#oneaday Day 1000: Milestone?

I say this is "Day 1000" but apparently I've missed a whole load of days this week without realising, so for that I can only apologise. In my defence… no, I have no defence, really, so I'll just apologise and admit that it was nearly another day I forgot to write today because I've been playing Actraiser Renaissance all afternoon.

It's good. Oh, it's good. I wasn't 100% sold on the art style when they showed it at the Nintendo Direct recently, but I'm completely on board with it now. It looks and feels very much like a Saturn game; Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack even sounds like the sort of thing you would have had as Redbook audio on a CD back then. By that I mean it's brilliant, but one would expect nothing less of Koshiro, of course.

The character art is beautiful, too, and they've gone to the effort to make each settlement's NPCs look completely different from one another. This might sound like an obvious thing to do, but given that the original SNES version just had "generic man and woman" addressing you most of the time, it's just one of many significant steps forward that Actraiser Renaissance takes while still feeling very authentic to the original.

As you progress through the games, the additions to the formula become more and more apparent. The real-time strategy/tower defence element becomes much more pronounced, particularly once you start dealing with enemies that only particular types of tower or unit can take down. I ran into my first real roadblock towards the end of the Bloodpool sequence this evening; a real-time strategy sequence with a flying boss who was troublesome to take down, to say the least — particularly as one of the defeat conditions for the battle was my mage unit being incapacitated.

Thankfully, Actraiser Renaissance takes a very "modern game" approach to progression in that if you fuck up, you can just try again — or indeed you can even back out of a strategic battle in order to rejig your settlement's defences before you give it another go. This is friendly game design that keeps the challenge in place, and I very much appreciate it.

Now I'm just hoping the "Heaven and Earth" games end up getting the same treatment. It'd be fantastic to see Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma Renaissance alongside this one — and I feel it's not beyond the realm of possibility, either. We will have to wait and see, I guess!

Anyway, that's my "thousandth" day of writing this nonsense for you all. Thank you for hanging out with me while I do this, and for supporting my work, of course! I hope you continue to enjoy what I do — still plenty more where all the existing stuff came from!