July’s game: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3
Summer bonus game: Arabian Nights: Spirit King of the Desert
Developed by Square, Live A Live is a unique little 90s JRPG, and I choose those words carefully. I’ve never played a game with this kind of structure. You’re given 7 different scenarios that you can play in any order, with a final two chapters following. As for why it’s little — well, each starting chapter takes only around 2 hours on average, if you’re not using speedup, and the final two scenarios together total about 8 to 10 hours. That puts Live A Live on the short end for a SNES RPG, and before I go on, consider leaving a like and subscribing to help the channel reach more JRPG fans.
Anyway, unlike most games, which could easily cut 5–10 hours or so, Live A Live would have benefitted by spending more time with its characters, especially in the final chapter when you get to use everyone in your party.
See, unlike in, say, Romancing SaGa 3, playing through all of the scenarios is required to finish the game. You don’t just choose a starting character and then the rest of the game is mostly the same, you have to play through everyone’s story, and then find out how they all tie together in the final chapters. You couldn’t guess from only playing one of them, and if you’re not paying close attention, you might have no idea what’s going on even after finishing all of the starting scenarios. Each takes place in a different time period, anywhere from prehistoric caveman times, to ancient China and Japan, or the Wild West, present day, the near future, even a far-flung, sci-fi scenario. It’s pretty damn exciting slowly piecing together how the scenarios relate, and there’s a nice twist at the end that feels necessary for the story to be satisfying. And, it is. While there’s not a ton of meat on Live A Live’s plot bones, it’s a perfect example of storytelling through gameplay, or at least through the game’s structure.
Every scenario involves the main character confronting a bad guy named Odio, or some rough equivalent of that name, like O. Dio, the Western outlaw, or Ode Iou, the warlord in Edo Japan, or even OD-10, the sinister AI that controls the spaceship in the far future chapter — an obvious nod to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s never spelled out that these are all incarnations of the same great evil, but observent players will figure this out after a few scenarios and wonder what’s up with them all having similar names. I was thinking the characters would all join together to fight the real Odio at the end, and, while that’s exactly what happens, the game still manages to surprise.
Now’s where I’ll quickly get into spoilers; skip this next paragraph to avoid them:
The surprises start in the eighth chapter, which unlocks after beating the first seven and centers around a medieval knight named Oersted, who endures a tragic tale of betrayal and sadness that makes for the most involved and interesting story in the game. Oersted’s quest feels like playing through a full-fledged, albeit miniature JRPG, except he ends up giving into his despair, falling to the dark side to become the demon lord himself. It’s Oersted, now known as Odio, who calls the seven heroes together to challenge him, and I’m sure you can figure out how the rest goes. There is, however, an alternate, bad ending where Oersted wins, which is a nice touch, since though it recycles the same boss gauntlet from the good ending, this time you play AS the hugely powerful bosses and get to try out all their powerful attacks yourself.
Storytelling through gameplay extends to Live A Live’s combat as well. Some characters learn new skills during the story or by leveling up, while another might learn skills when his opponent uses them or though more obscure means. This is rarely spelled out to the player — you might not even realize it’s happening unless you’re frequently reviewing your toolkit. I appreciate the amount of experimentation Live A Live both encourages and rewards.
The combat itself, though? Well, it’s got a lot great ideas, poorly implemented. I like the grid-based system where you move freely and attack enemies from any direction, according to what skills your characters have, and you’ve usually got quite a lot of options and have to position yourself properly to take advantage of them. Compared to a similar system from another JRPG I played recently, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, Live A Live makes much better use of the grid. The problem lies in difficulty balance.
Most battles are a joke, and I couldn’t help but speed through them, mashing A, even against most bosses. You might have a ton of options during every battle, but when any of them work fine, there’s no reason to experiment. On the other hand, occasionally I’d run into a fight that seemed like it should be pretty easy, given where I was in a chapter, but ended up having to grind several levels to get past. Some of this was on me not understanding all the mechanics at first, though. For example, you deal more damage to most enemies when attacking from behind or from the side, which makes a big difference, and you generally want to avoid standing diagonally to bosses since that’s how they dish out their strongest attacks. I suspect the learning curve would have been less frustrating had I read the manual, but I wasn’t able to find a translated copy, so, oh well.
There’s also a hidden ATB-like system, where characters act according to their speed, except there’s no visual indicator for this. Yeah, it’s kinda weird. Each character can only move a certain number of squares before their turn is up, and you have to just feel this out. It’s not a big deal once you get used to it. What’s stranger is that there’s no MP or skill points or anything like that, meaning you can spam your strongest skills on every turn. The only reason not to is when you’re not positioned properly to hit the enemy with your strongest stuff. This sounds cool but ends up making easy battles even easier, which left me pretty bored through most of the non-story sections. With more balancing, it could work well, though, and I wish more JRPGs would experiment with the idea.
So, while combat is generally easy with only a few crazy spikes, Live A Live’s difficulty mostly comes from figuring out how to advance the story. The game is more like a series of puzzles rather than a proper RPG, at least for its era. I’ll admit, it’s an old school approach that harkens back to something like Dragon Quest, only Live A Live is even more obtuse. Nearly every chapter had at least one story trigger that made me go, “Huh? How was I ever supposed to figure THAT out?” I did play a fan translation—thanks, Aeon Genesis (They’ve translated a ton of old JRPGs I want to check out.)—but as far as I know, it’s just as cryptic in Japanese, almost like the developers knew they had a short game and wanted to make it as difficult and time-consuming as possible. There’s several sections where you’re given no idea how to progress, or a piece of dialogue so mundane you might not realize it’s an important hint, like a guy mentioning he likes coffee. I did stream my playthrough, so I was trying to get through the game relatively fast, and if I’d taken it slower, it might have been less annoying. I dunno, though, Live A Live is legendary for being frustrating — it ain’t just me.
But the frustration is usually worth it. You can always use a walkthrough, which I did for many sections, and the game’s variety makes up for its short length. If you didn’t care for one chapter, you never have to play anything like it for the rest of the game. Some are short and intensely story-focused, with little combat, while another plays like a fighting game with zero story, and a few others are closer to what we think of as traditional JRPGs. By the time-hopping nature of the game’s structure, each scenario gets a distinct flavor and atmosphere, from the characters to the music, down the fonts used for each — although, that was added in the fan translation.
While not one of Square’s best soundtracks, the music is nonetheless awesome. It is weird how often it doesn’t play during scenes where it seems like it should, however. (This could be an issue with the translation patch, but that’s unlikely.) I’ll assume the devs are going for “atmosphere” in these moments, but it doesn’t work for me. The Wild West chapter, for example, has long stretches with no background music at all. I get that it’s emulating spaghetti Western films, but it’s also a video game. I want to hear some sort of sound pretty much constantly. That said, the tracks that are there do a great job of setting the mood, including a nice simulacrum of Ennio Morricone’s classic sound.
Live A Live is crazy experimental — there’s an entire chapter with zero dialogue, only caveman grunts, that ended up one of my favorites. It’s as if Square was trying to push themselves to tell the coolest mini-story they could, as many times as they could, all in a short game on a small budget. That’s one of the Live A Live’s biggest strengths, despite its length, and is why I’d recommend any JRPG fan check it out. It’s weird as hell, but the total package is stronger than the sum of its parts.
Thanks for reading. Join me next month, when I’ll discuss Star Ocean: First Departure R.
