Live a live feels so absurdly ahead of its time it’s not even funny. Like, I know this is a remake and slightly modernized and stuff, but from what I can tell most of what was changed was the visual style (duh) and the translation (which is one of the best translations for an rpg I’ve ever SEEN) (also duh) and everything else was like, slightly rebalanced? But the vast vast majority of what’s fantastic and creative and bursting with life here was just as breathtaking in the original version, and that’s genuinely insane to me.
If you don’t know, Live a Live is made up of a bunch of mini-rpgs, usually running anywhere from 1-3 hours apiece. Each of these picks the genre conventions apart in a slightly different way, with almost none having a traditional dungeon crawl/town experience (and when they do, you can tell there’s an understanding of the genre built upon the deconstructions they’ve perpetrated elsewhere).
One scenario has you exploring one huge dungeon that reveals itself in more of a metroidvania-type way. One has you spending most of your playtime preparing for a bossfight at the end. A few have extremely novel and fun forms of progression, beyond the standard “kill and level up” loop. A few of them diverge so far from how rpgs typically work that they completely cross genres.
But it’s not just interesting in this way. This experimentation goes beyond the structural and mechanical and bleeds into everything about the game. Each chapter takes place in a different time period and location, exploring a certain kind of pulpy fiction story and how you can mold rpg mechanics around the feelings those stories deliver. The wild mechanics are used to build story, character, and really connect you to the material in a unique way.
That kind of brings me to this game’s legacy. These short, experimental rpgs, that play with the genre and conventions in such a loving way, yet not very sentimentally, are the kind of thing I associate most with little indie rpgs on Itch.io. Sure there’s a lot of “earthbound-inspired indie rpgs”, but these days if you look in the right places you can find stuff that feels more varied and unconventional, stuff that until now, I didn’t think had ever been released by a larger studio. Games like An Outcry, Facets, Cataphract.io, even Dujanah to an extent, feel like the kind of bold interesting games that would not feel out of place next to any of Live A Live’s chapters.
Beyond even that though, the way this game ends (which I don’t want to get too into for spoiler reasons) is almost as perfect as I could’ve even wanted. It ties the themes of all these disparate stories together so well and so meaningfully, and gives you a right challenge too (which the rest of the game doesn’t really focus on). It nearly left me speechless, and gave me all the warm feelings finishing a more traditionally laid out rpg would.
If you like rpgs at all, you’ve gotta play this. Like, as soon as you can. This is one of the most interesting and cool and fun expressions of the genre to ever come out, especially from a studio as large as Square. Go in with open eyes.
If you don’t know, Live a Live is made up of a bunch of mini-rpgs, usually running anywhere from 1-3 hours apiece. Each of these picks the genre conventions apart in a slightly different way, with almost none having a traditional dungeon crawl/town experience (and when they do, you can tell there’s an understanding of the genre built upon the deconstructions they’ve perpetrated elsewhere).
One scenario has you exploring one huge dungeon that reveals itself in more of a metroidvania-type way. One has you spending most of your playtime preparing for a bossfight at the end. A few have extremely novel and fun forms of progression, beyond the standard “kill and level up” loop. A few of them diverge so far from how rpgs typically work that they completely cross genres.
But it’s not just interesting in this way. This experimentation goes beyond the structural and mechanical and bleeds into everything about the game. Each chapter takes place in a different time period and location, exploring a certain kind of pulpy fiction story and how you can mold rpg mechanics around the feelings those stories deliver. The wild mechanics are used to build story, character, and really connect you to the material in a unique way.
That kind of brings me to this game’s legacy. These short, experimental rpgs, that play with the genre and conventions in such a loving way, yet not very sentimentally, are the kind of thing I associate most with little indie rpgs on Itch.io. Sure there’s a lot of “earthbound-inspired indie rpgs”, but these days if you look in the right places you can find stuff that feels more varied and unconventional, stuff that until now, I didn’t think had ever been released by a larger studio. Games like An Outcry, Facets, Cataphract.io, even Dujanah to an extent, feel like the kind of bold interesting games that would not feel out of place next to any of Live A Live’s chapters.
Beyond even that though, the way this game ends (which I don’t want to get too into for spoiler reasons) is almost as perfect as I could’ve even wanted. It ties the themes of all these disparate stories together so well and so meaningfully, and gives you a right challenge too (which the rest of the game doesn’t really focus on). It nearly left me speechless, and gave me all the warm feelings finishing a more traditionally laid out rpg would.
If you like rpgs at all, you’ve gotta play this. Like, as soon as you can. This is one of the most interesting and cool and fun expressions of the genre to ever come out, especially from a studio as large as Square. Go in with open eyes.
Reviewed on Aug 01, 2022