Seems like Nintendo is giving second chances to videogames that are very niche and didn´t sell a cent back when they were released, this is what happened to Live A Live, a game which sold poorly and for some reasons I don´t know Nintendo gave money to Square Enix to rescue the IP, it´s weird since I don´t know the reason why they did this in the first place but that´s okay I guess, I managed to play the game so I wanted to share my thoughts here.
Live A Live is played by the simple premise of having multiple stories or scenarios which are differenced one each other through their historical period, I mean, one of the scenarios take place in the past Japan and there is other scenario that takes place in the Western Era, you know, where cowboys and sheriff actually existed. There are 7 stories that you must complete, there is no certain order in which you have to play them, it´s up to you to decide which one you want to play, if you complete all of the scenarious there is a ¨reward¨, so I highly recommend you to complete them.
Live A Live is a pretty short game, so the stories/scenarios are really short as well -thank god- most of them are like 2-3 hours long I think, what I did was to complete one or two by day, not a game that I wanted to speedrun or something so I took my time and I think this is the best way to enjoy it. In every scenario there is some king of ¨gimmick¨, for example, playing ¨Twilight of Edo Japan¨ actually makes you to play with a stealth mechanic, take into account that Live A Live is a JRPG game, the way they actually managed to mix many gameplay mechanics with the JRPG thing was actually pretty cool.
One thing I noticed when playing Live a Live was the fact that some stories are just better than others, at least to me. I don´t consider there is bad story in the game perse, but you can see there are some that are actually more interesting and well written than others, I think this is more of a subjective thing, for example, I´m gonna be honest, I didn´t like the ¨Twilight of Edo Japan¨ scenario, I found it to be boring, that´s because I don´t like stealth mechanics in videogames at all, so when you fuse stealth with JRPG is like ummm nope, of course, that´s way too subjective, I don´t consider it to be a bad story, it´s pretty cool and creative, but not my thing.
On the other side of the coin, there´s this scenario which I loved, which was ¨The Present Day¨. This story is about a man who wants to become the best fighter in whe world, as you guess, this scenario mixes the fighting with the JRPG genre, it was pretty cool, I mean, the scenario becomes in a cast of characters that you have to fight until you get to certain Final Boss, playing this scenario made me feel like I was playing a Street Fighter game, takes so much inspiration from it.
Let´s talk about the gameplay a little bit, not from certain scenario, I want talk about the core gameplay that you´ll have to play through the whole game, it can look a little bit messy but trust me, it´s easier than it looks. So, we have our characters in a template, we can move through the template as much as you want by square, everytime we move within a square, the action bar will fill a little bit, when said action bar is filled we can attack our enemies with all we´ve got. Take into account that this will be in real-time, your enemies can move through the template as well, if you are not smart enough or just slow, they´ll attack you first.
We´ve got some skills that can be different depending of the scenario, for example, in this scenario I can use psychic skills, you won´t be able to use them in another story, this is the only one where you can use them, not only in battle, you can use them outside of them, like for example, you can read the NPC´s minds. Getting into the battles, our skills will have certain range reflexed on the squares of the template, if our skill reaches that far to the enemy, we can use them to attack when our action bar is filled at its full, our enemies can use skills too so take that into consideration.
Some people say that the gameplay is outdated and aged terrible, well, I don´t think so, but it´s true the gameplay has no complex and deep mechanics, just move through the template, use certain skill, you can buff or debuff and that´s it, the game is pretty easy as well, not a big challenge or something, I mean, if you like the JRPG genre, you´ll probably like this game, but if you are an outsider, well, most probably you´ll find it annoying or stressful, being a remake, I think they could polish the gameplay a little more, because it is a remake, but I don´t know, it is what is is.
I know they didn´t polish the gameplay as they could, but they did polish the visuals and oh my God, this game looks great and so awesome, the HD-2D thing in Live A Live looks amazing, it looked great on Triangle Strategy but here looks soo good, the face lift this remake had is oustanding, not only that, this remake is fully voiced and the voice acting is actually cool. One could say that this remake was focused on the visuals and that´s right, the gameplay just remains the same.
I consider every person should try Live A Live at least once, more if you a JRPG fan just like me, it´s great they managed to save the IP somehow, despite its age, the remake does a good job, not the best, but still a good job. For the moment, Live A Live is a Nintendo Switch exclusive only, you can play the original game if you are willing to play it though. As a fun fact, Toby Fox admitted that he took inspiration in this game for Undertale, as well as he did with the Mother franchise. It´s a really creative game that never stopped me surprising, it overflows charisma and you can see Live A Live is a videogame with much love behind.
All of the screenshots were taken by me while playing the game