Live A Live - Review

Live A Live is the next 90’s Square RPG being brought to the western world and the modern day. A story of many journey’s Live A Live is a journey through history. Working with a series of seven different stories, from various periods of past, present and future, you get a wide variety of narratives to experience. Through this, there is varying lengths of these individual stories, culminating in two unlockable scenarios that link all the others together. The game gives you the option of choosing any of the beginning seven chapters to be played in any order you like.

The story is told across Prehistory, Old West, Near Future, Far Future, Twilight of Edo Period, Imperial China and Present Day initially, followed by an unlockable Medieval chapter, and then a Final Chapter that blends all the different periods (and their corresponding major protagonist) into the medieval one, and the recurring overarching antagonist Odio. The sheer amount of chapters can be a little be daunting at first and depending which you pick you may be in for a slightly longer, more difficult story or you may end up with a heavily story driven, super quick and easy story. Each chapter has a unique focus style, and through this Live a Live almost feels like it was a series of test games, rather than a cohesive single game.

For those who want that more classic style of RPG, Prehistory, Near Future and Imperial China are your best first choices. They offer the most in-depth and expanded upon story, with good amounts of combat, crafting and generally fleshed out gameplay. Present Day takes a tournament style street fighter-esque style, focused purely on smart play fights designed around learning new abilities. Almost like Mega Man, you’ll get abilities off one fighter, that make the others far easier. For those not so thrilled with Live a Live’s unique grid-based ability-oriented combat, the Far Future and Edo Period chapters are likely to draw you in. Far more focused on story in the Far Future and offering a unique stealth gameplay in the Edo period, the game begins to show itself off as a multi-faceted surface level concept. The Wild West chapter focuses on a heavy puzzle aspect, with a small amount of combat that is fairly straight forward and easy. Most chapters won’t take longer than an hour to complete, with a couple being easily completed in almost 30 minutes. The only ones that buck this trend would be Prehistory and the unlockable chapters.

I was beginning to feel disillusioned with the seeming lack of cohesion between the chapters. Live A Live definitely felt like concept pieces of bigger games, rather than a game of its own. The updated visuals were nice, and the gameplay itself was mostly enjoyable if not a little more difficult than I was expecting it to be. The Medieval chapter, and most particular the twist ending of it, really opened up the overall concept. It is a little unfortunate that it takes around ten or so hours for the game to reveal how it all really comes together beyond a similarly named antagonist. The reveal however, and in turn the lead into the final chapter is a well thought out and developed story turn. If you can get through the disconnected nature and the sporadic style of gameplay, you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised coming into the final chapters.

You may also find yourself completely unprepared for the ridiculous leap in difficulty the game experiences come into the final chapter. Prehistory is the only other chapter that really allows for and encourages grinding to level. The Final Chapter, which brings the major protagonists into the same time period, demands that you understand the way the game works, explore the world and in turn grind a lot. The undoing of Live A Live’s story culminating is that the final chapter is extended by the need to grind a lot to be able to complete the content available in the final chapter. A product of its time, the grinding nature of the final chapter unfortunately does not translate or hold up well in the modern day, where most RPGs manage to still get a solid thirty hours of game, without a need for heavy grinding.

The big problem with this, is the Final Chapter has two different endings available depending on whether you choose to play one of the original seven characters or play as the protagonist of the Medieval chapter. Grinding your way through the chapter once, to get all the special weapons and see the super powerful abilities of the characters is all good and fun once. Having to do it a second time, for a different ending? Incredibly frustrating. Live A Live does a lot of things well, and there is gameplay concepts used here that would see much use in future Square titles and other RPGs that would come. However it suffers from some very 90’s ideas of how to extend game time and the idea of grinding being good gameplay content.

Visually, Live A Live is strikingly more upscaled than even the Pixel Remasters and the Romancing Saga titles we’ve seen over the last year. The graphical 2D sprite style is perfectly designed for modern day upscaling, Live A Live in particularly very similar to the visual style of Triangle Strategy. This may be an active decision, as the combat whilst not being exactly a tactics style of gameplay, the grid combat definitely pays homage to the tactics style of gameplay, particularly with directional abilities and grid specific attacks.

Live A Live is a product of its time and suffers from roadblocks in story content because of it. Whilst this may be a dealbreaker for people not typically accustomed to old school RPGs; Live A Live also offers a lot of styles of gameplay to keep the average player entertained. There is a different style of gameplay to suit every style of RPG player, and the groundwork laid with some of these concepts extends into the modern-day RPG. One of the nicer looking remasters of an old school JRPG from Square, if you can get past the somewhat shorter nature of the game and the grind heavy aspect of the final chapter, you’ll find a lovely little gem of a game. Whilst not a perfect game, Live A Live is a lovely niche RPG that benefits from a modern-day touch-up.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by Nintendo

The Pros

+Diversity in Gameplay

+Interesting and unique characters

+Generally enjoyable combat

+Good story beats and development

The Cons

-Interconnecting of story takes a long time

-Severe grind requirement in final chapter

-Unlikely to encourage a second final chapter attempt for both endings