What Is ActRaiser Renaissance?

ActRaiser Renaissance is Square Enix's remake of Quintet's first game, released on September 23, 2021, the same day it was announced, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, iOS, and Android. It was notable before it was played: a Quintet catalogue title, dormant for decades inside a famously tangled rights situation, simply appeared. Its existence became the strongest public evidence that Square Enix could still publish Quintet's work, a thread that leads directly to Terranigma's return.

The remake keeps the original's two-part structure, side-scrolling action stages around a god's-eye town-building simulation, and changes the flow of both. The action stages gain extra input commands; the simulation maps gain tower defense segments, siege quests in which the angel and the town's heroes hold the settlement against waves of monsters while it grows.

It also adds what remakes rarely dare: a new post-game land, Alcaleone, that the 1990 game never had. And it brought back the original composer. Yuzo Koshiro fully recreated his 1990 soundtrack and composed fifteen new tracks, each rendered in both the original Super Nintendo sample style and the remake's higher fidelity audio.