Live A Live-ing up to Expectations?
I appreciate JRPGs, but they’re not my genre of choice. The original Final Fantasy VII was a groundbreaking, childhood defining game for many, with characters, locations and music that are rightly considered iconic. But playing it for the first time, I found the story confusing and the combat gruelling (more on this later). Likewise, Octopath Traveller is a gorgeous game, with stunning visuals that understandably captured the hearts of millions. But I found the story progressed too slowly, and the dialogue was too cliche and simplistic to be interesting. So, when I decided to dive into the remake of Live A Live, which was originally released in 1994, I was expecting more of the same – that it would be a game which I appreciate but don’t have excessively strong positive feelings about. I was especially expecting this when my JRPG-loving boyfriend gave up on it after just three chapters – “oh no,” I thought, “there’s a reason why I see this title on ‘top 10 JRPG lists’ much less than other landmark titles from this time.”
You can imagine my surprise when after three chapters I was not just soldiering on in order to experience a niche fan favourite, but I was positively aglow with praise. Live A Live addresses many of the gripes that often prevent me from enjoying your typical JRPG, and the result is a game that I positively love.
Turn Based Combat
It still feels controversial to say this even though I know it is a much more common sentiment now than in 1994, but I don’t particularly enjoy turn-based combat. It often goes hand-in-hand with random encounters, and both tend to slow down the pacing of any adventure. Live A Live is split into chapters, each following a different character with their own unique story. For this reason, not every chapter even includes battles and many of them have visible enemies that you can tactically skirt around to avoid a fight. This already goes a long way toward keeping the momentum of each chapter going. The battles themselves are turn-based, but rely on meters for both the enemy and player party, which fill up over time and allow you to take action when full. The battlefield is made up of tiles, and combat abilities each have a specific range of tiles they can affect. This provides an opportunity for more well-considered fights – having to actually position yourself and your teammates and keep track of enemy movements so you can dodge their attacks keeps battles interesting. It also discourages the classic spamming of the same overpowered move over and over (mostly, but not always). Characters also drop in and out of the party repeatedly based on story developments. This, combined with the time meter, keeps you on your toes and creates a sense of urgency by preventing you from relying on certain character abilities (i.e. healing) too much.
Live A Live Systems & Mechanics
Beyond the combat, the main mechanics of the game change with each chapter, with one being wildly different from the next. One chapter which has the possibility of being the most combat heavy is set in Edo Japan and follows the ninja Oboromaru. Using a cloak which renders you completely invisible, you must navigate a guard infested castle. The cloak technically allows you to effectively run through the chapter avoiding almost all combat encounters – but this has the obvious trade off of making Oboromaru underlevelled for the inevitable final boss encounter. Meanwhile, in The Wild West, you play as the outlaw Sundown who has offered to help a run-down town hold off a group of vengeful bandits. Most of the chapter is spent preparing – finding materials, laying down traps – under a time limit until the bandits roll in. The better you prepare, the less enemies you will have to fight in the big showdown.
Each system, while incredibly unique, is critically, very easy to understand. A few sentences of tutorial text, or else just context clues from dialogue, and you are good to go. It marks a massive contrast from games like the aforementioned Final Fantasy VII, which while I acknowledge the materia system as a fascinating mechanic to experiment with, it is also extremely confusing for a first timer. In fact, it took me all of VII and IX to even halfway understand the pros and cons of each type and combination of materia. The Persona franchise is another one that comes to mind: I think the various Personas are super cool, but I didn’t really experiment with them as much as I felt the game wanted me to, because I ended up accidentally creating the same personas over and over, or because my current line up had a big enough range of abilities to negate me needing to make more.
Complex game systems can be incredibly rewarding if you are willing and able to sink enough time into learning them, but I will always be grateful when games like Live A Live take pity on players like me and keep things simple. The result is that each chapter often has an experimental feel, like “what if we had a character who could detect animals by SMELLING them, and the player has to run around hunting them based purely on smell bubbles?” level of experimental. So mechanics are straightforward but interesting, and as a tradeoff, a bit simplistic.
Grinding Away vs Away with Grinding
Returning to the idea of pacing issues within JRPGs, another trope which again, I am aware that I am not alone in detesting, is grinding. In certain games, grinding is avoidable if you equip your character correctly, but this goes back to my point about needing to invest time to understand complicated item systems. Octopath Traveller was the game that made me realise how much I hate grinding, given that it’s a game which I gave up on when I grew tired of having to kill the same old monster over and over to level up barely enough to survive the next section. I am aware of the fact that I might just suck, which is fair. But I still appreciate Live A Live for the fact that I did not have to grind on any chapters, except the aforementioned Edo Period, as I did choose a non-lethal approach. The game however seems to recongise this might happen, and willingly provides a warehouse full of XP-rich 2-hit-kill enemies, so you can get right back into the main story without much trouble.
Many games, including remasters of Final Fantasy and Persona 4 contain settings to make the experience easier for babies like me, like the ability to fast forward or immortality, and though I would be the first to admit to using these ‘cheats’, I do always feel like they cheapen the experience – like I’m not really playing the game as it was intended or originally played. Which is an irrational thought, but one that contributes heavily to how much a game resonates with me. I know I got to the end of Live A Live through my own abilities, and that feels good!
Good JRPGS Should Be Seen and Not Heard
Voice acting in video games. I could never do away with the dulcet tones of Kratos shouting ‘boy’, and I love an enthusiastic ‘here we go’ from our favourite Italian plumber. But why are JRPGs in particular voiced and written like that? You know how I mean: the stilted or otherwise over the top vocalisations and dialgoue that don’t particularly suit a game like Live-A-Live, a game that features a deep space sci-fi chapter, in which someone has a psychotic break and cradles a dead body. In other words, it’s dark tonally in places, and ideally the voice acting should reflect this.
I know the answer comes down to localisation – that the personality of the Japanese language and culture is difficult to express exactly in English… but none-the-less, voice acting was switched off in my playthrough of Live-A-Live pretty early on. Sometimes, switching the voice acting off is not enough. Games like Octopath Traveler, or even Fire Emblem: Three Houses which I truly loved, feature dialogue which is both cliched and lacking much character. In Octopath in particular, I found each individual story dragged significantly, due to how repetitive and uninspired exchanges between characters were – it’s difficult to build tension and interest in a game where each story beat is as predictable as the last.
Voice acting aside, the story and dialogue in Live-A-Live is one of its strongest aspects. The short/medium length chapter format prevented any character from overstaying their welcome – one chapter only took me about 25 minutes to beat, which was a nice breather between some of the longer chapters. The writing is terrific and in some cases veers as sharply away from being ‘kiddy’ as possible, featuring both zany and heartfelt themes, layered characters and plenty of good old fashioned swears – used appropriately that is, without feeling out of place like other JRPGs that have tried the curse word route to add grit. At the time of original release, Square was no stranger to developing games like Final Fantasy VI and VII that went darker story-wise, and Live A Live is no exception to this. On top of this, the characters themselves are iconic, and the developers clearly used them as another opportunity to experiment. Whether it’s a character who cannot speak except in the form of speech-bubbled pictograms, or a character who can read the minds of all NPCs around them, the cast are fascinating and very lovable.
Live-A-Live’s Final Act
Mild end game story/gameplay spoiler warning ahead!
Disappointing ending or not, Live-A-Live will live in my thoughts for a long time to come, as a game that balances fun, ingenuity, and charm in a way I’ve rarely seen before. It’s certainly set the bar incredibly high for whatever JRPG I do decide to tackle next – and given me hope that the next one doesn’t have to be just an exercise in experiencing gaming history – that the experience itself might be as memorable and fun as this odd little gem from the 90s.
Have you played Live-A-Live? What’s your favourite JRPG? Let me know in the comments!
