Live A Live

The Good
Live A Live is an episodic JRPG with eight chapters spanning a wide range of settings and time periods, from prehistoric times to Edo Japan to a spaceship in the far future. The original game was released in 1994 on the Super Nintendo, when Square was at their peak (it came out right along the Final Fantasy series, Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger). Apparently, it sold poorly enough in Japan for them to never bother releasing it in the West. For a long time, the only way to play it outside Japan was to get your hands on an imported copy (or a ROM) and either learn Japanese or track down a fan translation patch. Needless to say, this remake, 28 years later, came as a major surprise!

What makes Live A Live special comes down to mostly two things: The sheer variety of settings and the unique combat mechanics.

The game initially lets you choose from seven chapters running between one to three hours, which you can play in any order and a final one that unlocks once you completed the others. While the finale loosely connects the heroes’ paths, for the most part, each chapter is completely unique. Take the Wild West one, for example. It’s a fairly short but memorable chapter in which an outlaw named Sundown unites with a bounty hunter to help a small town set up traps within a time limit and defeat an evil gang of bandits. Then you have a story set on board of a space ship in the far future in which you play a spherical robot called Cube facing various flavors of space horror. One sprawling chapter involves a ninja on a mission to rescue a prisoner from an enemy castle in Edo Japan. Another, set in prehistoric times, focuses on slapstick humor as characters communicate using symbols in speech bubbles rather than written dialogue. The chapter set in present times is purely focused on combat with individual fights set up as underground sporting events, Street Fighter style. A chapter in ancient China involves an aging kung fu master searching for disciples to teach his secret technique to a new generation and a near-future chapter involves a biker gang, telepathy and a giant robot.

The range of settings, characters and play styles is truly staggering. Chapters can be fairly short, which might have contributed to the game being poorly received in 1994 but a more modern view would be that there is remarkable little filler and grind. Once an idea is played out, the game moves on to the next.

The other stand-out is the unique combat mechanic. Combat has traditionally been one of the weaker aspects of JRPGs with winning or losing mostly depending on your characters' stats or equipment. Any planning or strategy revolved around grinding to level up your character or following simple rock-paper-scissors rules such as fighting an ice monster with fire attacks. Live A Live does all the classic JRPG combat tropes but it also adds something new: Positioning. Combat plays out on a 7x7 grid and characters and enemies take turns to either fight or move to a different tile. Attacks have a tile pattern (for example firing a gun diagonally or affecting all adjacent tiles). Tiles can also have status effects applied to them like fire or poison, forcing an opponent to either use their turn to flee or receive damage. While most fights are too easy to be much of a challenge, this elevates combat from simply spamming the attack with the highest damage, adding a lot of strategy. It’s an example of what JRPGs could have achieved if they dared to experiment with the formula a bit more.

The Bad
There are moments where this game being 30 years old shows and it’s mostly in how little it cares about the player getting lost. Despite the remake adding a radar and splash screen tutorials, some of the labyrinthine designs and lack of real mission objectives mean that you often find yourself running around aimlessly in hopes of triggering a random event that pushes the story forward. I prefer not to use external guides as getting lost can be part of the charm (and very much be intended by the designers) but occasionally had to give up and looked things up online. Also, of course, the episodic nature makes it hard to really dive deep into any character. I would have been more okay with that if the final chapter connected all characters in a more in-depth way but it mostly feels like it was done as an afterthought.

As for the remake aspect, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The voice acting ranges from decent to cringe-worthy and I found myself switching it off in some chapters. The 2.5D graphics are a strange mix of 16bit-era sprites for characters and environments with 3D perspective and occasionally full-polygon elements. Text is rendered sharply in full resolution and so are all menus (which annoyingly leads to a 2 second delay every time you enter the character menu). Environmental and particle effects also seem to be full resolution and picked from some Unreal Engine library. While on the SNES, the pixelated art style grew out of cleverly solving the limitations of the hardware, in 2022 it's mostly just a vague reference, an imitation and, most importantly, a shortcut. It feels bit jarring and dare I say… tacky. Why not go fully 3D or stay in a lower resolution aesthetic consistently?

On top of that, one of the more interesting aspects about the SNES original is that each chapter was drawn by different manga artists, adding some unique styles and flavors, which are mostly lost in this remake. Sometimes it’s ok to let a decades old game be a decades old game. I probably would have preferred an official release of the SNES original to soak in the historical context of the game over playing a version with superficial polish.

The Bottom Line
All in all, Live A Live is probably one of the most interesting oldschool JRPGs to currently play, despite its limitations. I don’t know if it’s the „best“ in terms of polish or depth but there is no other game of this genre that lets you experience so much variety in such a tight package. I have to praise Square Enix for bothered to remake such an obscure (and, back then, financially unsuccessful) game for modern audiences. Other remakes often feel lazy, especially on the Switch where they sometimes fill huge gaps in the release schedule that could be taken by actually new games. But with Live A Live, there genuinely hasn’t been a way for Western audiences to play this game for 30 years so it feels suprisingly fresh.