Live A Live (2022) [Switch]
11 min read
Inherit our cause. Keep the faith. Forgive.
– Arc Words
Have you heard of the Japanese exclusive Super Famicom RPG, Live A Live, that got a remake this year (2022)? It was hard to believe when I saw the announcement trailer for Live A Live. The only way to play Live A Live before this remake was by accessing fan-translations (It had only released in Japan prior). Live A Live is now available worldwide for English-speaking players to experience. However, this isn’t the only remake/remaster that Square Enix has pumped out in recent times. It’s been a season of re-releases with the recent releases of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, Actraiser Renaissance, and the game featured here, Live A Live.
Live A Live was released in 1994 and remade in 2022. It is an HD-2D remake (much like Octopath Traveler) with a re-mastered soundtrack and updated quality of life improvements. The game is structured into seven initial chapters featuring seven protagonists in seven time periods. The seven chapters must be completed to unlock the late-game content. This is the structure that is very similar to Octopath Traveler, but I’ll explain how that works (or doesn’t work) for this game. Live A Live is for fans looking to play a classic Japanese RPG, but some will be more disappointed in the story and gameplay than others.
Live For Story
The first seven chapters are self-contained stories that can be experienced in any order. Each chapter takes place in a specific time period: Pre-Historic, Imperial China, Edo Japan, Wild West, Present-Day, Near Future, and Distant Future. The chapters are short as they take from less than an hour to four hours at most depending on all of what the player wants to accomplish. The initial seven chapters are to be completed in order to unlock the final chapters. Within the two final chapters, the game reveals the connectivity and overall crisis the heroes face. The overall setup is a neat concept, but does the story do a good job of getting the player invested enough before the climax? The rest of this section will contain minor spoilers, so skip to the 8-bit review to avoid those.
The narrative in Live A Live in the initial chapters is a bit all over the place. Obviously, this comes from each chapter taking place in a different time period and having its own mechanics. Some chapters like Twilight of Edo Japan are more ambitious than chapters like Present Day. They are brief chapters that don’t always do a great job of getting the player invested. Sometimes it feels like characters didn’t interact the right way or events happened too quickly.
Seven Protagonists, Seven Stories
All chapters have specific themes of focus, but some are more apparent than others due to the differences in story progression. All of the themes have some similarities though: they all have something to do with humanity. The Pre-historic chapter focuses on how love drives humans where the Imperial China chapter has themes of how humanity passes heritage from generation to generation. The Twilight of Edo Japan revolves around honor and code and in the Wild West chapter, Sundown learns the value in protecting others.
The Present Day chapter showcases what lengths humanity will stride for power, while the Near Future chapter is about the protagonist transcending himself beyond humanity. Finally, The Distant Future chapter focuses on a robot protagonist, who learns to become more human through its mechanical heart. As these chapters are all mechanically different, they are all made to prepare the player for the final chapter. It accomplishes this by setting up the antagonist, Odeo, but it doesn’t significantly impact individual character’s stories. Overall, the stories are bite-sized, which may sacrifice some of the impact on the player. The initial chapters do a good job of preparing the player for the final stretch of the game thematically speaking but the individual stories may lose significance due to the importance the latter half of the game has to the overall plot.
Live Over Again
The Middle Ages is unlocked once the first seven chapters are completed. It sets up the central conflict of the story and the final chapter. It is a more in depth story with morally grey characters and portrays themes of grief and loss. The seven heroes fight and save the world from the evil that is revealed in The Middle Ages. I think that the final segments are some of the best parts of the game. In the remake, there is new dialogue and a new final boss along with a new song.
The final chapters of the game reveal the connections between each chapter. Essentially, it reveals that the antagonist is involved throughout the game, mainly through the identities of the final bosses in each chapter. There is however less meaning in the individual adventures of the protagonists as the game pushes more for thematic connectivity rather than the impact on each character. Of course, each character will have a different impact, but it varies as each chapter is mechanically different, and dialogue varying in density. I think that the story is a very good concept but I think the execution before the latter half of the game could leave more to be desired.
8-Bit Review
Visuals: 7/10
Live A Live resembles the HD-2D style that is similar to Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy. The sprite work and visual effects are new and improved in this remake. There is really nothing jarring about the visuals for the majority of the game, but the modernization goes a long way in some aspects, like the opening scene in Twilight of Edo Japan. There’s also a noticeable amount of effort that was made during the newly added final segments of the story. I’ve also found that some people have had issues with frame skips, specifically in more graphically intensive areas live the rooftops in Edo of Japan. Others claim they didn’t have any issues with frame skipping.
Live A Live mostly does the original’s visuals justice by making the UI more modern and appealing, while also updating menu screens, and the menu in battles. Take for example that the original had a very basic chapter selection screen with not much going on. The remake adds some prettiness and a saturated background. Overall, I think the remake presents the original game pretty well in HD-2D. It’s not a unique style because it’s being used pretty often in other releases.
Audio: 9/10
Yoko Shimomura returned and re-arranged the soundtrack for Live A Live and has done so with a lot of care. According to Shimomura in an interview, she had lost the original MIDI (digital audio format file) and had to re-work the soundtrack by ear, which is very impressive given the quality. Every song has been orchestrated to fit a modern remake. Each chapter has a unique style of music, take for example most songs in the Near Future chapter incorporate a saxophone, and the Wild West chapter incorporates a western sound. Live A Live‘s historically beloved soundtrack doesn’t disappoint in this modern rendition. As mentioned earlier the game also presents new music on this release.
All of the dialogue in the scenes of Live A Live is voice-acted. Each chapter has some different dialects and accents, it’s especially noticeable in the Imperial China chapter. The English voice acting is rough around the edges. The acting in the Wild West chapter fits well for its period, where the acting in the Imperial China had some hick-ups and awkwardness. That being said, I played most of the game in Japanese, as it’s usually clear the Japanese voice acting is of higher quality in Japanese media.
In execution, the audio volume between music and voice acting is balanced pretty well. The music is pretty diverse but they capture the time periods pretty well. Live A Live‘s most popular track in the game is called Megalomania, it is the boss theme at the end of each chapter, and it’s a very impressive modern rendition. The soundtrack ultimately suits the game very well. Again, the English voice acting could have had some improvements, but it’s nothing too impactful especially if the player doesn’t mind playing in Japanese.
Gameplay: 5/10
Live A Live has a more strategic RPG-style combat, where the protagonists can move tiles as well as opponents. Protagonists will have a set of attacks of which vary in a few different types, and enemies are weak and resistant to specific types of attacks. Resistances and weaknesses display when the player hovers over a character on the grid. Characters learn more attacks as they level up (in most cases) and as they level up their stats increase. With resistances and weaknesses displaying, it can make the combat easier since the game tells the player what deals more damage, and what deals less. The amount of combat in each chapter varies, Distant Future has barely any combat, and Present Day is purely combat focused. Some chapters feature random encounters where others display enemies in the overworld. The random encounters can make travel time a lot slower.
Aside from combat, each chapter has unique mechanics. In Pre-History, Pogo can sniff out enemies and helps track down objectives while the Near Future chapter allows Akira to read through minds of other NPCs through telekinesis. The Present day has a unique mechanic that allows Masaru to copy moves of his opponents after they execute them. The Twilight of Edo Japan chapter features stealth through a very maze like dungeon.
The executions of these mechanics and how the chapters revolve around them make for a frustrating time at points. The Twilight of Edo chapter in particular is very tedious with it’s different objectives and requires precise execution for some of the endings. It’s also very maze-like and can leave the player having to backtrack a lot. The Imperial China chapter requires the player to fight their students twelve times in order to train them which is also a slog. The Wild West chapter has the player exploring the town and setting up traps before time runs out. That part of Wild West isn’t nearly as tedious or time-consuming as some of the other chapter’s mechanics.
Overall, Live A Live isn’t a mechanically dense game, which is fair since it is a game from the 90s. However simple the gameplay is, there are certain flaws as I mentioned before, and there can be less than desired. The combat is the strongest aspect of the game but it isn’t always the focus. The combat really shines the greatest in the latter part of the game during the final chapters, as the player has a much larger arsenal than during the initial chapters. The strongest aspect may be how diverse the mechanics are throughout each chapter.
Narrative: 6/10
The story is split up into seven chapters at the start which leads to the finale after completion. I’ve already spoken a lot about the themes above, and how they improve the overall experience, but there are some flaws I’d like to mention here. The bite-sized stories don’t all provide enough impact for the player to care about the characters deeply. Some chapters are better at it than others. The Present-Day chapter is very short and mainly focuses on Masaru getting stronger and has minimal dialogue. The Imperial China chapter portrays a shifu passing down his legacy, but the events during that chapter focus on the new protagonist. The events in that chapter often feel they miss points on emotions that characters should’ve experienced. Characters don’t speak in the Pre-Historic chapter while the Distant Future chapter is dense with dialogue.
I also want to mention that the story of Live A Live during the initial chapters can seem pretty insignificant by the end of the game. The final chapters offer some of the most in-depth stories, and it introduces the central conflict. It takes playing most of the game to get to this point, which may not be worth the time. The finale is the strongest part of the game and has strong cinematic scenes, but the journey isn’t quite as epic as the finale.
Challenge: 5/10
Live A Live is not a challenging game (for the most part). The difficulty of the combat is relatively easy since there are many enemies that can be defeated in one hit. The main challenge comes from fighting bosses, which there aren’t many in the game, and some are easier than others. Again, the best progression in difficulty is probably during the final chapter where party members grow to level 15+. There are also more challenges by fighting super bosses that aren’t required.
Some other difficulty kicks in for completing certain objectives in The Twilight of Edo Japan. However, it can be difficult to achieve these objectives without a guide, because killing every enemy in Edo requires accuracy. Overall the difficulty slope is pretty slow as each protagonist starts at a low level. It takes a while for the game to get harder.
Replayability: 6/10
Each chapter is replayable in Live A Live. There are some chapters that offer different endings and different objectives. Also, if the player wishes to, they can replay chapters for super bosses as well. The Imperial China chapter has three different outcomes that decide the protagonist of that chapter. The final chapter also offers the player to play as one of the 7 protagonists. It’s not meaningful enough to warrant most players to replay the final chapter but there is some unique dialogue depending on the protagonist. The incentives to replay some chapters are there, but it’s not likely that the player will replay the whole game. At least the remake does offer the opportunity for the player to replay different chapters.
Uniqueness:7/10
While Live A Live was definitely unique for its time, it’s got some competitors like Octopath Traveler nowadays. It’s an experimental game with a diverse package that can’t be found in many other games. The major conflict presents a surprise on a heroic trope in a way that is unique. Overall, Live A Live is appealing as a unique experience, but the quality of the uniqueness is shaky.
Personal: 7/10
I’ve been waiting to play Live A Live for a while as per the recommendation of a friend. Once the game was announced to release world I knew I had to pick it up. In retrospect, I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would, but it still left me feeling positive. There were times when I was frustrated with the game and other times when I had lots of fun. The experience has been all over the place for me, however, I did enjoy it for what it was worth. Overall, I didn’t enjoy the individual stories as much as I enjoyed the overarching connected themes.
Aggregate Score: 6.5
I’m Zerinus, a hobbyist video game lover, music lover, writer, and a professional in IT. You can find me at @DivineZerinus on Twitter.
