Live A Live

After painting a fresco of personal conflicts with FFVI, Square's character-driven approach would then reach its logical conclusion: A project entirely devoted to side stories. Live A Live was that final stage. Inspired by Dragon Quest IV, it expands Chunsoft's 'omnibus' format into eight individual tales playable in almost any order, each taking place across different locations and eras before merging into a full party near the end. That feeling of re-interpretation could also apply to combat, a turn-based grid system where enemies gradually move/act in response to the player, as if Mystery Dungeon's semi-tactics migrated to a standalone battle screen (albeit without the item diversity). However, what truly stands out is the variety; not only in regards to setting, themes and scenarios but also in the flexible ways one can progress within each route. The latter quality - in particular, outlines their best chapters: Namely the pupil stat-training of Shifu, the humorous & elaborate ambush setup of Sundown, and especially the complex, stealth-leaning dungeon-crawling of Oboro (allowing for and rewarding both lethal and non-lethal methods of play).

While not every chapter succeeds (some of which boil down to standard JRPG fare, and the final episode gets rather tedious), these mini-journeys are nevertheless products of gifted storytellers, capable of sneaking in bits of tragedy and comedy without losing the general tone, with peaks of drama in the Alien imitation of Cube's route.

Live A Live is a game that is conceptually really, really cool, with the idea of these 7 radically different scenarios ultimately converging and working towards a common goal being something that could naturally lead to some great sense of variety. Honestly what makes this an even more amazing idea is the fact that on that front, the game is amazing with this, each scenario feeling remarkably different while still sticking to the confines of the JRPG structure to make each story beat feel exciting to be introduced to. There's just one issue with Live A Live, and it's one that encompasses quite a few things, and that's that it feels very much like an RPG that doesn't quite understand the fact that people outside the dev team will be playing it.

None of the gameplay elements quite feel as if they fit together right, it feels like there's always some nagging flaw with basically any action the player attempts to take that stops most of the game from approaching any level of truly satisfying experiences, bar one or two situations. The biggest one for me is how stilted the progression can often feel, with narratives not progressing unless you speak to specific characters, usually multiple times being especially problematic when there's no instance of the game telegraphing where the player needs to go. This can often lead to the player's standard course of action being aimlessly exploring the entirety of the areas hoping that they missed something as they keep talking to all the NPCs they meet, only to realise that the reason nothing is happening is because a character had to be interacted with another couple of times despite being framed in a way that wasn't at all different from anyone else. This can often lead to the narrative progression and pacing feeling quite off in a lot of scenarios, with swathes of nothing happening followed by EVERYTHING happening at once, often without much buildup or foreshadowing. With such a sporadic narrative element so often in place in a game tries to hinge so strongly on that narrative, it really does end up killing a lot of the potential emotional connection for its navigation of the overworld to be as obnoxious as it is.

If it were just the strangely cryptic and unintuitive navigation and story progression that were here, I think I'd still consider this game pretty cool on account of the other things it got right elevating the experience, but unfortunately the combat ended up falling even more flat. The tile and turn based combat system in place is initially something that felt rather interesting, seemingly leading to a game that wouldn't only require higher stats than the opponent, but also had more of a strategic element by playing around with attack ranges and positioning. Unfortunately, what usually ends up happening is the player instantly winning the fight from a distance because they can achieve victory before the enemy even approaches while staying in the one spot, or they just walk up and have the equivalent of a regular JRPG battle just with a slightly different appearance. What initially seems like an interesting concept essentially becomes a tool to inject more inconvenience into the game because now you usually can't even mindlessly spam through the common enemies you'll find around the place, and have to pay that tiny bit more attention constantly, which quickly becomes needlessly exhausting in a game like this.

The attacks of the players also tend to never feel as if they have a middle ground. They either feel hopelessly weak to the point where it barely even feels worth it to attack, or they'll be so obscenely strong that it's the only thing you'd ever consider using. This undermines the sheer variety of moves most characters have at their disposal when the dominant strategy feels as obvious as it does and leads to each campaign stagnating very quickly on this front. A lot of this became especially clear to me with the medieval chapter, which played things extremely straight by being as close to a regular fantasy RPG as you could get, just with all the quirks of this game, representing both how flawed the combat system felt without having only a select few, carefully designed fights in an area, and also just how aggravating it is to progress the game at times, with the same mountain needing to be climbed up and down multiple times just to have anything meaningful happen.

A lot of these chapters can feel a bit half baked in one way or another as well, usually ending right before things could pick up and go somewhere, or by having the complete opposite happen and being overlong and tedious. Barely any of these mini-campaigns feel as if their size is right and it makes it all the worse when so many of them have as many missable items as they do, usually wasting the player's time in a plethora of ways or so cryptically hiding bits and pieces that nobody would reasonably find them, while still feeling as if the game expects the player to in order to be at a reasonable strength. Reading a guide for this and seeing the absurd lengths you need to go to to acquire any sort of acceptable power in some of these scenarios was baffling to me, either that or annoying when I realised that the game was taking advantage of the fact that there were so many little things I had to do at EXACTLY now otherwise they'd be lost forever that some parts felt almost mandatory to be reading a step by step walkthrough for things to not be unreasonably difficult later down the line. While another playthrough would alleviate these issues mostly due to now knowing how to approach most of these, relying on hindsight of the player so regularly is downright absurd to me.

Despite all the complaining, I don't feel like I can really rate this too harshly due to the fact that there are so many ideas here that I genuinely adore. I fully believe that each chapter of this game is radically different in tone and gameplay while feeling largely cohesive. Every one has its own special mechanics and ideas that are explored and put at centre stage, whether it's the wrestling chapter being a series of miniboss battles where you learn new attacks by getting hit by them, the martial arts chapter being dedicated to training up a disciple that then helps you fight, or the sci fi chapter completely abandoning combat altogether and basically being a top down visual novel. The game is also insanely charming on top of this as well, with a lot of comedic moments taking on this very offbeat sense of humour and then playing it completely straight to just up the weird factor. There's also just a lot of flavour to the game's presentation, with things like item descriptions and move names being especially powerful tools in characterising, whether it's the very matter of fact names that the cowboy character has to reflect his stoic personality, or the fact that a wannabe tough guy who isn't as cool as he seems has moves like PissedFist, there's a surprisingly large amount to unpack with a lot of the finer details here. The medieval chapter is also genuinely amazing from a story perspective and had me gripped so strongly that I was able to somewhat overlook it having some of the worst gameplay here.

Overall, Live A Live is the type of game that I think would benefit a lot from being remade, with a lot of fascinating ideas here often being buried beneath a lot of frustrating, archaic gameplay conventions that stop this from truly flourishing. With the amount of charm this has it's no wonder that it's become a bit of a cult classic over the years, as there definitely is a lot to appreciate, and even moreso if you're less picky about a lot of these outdated mechanics as I tend to be, but I just didn't enjoy it enough to truly say I loved it either. Still, with all that said, if you want something unique from a JRPG, then please go for this one some time, it's totally the type of game that I could see others enjoying more than I did, and I can safely say that I haven't played something quite like it before.

Another neat game conceptually, but it's plagued by poor battle mechanics. You choose from a list of characters (and they are all cool things like robots and cowboys) and play a unique scenario about them, then they all meet up at the end or something. I didn't finish all the scenarios because I ran in to a weird stalemate at the end of a really long scenario and didn't feel like redoing it, but I got my fill of the game regardless. It's great that Squaresoft was willing to pump out quirky games like this one back in the day, and I wish they were as open-minded nowadays.