ActRazer

This game has a great opening scene, although I dislike the fact that this is yet another story where an angel is evil and the way this story, while humorous, makes it feel like South Park, but also dumber in some ways. For example, Terra acts like a stereotyped female character as a joke, and the same might be true of Celes but we barely hear her say anything. Everyone from the main cast of the setting (Final Fantasy VI) gets killed probably. At least there is a really charming moment between Mimic and Cyan (whose only personality traits are to say "thou" and have a short temper).

Anyway, you play as Kefka who lost his powers after the three divine statues stopped providing him power. I am not sure how much the characterization is true to source material, but it seems pretty solid. You can definitely argue this is not the case for the little cupid guy, though, because they just become complicit with all of Kefka's plans even though they seem intent on saving the original hero of Actraiser. And because of this, the goal of the game is to destroy cities rather than save them and develop them...

On the surface, this might seem like a charming subversion of Actraiser, and it is the whole point of this game, but in reality it just makes a much simpler and less balanced game. The original Actraiser is very difficult, but this game chose to be even more sadistic and because of how things are designed, you have even less opportunity to do well. In the original game, you are supposed to be unearthing areas where artifacts can be found and securing a place for the city to grow. You are rewarded for the city prospering. Also, perhaps most importantly, you can end up uncovering spawn points for the enemy and destroy most of them. In this game, not only do all of the enemies in the level spawn immediately, but there is no way to stop them. Also, the chicken enemies are actually really difficult to avoid, at least in Normal difficulty...

By the way, you are FORCED to play Normal difficulty. It is much more like a Hard difficulty because I do not see how you could make this game harder. They should have doubled the SP on Normal because that would have been remotely fair. You can not build up SP fast enough to survive as far as I could find. Now onto the last straw for me...

The exploration/combat sections of Actraiser were known to be very hard, but ActraZer gets it to be worse somehow. The first level is actually easier than beating the first level of Actraiser (no clunky controls and survival is based on RPG combat). However, there is already a very challenging puzzle here. But on the 2nd level, things managed to get absolutely unbearable out of nowhere. First, you have to solve 4 puzzles around the same difficulty as the first to get hints and nothing else, or you could call them an answer key. You are also fighting enemies much tougher than the first area and I imagine the boss could be ridiculous since the first boss was pretty tough already. But after you solve the desert section, you go into the temple and you have to do the switch puzzle that the desert references.... But this is no ordinary switch puzzle. It has no instructions and it works in a very abstract way. I managed to break one of the locks, but I honestly feel like this is impossible with what information is given. And throughout every area there is no way to save either. So if I feel like I can not handle it anymore, I am basically forced to redo everything in the desert.

It just feels very mean-spirited and unnecessary. This game should have fixed problems with Actraiser instead of doubling down on them. This game feels very dependent on skills which you can barely use and precise controls on the town destroying sections and it is clearly trying its hardest to ramp up difficulty just as much with puzzles and RPG battles. And in my opinion, puzzles are the worst part of RPG Maker games. These puzzles are pretty clever until that switch puzzle, but I still think an RPG should never rely on puzzles.

I guess I could have played the exploration section on Easy and skipped the puzzles, but when you play on Easy, you basically are not allowed to benefit from it. Therefore, very sadistic. I already solved some very challenging puzzles and was ready to do tough RPG battles, but I was forced to quit on this stupidly impossible puzzle and it is guaranteed that the next challenges would be worse. It is a small game, most likely, but I really hate extreme content gating like this. Easy mode should have been a way to at least improve progress in Normal difficulty by getting skills, but these puzzles are just an undeniable roadblock even if that were the case.

Overall, I feel it is unfair to rate this game too lowly as it had effort put into it, but it also feels like I was just supposed to suffer for no reason on a lighthearted game and that is always the worst combination. This game feels like a 1 out of 5 for me simply because it ruined my day. If you are going to put a lot of effort into your game, you should not make it this hard to play that game.