One of the best and most innovative JRPGs of all time that disguises itself as way more unassuming than what it is. It absolutely revels in subverting player expectations and mixing genre forms; so much so that I feel like I can’t talk about it at all without spoiling what are some of the coolest gameplay setpieces in the genre.

(but i will anyway)

The entire anthology of mini-RPGs the game bases its whole schtick around makes Live A Live a veritable love letter to video games the same way something like Cinema Paradiso is a love letter to film.

I’d recommend going into this game completely blind so you get what I’m sure is the dev team’s full, intended experience, but if you’re curious as to what some of these chapters actually entail, my personal rankings are:

1. Distant Future: Eschews standard JRPG progression and battles completely in favor of an atmospheric, exploratory narrative that takes inspiration from Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2. Feudal Japan: A single-man raid on a castle where you can choose to infiltrate stealthily or kill all the inhabitants, with multiple routes of infiltration to choose from; years before games like Thief and Deus Ex would popularize the immersive sim genre, and on much less powerful hardware.

3.Imperial China: Aging kung fu master decides he needs to find and train disciples as his last mission in life before passing on. Has a very inspired, affecting twist midway through.

4. Wild West: Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven-inspired western where a wanted man and a bounty hunter team up to protect a town from being ransacked by a gang of bandits. The Sundown Kid is so cool. Mad Dog is so cool.

5. Near Future: Suffers from some pacing issues, but the most bombastic chapter at its highest points, taking inspiration from mecha anime and tokusatsu series of the 70s and 80s. Has a LOT going on. Extremely fun final sequence.

6. Prehistory: Cute! An entire chapter featuring nonverbal cavemen, instead opting to use expressive 2D sprites and grunts to tell a story about love conquering all. This probably would have been more effective if I had played the original game with its hardware limitations, but this was still fun.

7. Modern Day: Not bad, just not a whole lot to speak of here. Grafts the RPG-grid combat of the game onto the UI of a fighter a la Street Fighter II as your player-character fights combat masters to learn from them and take their skills as his own (I’ve heard the remake actually bogged down this part a lot so it’s not as much of a gauntlet, which also explains some things). Also, having Yoko Shimomura write compositions for a SFII sendup in her first job at Square after leaving Capcom was also something I thought was kind of funny.

The remake and its additions, headed up by original-director-now-supervising-producer Takashi Tokita, similarly feel like a labor of love; almost uncharacteristically gorgeous environments in the HD-2D style, meta-storytelling through loading screen blurbs that actually made me tense up at times and an entire Mazinger Z-inspired chapter opening – complete with vocals from anime stalwart Hironobu Kageyama – were some highlights.

If the game were just a sequence of these vignettes completely separated from one another, it’d still be a pretty cool little experience. But the coup de grace of the whole thing is saved for the penultimate chapter.

Some context: Dragon Quest, the first game in the now-acclaimed series that created the standards of JRPGs as we know them, was released in 1986. Five games in the series were released before Live A Live’s original Japanese release date in 1994.

By that point, a basic narrative trope in JRPGs in the Dragon Quest vein had emerged: you’re a chosen hero on a quest to rid the kingdom of some ancient, omniscient evil. Pretty standard stuff, constrained to basics because of the hardware of the Famicom. But they were basics done particularly well:

“Dragon Quest II is the most influential game,” said Tokita in a 2011 interview with Playstation Lifestyle. “It really showed me how traumatic an RPG could be. “There is a part where you are looking for your second party member for a long time and you are exhausted and you can’t find him. You come back to your camp and he is there sleeping and you get really pissed off, but you bring him into battle and he cures you and is really reliable. That was when I saw how the storyline of an RPG can do so much and can tell so much.”

The Middle Ages chapter not only subverts the chosen-one expectations of Live A Live’s predecessors, but also showcases Tokita’s philosophy of the genre. It’s one of the most interesting takes on some now commonly-established genre standbys I’ve seen in the medium.

Aside from the basic tropes - you have to save the princess from your foe and the kingdom from ruin - there’s no sense your character is motivated by anything other than what the game itself is telling you to do. He’s on a quest to be a hero simply because of a “destiny” the game lays out for him.

It’s only during the chapter’s climax that we see our character’s personality: arrogant and hypercompetitive, relying on his comrades to do much of his work while he receives the endgame glory.

His eventual betrayal and downfall because of these traits leads to one of the most interesting, nuanced final villains in a game. It’s an incredible subversion of JRPG tropes and the player-character power fantasy that feels incredibly well-earned.

To contrast, every other chapter allows its hero some agency, a clearly laid out reason for why they become heroes in the first place - a sense of duty, survival, love, etc. And despite being player characters, they aren’t silent protagonists (except for the two who literally can’t speak, but they’re able to convey emotions otherwise).

Some more context, as an aside: Takashi Tokita worked sparingly on the first three Final Fantasy games before becoming the lead designer on Final Fantasy IV, released in 1991. It took him being in charge of one game before knowing exactly what the JRPG genre was all about and being able to bend the entire genre to his whims. He also had help from scenario writer Nobuyuki Inoue, who would become the director of Mother 3 years later. GOAT shit.

I could write more about this if I wanted to from a gameplay perspective, but I’d like to play the original for myself and do some comparisons before tackling that.

THAT BEING SAID:

Some decisions, like one to include a radar that always nudges you to the story’s next checkpoint, seem to water down some of the sections that focus on player exploration vs linear progression, but I’m interested in seeing how the original game plays out without it and whether that inclusion was actually justified.

I know some real Live A Live heads from back in the day weren’t happy with some of the localization choices here, either (specifically one from the prehistory chapter that really bogs down its intended ending).

There were some pacing issues I also had in certain chapters as well, where some points would completely bring the forward momentum of a story to a halt. Grindy bits in JRPGs are fine with me – they’re JRPGs, after all – but in the context of Live A Live, where the story pacing is otherwise lightning fast, it became kind of a bummer when I wanted to see what would happen next.

Irks aside, though, this is one of those games I could see myself giving five stars to if it sticks with me long and hard enough. It’s tough to sell how much Live A Live loves video games and the people who play them over the written word.