ActRaiser 2

About ActRaiser 2

ActRaiser 2 (1993) is Quintet's SNES sequel that drops the original's city-building for pure side-scrolling action, in which a winged Master fights the seven deadly sins in a story drawn from Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy.

ActRaiser 2 in Depth

The game keeps only the platform action of the first ActRaiser, removing the city-building simulation. As the Master ("God" in the Japanese version), the player watches over the world from a floating palace, hears the people's plight and descends to fight the monsters. Each area has two acts: the first against minions of a lesser demon named after an unfavourable condition, the second against monsters of a greater evil named after one of the seven deadly sins. The Master now has working wings and must jump, fly, fall and float between platforms, armed with a sword and a shield that deflects some attacks. He relies heavily on magic, charged by holding a button and released to use up one of a limited number of scrolls, taking different forms depending on his position. Higher difficulty lengthens the charge time and toughens enemies, and the final area, Death Heim, cannot be reached on easy.

Tanzra ("Satan" in Japan), once the Master's servant, led a rebellion and was banished from the Sky Castle. Revived by his seven deadly sins, he unleashes them on the world. After defeating the sins and the mechanical false god Destruction in the Tower of Souls, the Master rams the Sky Castle into Death Heim to break Tanzra's barrier and faces him frozen in a lake of ice, like Satan in Dante's Inferno.

Making ActRaiser 2

Quintet developed ActRaiser 2, and Enix released it for the Super Famicom in Japan on 29 October 1993, with Western releases following. It had no direct story link to the first game. Readers of Super Famicom Magazine gave it 20.3 out of 30, and critics were generally favourable. Quintet reported 180,000 copies sold worldwide: 100,000 in North America and 40,000 each in Japan and Europe. Total! ranked it 38th among SNES games in 1995, and in 2018 Complex placed it 81st, saying it was great despite being strictly a platformer without the first game's god elements. Quintet began a third ActRaiser for the Nintendo 64 but never finished it.