Description
"Solo Crisis" is the "ActRaiser" game that could've been with a bit of neat history.
Released in early 1998 by, you guessed it, Quintet, "Solo Crisis" is a strategy game and "god sim" that is light on the narrative and... actually, quite a bit of stuff, but draws some parallels to Bullfrog Productions' "Populous" as well as the first ActRaiser. The game was spoken of as early as late 1996 back in magazines such as GameFan (Vol. 4, Issue 11) where the title was tentatively known as "ActRemix" (Act Remix) and "ActRaiser Gaiden" which was supposed to be a combination of ActRaiser 1 & 2 with an overarching simulation mode that took advantage of the Saturn's advanced specs of the time, but it ultimately became this game instead.
The sentiment at the time from Masaki Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki (Founders of Quintet and former Falcom vets) was that around halfway through development, the game wasn't shaping out to their liking and they felt ActRaiser's premise was "dated", so they kept the underlying theme of creation and destruction but pivoted to a different design with the end result being loosely AR-Adjacent. If ActRaiser 2 abandoned the Raiser portion, then Solo Crisis effectively abandoned the Act portion... why was it so hard to just expand on the first ActRaiser!? History, of course, has shown that we WOULD eventually get a remake in the form of "ActRaiser Renaissance" (and a spiritual successor before that with "SolSeraph"), but a proper 32-bit ActRaiser coming off the heels of all the hot games Quintet (and Enix) were pushing back-to-back would've been the cherry on top. Oh well. Here's a translated story synopsis of the intro.
"A new chapter in the battle between gods and demons, which has been repeated unnoticed throughout the ages, is written here... the minds of people who once walked with the gods gradually became ill. God, saddened by the devastated world, saw a world inhabited by people with pure hearts grow into a world of people with corrupted hearts driven away to the "other side" or "Underworld". Before long, these inhabitants of the Underworld became monsters and these monsters began to spread. The monsters who worship evil demons led by the devil have begun to threaten the surface world or "Overworld". Finally, God has intervened to defeat the devil, for those with pure hearts have taken a stand and are granted the power to purify corrupted hearts. To this end, the door to the other world has been opened and the time for the final battle has come. What remains after the Holy War... will it be the world of gods or the world of demons? A battle for survival between the front and the back is starting now..."
Solo Crisis borrows a fair chunk of ActRaiser's concepts and terminology, but the actual gameplay might be oversimplified as a whole. There is no leveling or gear of any kind, you can upgrade a character's rank between Bronze, Silver and Gold (and only one character per stage), and the basic loop is repetitive. The game takes place over turns with characters moving spaces based on terrain and battles are comprised of a few basic stats, with the player going first and then the enemy. At first, you will only have a half-dozen units such as your leader (Joshua), attackers and builders, but you will get different classes as you progress if you "successfully" purify demons such as archers, priests, etc. The leader and builders will be your bread and butter as they can increase your "population" in an area which increases the amount of SP (or Spiritual Power) you amass each turn as well as heal allies adjacent to them OR underneath them and damage enemies in the underworld who are on the same tile in opposite land (this same system can hurt your allies if they step on a demonic structure).
Amassing enough SP allows you to use "miracles" (many of which were in ActRaiser) such as raising and lowering land, rain to fill grooves with water and put out fires, lightning to set structures on fire, wind to attack buildings and forests, sunlight to affect vegetation and dry areas, earthquakes to level a wide area, and a meteor which brute forces a portal to the underworld (as well as devastate the terrain and eliminate the water). What's interesting is leveling land has the opposite effect depending on who is doing it; raising land in the overworld will lower it in the underworld and it's actually one of your main strategies as enemies hit hard and will outnumber you, so you can easily destroy enemy property, turn puddles into lakes and even drown your adversaries. Victory is achieved when you destroy the main base or defeat the leader, but a side objective is listening to demons speak and defeating certain ones in combat to learn "demonology" language to decode hidden messages and enemy strategies. It's interesting, but is fairly tedious to get 100%.
The visuals are rough with a restricted view and no mini-map and there's not much music, but the game is interesting Quintet history...
Enjoy.