ActRaiser/YMMV


 * Awesome Music: Both games have fantastic scores contributed by Yuzo Koshiro. Aside from being deeply rich and powerful musically, they also sound nearly orchestral... a phenomenal achievement for cartridge based games.
 * The game came out 20 years ago, yet this troper still finds himself humming the music on occasion.
 * Demonic Spiders: The Skull Head enemies in the simulation sections: they can move fast, cause massive damage to your angel, take twice as many hits to kill as the second-strongest simulation enemy and level your towns with earthquakes if you leave them alone for too long.
 * Game Breaker: The Magical Stardust spell, oh so much. It essentially makes the bosses much easier than the levels, since if you save your MP for the boss fight and then spam Magical Stardust, you can easily kill every single boss. The best part is that it's found in the second area of the game.
 * Although it's not found until near the end of the game, the Magical Aura spell makes boss battles pitifully easy. It's even possible to kill the arctic wyvern - normally one of the toughest bosses in the game - without taking a single point of damage just by casting magic aura every time he swoops at you.
 * Goddamned Bats: Most visible in Bloodpool Act I, where birds will easily knock you into pools of water and kill you.
 * Also Napper Bats, the first monsters found in simulation mode; a single arrow blips one out of existence, and their large wingspans make them easy targets from the north or south. They are nonetheless annoying because they often spawn from two or three different lairs at once, are very difficult to shoot from the side, and (true to their name) kidnap groups of your subjects when left alone and carry them off, never to be seen again.
 * Harsher in Hindsight: Causing an earthquake to alter the landscape of the tropical island of Marahna doesn't quite feel the same in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Although in-game, this isn't seen as sad or tragic at all.
 * Most Wonderful Sound: The cheery bubbling noise that accompanies the "Town Under Construction" message. It means your city is growing!
 * In the simulation sections, your angel doesn't die from losing all his HP, but he can't shoot arrows in this state, turning your townspeople into sitting ducks for monsters. However, the angel gets some HP back when the town expands: the cheery bubbling noise indicates that you can once again kick monster butt.
 * Porting Disaster: The 2004 mobile phone port of the first game has horrible controls, no music, only three levels (the final boss being the Manticore), and no simulation mode.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: Bridges in the first two regions (Fillmore and Bloodpool). If you want to max out your population, in addition to scoring well in the action stages, you need to follow rather strict building directions in order not to waste your limit of 128 buildings, which includes bridges in that total, and once a bridge is built, there's no way to destroy it.
 * Sequelitis: The first game is remembered quite fondly, with a nice blend of platforming, role-playing-game elements, and the town creation segments combining for a genre-busting game. The second game took out most of what made the first game memorable in favor of a straight-up platformer, and it's seen in a far more negative light.
 * Suspiciously Similar Song: The music that plays over the credits has a knock-off of the 20th Century Fox fanfare and parts of the World Tree theme (a.k.a. Northwall Act II) sound inspired by Star Wars. Some parts are also very reminiscent of Gustav Holst's The Planets, especially Northwall's final dungeon theme.
 * That One Boss: It's virtually impossible to dodge the Minotaurus' attacks, especially if you want to do any damage yourself.
 * Ganesha is practically the only boss that can't be decimated by Magical Stardust alone, and is very difficult to attack normally without getting hit yourself.
 * Unfortunate Implications: The evil demon-god that's luring worshippers away from the proper and rightful path of the Master is... basically Ganesha.
 * There's actually a fair amount of this. A number of the boss figures, (or some of the background art and mooks) either are or strongly resemble figures from real life religions. According to more fundamentalist Christianity, any other gods being worshiped either don't exist, are false gods/evil spirits, etc. So if the Master is the God of Abraham, is it really surprising that they would be his enemies?