable. I get Actraiser is a tough act to follow. Even Actraiser 2 didn't follow Actraiser 1, and the only folks who have tried since are a few indies, but I know what a game trying desperately to avoid being yelled at for being too short looks like. It's still a fine game with a lot to offer, but you are going to have to work through the bad parts.
