4. Live a Live, dev. Square Enix & Historia
I've played a JRPG or two in my day. You may have heard this about me. For years now I've heard talk of a legend of a game, Live a Live. This game comes from one of Square's most fruitful moments of creative output, the late-SNES/Super Famicom era. It was one of the unfortunate titles sandwiched between the legendary Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, thus just missed the boat to be released outside of Japan. That made it join other niche titles like Bahamut's Lagoon or Terrangima or for a long time, even Final Fantasy V, as this obscure marvel that only gamers with emulators or working knowledge of Japanese could have access to. Live a Live was compared a lot to Chrono Trigger specifically, since they were both games set across a variety of different eras and different tones. There were not a lot of RPGs in that era to send its players back to Flinstonian Dinosaur Times.
I foolishly never go around to Live a Live until now. I had always assumed that Live a Live was just a curiosity. A truly great game, would have gotten an export. How good could some silly game be with cowboys and whatever? I was wrong. Live a Live is great game, a mini-masterpiece. 1994 lives again on our Nintendo Switch. We're bringing back "Cotton Eye Joe", The Magic School Bus, and Planet Hollywood restaurants. Turns out the Nineties ruled. All we need to relive the Nine Inch Nails era is a new coat of HD-2D paint. Live a Live might now look a lot like Octopath Traveler, but this game is vastly superior.
What I love about the SNES-era in JRPGs is that you can already feel the rumbles of a revolution to come. Square starts out with Final Fantasy I in 1987 as this nearly plotless Dungeons & Dragons campaign on your TV screen. It's a simple crunchy game of simulated fantasy adventuring. The player fills in the story as much the game. There aren't even characters, you just have four blank slates you get to name. But as technology advanced, you can see them growing less and less interested in tabletop modules and more interested in what this system can be as a storytelling engine. Final Fantasy VI was setting the stage for the PS1-era of cinematic adventures. It pushed the SNES to its very technical limits to tell a grand epic. Live a Live feels like another test of what RPGs can be.
Can RPGs be westerns? Can they be Ridley Scott's Alien? Can they be Street Fighter II? Live a Live answers "yes" to all these questions. Therefore, it is not really one game as much as eight or nine short games all with their own unique style and tone, all of which you can finish in a few hours. It does not return to the classic sword and sorcery origins of RPGs until the very final level. And when we finally get there, Live a Live pulls a cruel deconstruction of all the tropes of the genre. It is almost like the game is outright rejecting its roots: "RPGs can be anything now, and we don't need to be that".
The variety is one of the best elements of this experience. Live a Live is eight stories all with different methods of gameplay and focus. Pogo, our darling little caveman boy, has an adventure through an overworld and random encounters. Meanwhile, Cube, a spherical robot in the far future, goes through a horror game, so it is mostly all cutscenes, with only one true RPG encounter at the end. Masaru's chapter is a Fighting Game, so it's just a boss rush. Along the way you'll encounter all sorts of different events. The Wild West level is about preparing ambushes for outlaws. There's a level with psychics in the near-future where you get a giant robot and a fittingly glorious tokusatsu theme song. (Sung by anime opening legend, Hironobu Kageyama, no less!) Then in the final level where all your character team up, there's dungeons and a non-linear world to explore in any order.
Another really awesome thing about Live a Live is the combat. This is not your traditional row of four heroes on the left and monsters on the right. Instead this game uses a psuedo-tactical system, on a 7x7 grid. It is remarkably varied too, with positioning being very important. The martial arts stages are all about swiping at enemies, then moving just out of range. It feels much more like an actual tug-of-war hit-and-run battle than you'd think turn-based tactics can achieve. The big high noon showdown is all about keeping the boss bottled up in the top left corner, knocking him back into place, so he cannot get into position to use his insta-kill Gatling Gun. The Prehistory levels are about controlling the field by dropping poison all over your enemy's feet. Then when we're back in medieval high fantasy, it just feels like a regular RPG battle but on a grid, as the entire level is a return to classic form.
Also, every one of these chapters ends with a huge boss fight with incredible music. "Megalomania" is the track, and I'd share a link to it if Square Enix were not downright fascist when it comes to keeping their music off Youtube lately. You gotta sell Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line copies somehow, I suppose. (I actually might buy that whole game and the DLC just to have "Megalomania" in my house.)
To me, Live a Live just feels like a game that had to be fun to make. It has infinite possibilities to be anything. If you were there in Square Enix offices in the mid-90s, you could pitch anything, any crazy idea at all, they could put it in this game. That's a level of creative freedom I cannot imagine exists anymore when modern games take five years and tens of millions of dollars to produce. We will not get get tokusatsu romps and cowboys in Final Fantasy XVI. Finally, after all these years, Live a Live has regained its place in the great history of RPGs.
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