This review contains spoilers
The quality of the chapters can really fluctuate. On one hand, the near-future chapter might be one of my favorite short game stories ever. On the other hand, I found the distant future chapter so miserable that it took me a year to get back into playing the game. I would say that it is more likely for a chapter to be poor over being good.
I honestly started the game really loving it, but as time went on, I grew more and more disappointed. I found myself especially frustrated with the Middle Ages chapter. Maybe it's my fault for going in with expectations, as I heard it talked up as "a great subversion of classic SNES RPG tropes", but I find it to be either the second worst (behind the distant future) or the worst chapter. The overall routing and things you need to do can be a bit strange, but that's the least of my complaints. It feels extremely like it's contemporary (now and in the SNES era), and I'm not easily wowed by "the hero turned into a villain" stories. It felt like it thought it was something much more than it was.
Not only that, but it's hard to take anything that is trying to be subversive seriously when it still relies on age-old, misogynist tropes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's not fully in line with the tropes, but does Alethea exist outside of the men that surround her? I think the treatment of women in Live A Live is something to comment on as a whole. There is one decently written girl character (Lei), which is incredibly pathetic for a game about multiple places and time periods with multiple different batches of ensemble casts.
To be honest, I actually did not 100% finish the game. I got to one of the final bosses, found it aggravating, saw that all that was left was a boss rush and a final final boss, and called it there. The final chapter felt incredibly weak with no good payoff or reason for everything to be connected. It also felt very designed around the fact that the person playing it would be in love with the game, which is a fair assumption as the person playing had gotten to the very end, but still. I like hard video games, I like hard RPGs, the first Odio boss fight felt like a boring slog and grinding around the dungeon got absolutely meager results. It was not anything i wanted to put more time into.
I wanted to like it, and the game is interesting in concept, but it weakens as it goes on, and its charm does not last. It's an incredibly disappointing game.
I honestly started the game really loving it, but as time went on, I grew more and more disappointed. I found myself especially frustrated with the Middle Ages chapter. Maybe it's my fault for going in with expectations, as I heard it talked up as "a great subversion of classic SNES RPG tropes", but I find it to be either the second worst (behind the distant future) or the worst chapter. The overall routing and things you need to do can be a bit strange, but that's the least of my complaints. It feels extremely like it's contemporary (now and in the SNES era), and I'm not easily wowed by "the hero turned into a villain" stories. It felt like it thought it was something much more than it was.
Not only that, but it's hard to take anything that is trying to be subversive seriously when it still relies on age-old, misogynist tropes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's not fully in line with the tropes, but does Alethea exist outside of the men that surround her? I think the treatment of women in Live A Live is something to comment on as a whole. There is one decently written girl character (Lei), which is incredibly pathetic for a game about multiple places and time periods with multiple different batches of ensemble casts.
To be honest, I actually did not 100% finish the game. I got to one of the final bosses, found it aggravating, saw that all that was left was a boss rush and a final final boss, and called it there. The final chapter felt incredibly weak with no good payoff or reason for everything to be connected. It also felt very designed around the fact that the person playing it would be in love with the game, which is a fair assumption as the person playing had gotten to the very end, but still. I like hard video games, I like hard RPGs, the first Odio boss fight felt like a boring slog and grinding around the dungeon got absolutely meager results. It was not anything i wanted to put more time into.
I wanted to like it, and the game is interesting in concept, but it weakens as it goes on, and its charm does not last. It's an incredibly disappointing game.