Though I had a good time with it in retrospective, I feel Live A Live (2022) is an extremely conflicting game... literally.

When I played it, I felt like playing 2 separate games at the same time:

1) One being a somewhat closed and linear JRPG on the SNES whose fun comes from exploring and figuring out its mechanics and its world;
2) And another being an open JRPG released in the late 2010s/early 2020s which doesn't really care about immersing the player and is oh so scared of having them having to figure out anything: every item and interactible element is indicated visually, text boxes explaining you any form of new mechanics appear before you even have the chance to experience it, and there is even a mini map indicating where to go... at all time.

In other words, every quality of life "improvement" added in this remake of Live A Live feels completely disconnected from what you're actually playing, as well as being detrimental to the experience I think. And this is coming from someone who never played the original release.

I know for a fact that because the chapters are so self-contained and don't really offer much in term of world-building, battle system or other gameplay elements used by more traditional JRPGs to immerse the player in its world, the original release's enjoyment must have come from discovering the unique mechanics specific to each chapters, as well as their world.

Well this is completely thrown out in the remake. For example, there is no point in having to remember locations or memorize what might be of interest later, just follow the minimap. What eventually happens is that you end up only looking at the circle at the bottom-right corner of the screen, because that's the most logical and convenient thing to do if you want to progress. Adding to this, the world feels extremely empty now that items are highlighted. There is no more mystery or suspense like in other JRPGs where you're like "Will this closet have something inside?" as you just know it by entering the room a looking at it for less than 1 second.

I have so many other examples where the game just prevents you from interacting, engaging with it. All of this makes the game so much less interesting and memorable than it could have been. It's not a coincidence that my least favorite chapters were the first two ones I played... before I turned off the minimap and the advice boxes.

I feel like if they wanted to include all these QoL improvements, they should have completely remade that game, by making it bigger, more open, with more sidequests, longer stories and things like that, instead of making a faithful remake except with small dumb additions ruining it.

I still found enjoyment with though, especially after turning off the QoL things. I love the HD-2D artstyle (though I found the extremely slick, polished style not really suiting some parts of the game), the OST was great and didn't feel like simple arrangements of SNES tracks, I was surprised with how unique and varied the chapters were and the last part of the game was of course peak fiction.

But all of that didn't change the fact that I ended up really disappointed and even frustrated with this remake, which I thought would be the best way to experience Live A Live for the first time. I just wished I played the original instead.