YMMV / ActRaiser

• Awesome Music: Both games have fantastic scores contributed by Yuzo Koshiro. Aside from being deeply rich and powerful musically, they also sound nearly orchestral—a phenomenal achievement for cartridge based games, especially with the first being so early on in the SNES library.
• Demonic Spiders: The Skull Head enemies in the simulation sections — they can move fast, cause massive damage to your angel, take twice as many hits to kill as the second-strongest simulation enemy, and level your towns with earthquakes if you leave them alone for too long. Thankfully, they've been considerably nerfed in Renaissance; while they can still destroy multiple buildings at the same time and take the most hits out of any flying enemy to kill, it's not nearly as many (5 arrows vs 8 in the original), they're easier to hit thanks to the Angel's arrows having slight homing properties, they don't zoom across the map without warning and take a huge chunk of the Angel's health if he's in their way anymore and their earthquakes now only destroy a 3x3 area at most.
• Funny Moments: This moment in Renaissance during the Northwall missions:
  Angel: By all means, Taia. Speak and be heard, for I am the right hand of Fire and Life.
  Taia: Right…hand? Where is the left?
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Magical Stardust spell, oh so much. It essentially makes the bosses much easier than the levels, since if you save your MP for the boss fight and then spam Magical Stardust, you can easily kill every single boss. The best part is that it's found in the second area of the game.
  • Although it's not found until near the end of the game, the Magical Aura spell makes boss battles pitifully easy. It's even possible to kill the arctic wyvern - normally one of the toughest bosses in the game - without taking a single point of damage just by casting magic aura every time he swoops at you.
• Goddamned Bats: Most visible in Bloodpool Act I, where birds will easily knock you into pools of water and kill you.
  • Also Napper Bats, the first monsters found in simulation mode; a single arrow blips one out of existence, and their large wingspans make them easy targets from the north or south. They are nonetheless annoying because they often spawn from two or three different lairs at once, are very difficult to shoot from the side, and (true to their name) kidnap groups of your subjects when left alone and carry them off, never to be seen again.
• Goddamned Boss: The Spawners in Renaissance's monster lairs seem to be completely aware of the fact that there's a time limit in those sections, and as the game goes on, they become better and better at keeping you busy and/or incapacitated. It's bad enough when they're firing Bullet Hell curtains of fire at you constantly; it gets worse as they also start to keep you pinned down with respawning enemies, teleport between a few fixed positions, or straight-up start constantly moving around the entire stage as you progress- perhaps the most egregious are the ones that force you to fight an Act I boss alongside it.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The cheery bubbling noise that accompanies the "Town Under Construction" message. It means your city is growing!
  • In the simulation sections, your angel doesn't die from losing all his HP, but he can't shoot arrows in this state, turning your townspeople into sitting ducks for monsters. However, the angel gets some HP back when the town expands; the cheery bubbling noise indicates that you can once again kick monster butt.
• Polished Port: ActRaiser Renaissance is a fantastic remake of the original game that adds on to what was already fun about ActRaiser whilst polishing up the rough parts. It also adds a lot more story with a bigger, more memorable cast of characters and changes the original game's infamous Downer Ending.
• Porting Disaster: The 2004 mobile phone port of the first game has horrible controls, no music, only three levels (the final boss being the Manticore), and no simulation mode.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: ActRaiser 2 is one of the sharper ones in video game history. Although you have more combat options such as gliding, the enemies do more damage and are much harder to avoid, and the platforming is a lot trickier. You also lack the overpowered magic spells. Renaissance is also generally more challenging, although not nearly as brutal.
• Sequelitis: The first game is remembered quite fondly, with a nice blend of platforming, role-playing-game elements, and the town creation segments combining for a Genre-Busting game. The second game took out most of what made the first game memorable in favor of a straight-up platformer, and when combined with the massive increase in difficulty it received, it's generally seen in a far more negative light. Though it does have its fair share of fans.
  • Averted in the case of Renaissance, which takes the first game and adds to it considerably on every level. Which includes another level after you kick Tanzra's ass!
• Scrappy Mechanic: Bridges in the first two regions (Fillmore and Bloodpool). If you want to max out your population, in addition to scoring well in the action stages, you need to follow rather strict building directions in order not to waste your limit of 128 buildings, which includes bridges in that total, and once a bridge is built, there's no way to destroy it. Renaissance thankfully makes this a non-issue, provided you use enough caution to not overuse bridges to give the tower defense enemies a straight shot to their targets.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The music that plays over the credits has a knock-off of the 20th Century Fox fanfare and parts of the World Tree theme (AKA Northwall Act II) sound inspired by Star Wars. Some parts are also very reminiscent of Gustav Holst's The Planets, especially Northwall's final dungeon theme.
  • Double subverted in Renaissance. When you defeat Tanzra, you get a new credits theme with the original fanfare removed. However, when you beat the post-game content, it also has credits, and a remastered version of the original theme, that has a fanfare which sounds even closer to the actual 20th Century Studios one.
• That One Boss:
  • While the Minotaurus is an easy boss to begin with, it becomes this in the Boss Rush near the end of the first game, due to the massive speed boost it gets. It's virtually impossible to dodge its attacks, especially if you want to do any damage yourself.
  • Without the sword beam powerup, the dragon boss in Aitos Act 1 can become this in Professional Mode.

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