i've never played this but it looked weird and cool and i wanted to play a game that's at least one of if not both of those. i saw there's a fairly new remake/successorthing but it looked weird in the not-as-cool way. weird old games are cooler to me than weird new games, don't ask me to explain why i think this

when i first started the game and there was this whole XMB-ish command menu before i could get into the first platforming segment i worried it was a "keep the manual open" type game, but i got a handle on things pretty quickly. i have just learned upon researching to write about it that i am in fact (in the original japanese version) God, as in God God, and the antagonist of the game is Satan, as in, you guessed it, Satan Satan. i thought i was just some guy who was kind of a god guy. thus i hereby declare it a sin to ask God how many times he died to the first centaur boss

then it took me to the city-building segment where enemies were still hurting me in realtime and it was the most overwhelming thing i have experienced in life. as far as i could tell it is mostly a shoot-em-up where i'm protecting townspeople as they kind of passively build stuff in the background. i've never played anything remotely like this. "god game?" i don't know if i want that kind of responsibility. i'm controlling God and a naked baby archer angel now

i have a Miracle Menu but my powers are all very situational and one-and-done. so far there doesn't seem like much strategy involved at all really, which is kind of nice. when i heard about the town management aspect i thought okay it's a simulation game from 1990 so i will most likely immediately be confused and get perma-gameover. but they sprinkled in some "being a japanese console game" so it is in fact super simple and linear in that regard

every few minutes archer junior tells me "i know it's unexpected but the people have something to say". it's not that unexpected on account of it happens every few minutes and generally people say things. the whole christianity thing would be a lot cooler if they just spent the whole year building big bombs never mind i realized they do in fact do this and it's actually not that cool

it remains to be seen whether the few times i've let my population get blasted by dragons will royally screw me over by the end. there is apparently a "max population" for each town according to this wiki, and after building all i can on every plot i am not at that population. also sorry for how crusty the CRT filter looks in video recordings, i will not be changing it

second commandment or whatever: thou shalt not question whether God had to look up a guide for this sphinx boss

i got worried when the music changed for the first time ever. turns out it was just that

after i beat the boss for this town they dragged me down from heaven to tell me everyone's dying from a plague suddenly. i couldn't figure out whether earth wind or fire would cure a plague so i looked it up and saw that the cure comes from another town, two towns ahead!! i was just progressing through towns in the order they were presented, because they clearly go up in difficulty in the platforming stages. so now i was worried i'd messed up and a ton of people were going to die/become atheist in the time it took me to work through that other town

fortunately this game is in a constant state of reminding me that it is nowhere near as difficult or stressful as any other sim game, and no one dies over time. the difficulty scaling is really strange, because upon entering a fresh new town it's an immediate mad dash to seal away all the monster spawning points which are constantly spitting out guys who try to kill my guys. and i need my guys to seal away those guys!! then once that's done all i'm doing is sitting and waiting while every available plot of land gets built on. i go and make food

action stages are kind of hard but not hard because they always give me a full health restore before the boss, so i don't care much about getting hit. i get a powerful magic spell with limited charges, and there's an item pickup in each stages that gives me another charge, but my charges don't reset when i die so really the best tactic is to keep picking it up then dying until i can just walk into the boss room and use my magic over and over. don't know what the mechanics are of any boss past like the third one don't care

when i said earlier these weather miracles were situational. they are but. there was one town where i had to cause an earthquake to connect an island to the mainland, and that's all it did. so when i couldn't figure out how to get rid of this icy ground i figured trying an earthquake would either do that or nothing. oops

oh i just had a boss rush left before fighting the Bad Satan. it was a little difficult and took me a few tries because i couldn't use my cheese tactic and i had to go to bible studies and actually learn what the bosses do. that's ActRaiser!! i enjoyed it somewhat. i have this weird desire to play the rest of Quintet's games now since apparently a few of them are related. ActRaiser 2 totally ditches the god game stuff and is a straight platformer? really want to see how that worked out, because finishing this game unlocked a new mode that's exclusively the action stages and i don't know if that'd be all that worth playing on its own

i was curious about how the population works since apparently i didn't do amazing in that department, and i'm learning there's a bunch of hidden arbitrary mechanics that determine the numbers i end up with. i'm currently scrolling down an exhaustingly long gamefaq explaining this and i can't believe how deceptively simple this game turned out to be. at no point whilst playing was i able to come up with any ideas as to what i could be doing differently. i say build and people build that's IT

after the final boss the angel spends about ten minutes taking me across every town to very slowly comment on how people and the world are so beauty.....it was an unexpectedly heartfelt ending that actually had me feeling a litt--

"on longer" lmaooo