9. ActRaiser
Developer: Quintet Japanese developer Quintet released a number of excellent games for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 90's. While they are perhaps most fondly remembered for their Soul Blazer trilogy, it is their debut game on the SNES, ActRaiser, that caught the attention of this author perhaps more than any other early game for Nintendo's legendary console, including Super Mario World. ActRaiser was a stunning game in it's presentation right from the get go. It had some of the prettiest graphics that had ever seen on a home console at the time, with a unique visual flair that fully harnessed the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 scaling and rotation abilities. The music was absolutely killer, and the game's soundtrack still ranks among the best in the entire SNES library. But what made, and still makes, ActRaiser a one-of-a-kind gaming experience is the way it somehow successfully fuses together two genres that should never conceivably be fused together: side-scrolling action platforming and city-building. In ActRaiser, you are God. Seriously. You play as a divine being who was defeated by another dark being of power known as The Evil One, and after your defeat in battle, The Evil One took over your lands and corrupted your people. As you slowly rise from your slumber that inflicted you after your defeat, it becomes your goal to defeat The Evil One once and for all and win back your lands. The catch is the only way you can restore your power is to replenish your peoples' faith in you. This is done in two ways: defeating the minions of The Evil One (via the 2D action segments) and helping your people restore their lands so that they can be happy once again (via the city-building). The city building portion of the game, which is overseen by a cherub that is your servant, is very streamlined and nowhere nearly as complex as other games of the era like SimCity and Civilization, and this is a good thing. Playing as the faithful cherub servant, you help guide the people of the world restore their farms, homes, and mines while taking care of pesky invading demons with your bow and arrow. As the peoples' land begins to become more and more fully restored, their faith in you increases, which increases your power as well. Every so often, the people become unable to proceed their restoration efforts due to the interference of one of the minions of The Evil One. It is then where you take control of a statue of an ancient warrior and proceed into the beautifully-rendered labyrinths to destroy these minions and allow your people to keep advancing, who in turn become happier and more faithful. It's an addictive system that works incredibly well and leads to some very exciting gameplay moments. Watching your civilization flourish is just as satisfying as slaying the sinister bosses in the dungeons, and it's remarkable how Quintet was able to balance these two entirely different genres into a cohesive, fully-realized, and extremely fun video game. Whenever anyone asks me what franchise from the past I'd like to see rebooted, I always say ActRaiser. For some reason, thinking about more modern city-building simulators like Tropico and modern action games like Darksiders and Devil May Cry makes me giddy at the possibilities of what ActRaiser could become today in the hands of the right developer. Quintet went on to release a sequel to ActRaiser on the SNES, but it completely excluded the city-building elements for a full on action game, which ironically was a much weaker action-platformer than its predecessor. Hopefully, we haven't seen the last of this very unique franchise that is still ripe with potential.