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Divine Raising and Blazing
Jan. 21st, 2009 06:31 pmI've spoken before about the concept of God in video games, and there was an early Super Nintendo game that not only featured God, but let you control Him.
Now, the English translation only referred to the player's character as "The Master," due to some weird rules of the time about avoiding controversy by leaving out religious terms entirely. It was pretty obvious who this Master was, though. Your job is to rebuild civilization by fighting off enemies in action sequences (in which the Master incarnates as a statue), and by performing miracles to help the people in their building efforts. This latter part of the game plays out like a strategy game, although it's much more straightforward than actual strategy games are (at least as far as I've seen). Still, it's an interesting combination of different types of gameplay, and Enix really dropped the ball by making ActRaiser 2 a straight-up action game, thereby destroying what was unique about the first one.
Enix also released another game that wasn't a follow-up, but had a similar theme.
In this one, you play a child of God (perhaps an angel or something of the sort), who comes to the mortal world to free the souls that are being held captive by Deathtoll, the Devil figure this time around. As you rescued these souls, they would return to their living forms, which included people, animals, plants, and even some inanimate objects. (I suppose it was a rather animistic game.) And as they're restored, their living spaces are as well. There was also one part where you had to go inside of a painting by the great scientist Dr. Leo. I honestly don't remember too much else about it, but I watched my brother play it all the way through, and it was definitely a clever game.
Now, the English translation only referred to the player's character as "The Master," due to some weird rules of the time about avoiding controversy by leaving out religious terms entirely. It was pretty obvious who this Master was, though. Your job is to rebuild civilization by fighting off enemies in action sequences (in which the Master incarnates as a statue), and by performing miracles to help the people in their building efforts. This latter part of the game plays out like a strategy game, although it's much more straightforward than actual strategy games are (at least as far as I've seen). Still, it's an interesting combination of different types of gameplay, and Enix really dropped the ball by making ActRaiser 2 a straight-up action game, thereby destroying what was unique about the first one.
Enix also released another game that wasn't a follow-up, but had a similar theme.
In this one, you play a child of God (perhaps an angel or something of the sort), who comes to the mortal world to free the souls that are being held captive by Deathtoll, the Devil figure this time around. As you rescued these souls, they would return to their living forms, which included people, animals, plants, and even some inanimate objects. (I suppose it was a rather animistic game.) And as they're restored, their living spaces are as well. There was also one part where you had to go inside of a painting by the great scientist Dr. Leo. I honestly don't remember too much else about it, but I watched my brother play it all the way through, and it was definitely a clever game.
