Live a Live HD (Switch Version)

Live a Live was a Square RPG for the Super Famicom that, despite never leaving its home country of Japan, became a cult classic abroad, thanks to emulation and fanmade translations. It’s easy to see why western gamers were so interested in the game that they went through the trouble of patching and distributing it - besides having an all-star development team consisting of director Takashi Tokita (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV), Noboyuki Inoue (Mana series, Mother 3), and composer Yoko Shimamura (Kingdom Hearts, Mario RPGS), the game’s premise was unique. Instead of your typical linear JRPG quest, Live a Live had a total of seven chapters - each corresponding to a different period of history, with their own casts - that you could tackle in any order you wished. After completing all of them, two new chapters would be unlocked, connecting the plots of every episode and uniting the cast for the final battle. This alone is enticing enough, but to really put the cherry on top, each scenario has a different mangaka serving as the art director, so each time period has a distinct design that plays to each artist’s strengths. While I’m not sure how popular some of the mangaka are here in the states, they include Yumi Tamura (Basara, 7 Seeds), and Gosho Aoyama (Case Closed), titles that I know have at least been localized.

Honestly, Square Enix could probably have just made a simple port of this game and people would still eagerly buy it. But they decided to pull out all the stops and completely remake it for its first official western debut. The most noticeable difference is the upgraded graphics. The pixel art in the original game was charming and perfectly fine, with the overworld sprites being more simplified than the larger, more detailed ones seen in battle, but now the entire game is presented in the “2D HD” style that was seen previously in games like Octopath Traveler. It’s a style I wasn’t too keen on at first until I played Triangle Strategy (which released right before this remake), and I learned that still screenshots failed to capture how gorgeous this style is. An extra plus is that I primarily played on handheld mode, and there were no noticeable frame rate dips (although the load times were sometimes a bit on the long side; at least they had tips for the chapter you were playing). The 16-bit version’s soundtrack was already incredible, but the new orchestrations are an absolute treat. The addition of a sound test in the chapter select is a great feature, too. Lastly, the biggest non-cosmetic addition to this remake is that the final chapter of the game is expanded, with a completely new form for the final boss!

So, now that we know the rough basics of the game and what’s new in this release, it’s time to talk about the actual gameplay. Your time is spent balanced between exploration and battling enemies, although some chapters lean more heavily on one side of the equation than the other - for example, the distant future only has one mandatory fight, while the present day is nothing but battling. Further, some scenarios only have random encounters, while others have foes roaming the map that you have to bump into to initiate combat. The battles themselves are always the same, however; your party and your enemies are dropped on a 7x7 grid, where both you and your foes will be able to perform actions once your gauges fill up. Some skills happen instantly, while others take time to charge. There’s also a number of different attack types, and it pays to take note of your enemies vulnerabilities when targeting them. To round things out, there’s a variety of status effects and tile effects that you’ll need to be wary of. Even when I first started and hadn’t yet grasped the finer details of the system, it never felt overwhelming, and there’s a guide you can access at any point in battle explaining the types and effects of attacks. Battles can feel repetitive in some chapters, but overall I found them enjoyable and they would sometimes have surprising depth (such as in the optional Captain Square battles in the distant future).

Story-wise, none of the scenarios are groundbreaking, often referencing common cliches or popular movies, and are fairly predictable. However, that’s not to say that they’re bad; for the most part, they’re fun, if not at the least serviceable, and the variety stops things from growing stale. The distant future is a clear standout, combining elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ripley’s Alien to create a tense game of predator and prey; the wild west has you creating traps to protect a small town from outlaws; the near future takes heavy cues from Akira, putting you in the shoes of a delinquent orphan with psychic powers. My personal favorite scenario is definitely the Twilight of Edo Japan, where you play as a ninja tasked with rescuing a prisoner. There are 100 non-boss enemies in this chapter, but in a move that no doubt inspired Undertale, you can choose to instead avoid them all through the use of stealth. Or, if you’re feeling particularly violent, you can go out of your way to find and slay every one of them! I had a blast with this chapter, which felt so ahead of its release back in 1994. Unfortunately, not all of them are winners - the prehistory chapter is unique in that it doesn’t feature any dialogue, every character communicating through grunts and symbols. It didn’t capture my attention, and while the battles were fun, the story didn’t appeal to me, having you rescue a girl from being sacrificed, and is filled with humor relating to bodily functions and making heart eyes, which could have been funny in the right light, but fell flat here.

After completing every one of these episodes, an eighth one will unlock, set in the middle ages. After having won the hand of the princess, your mission is to defeat the Dark Lord, with some help from the kingdom’s previous great heroes. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned. I won’t spoil the twist, but while it definitely felt like it came out of nowhere (it doesn’t help that the main character here is completely silent, and lacking in personality) it was mostly enjoyable, and leads into the final chapter, where all your heroes from the previous scenarios team up. You’ll pick one of the characters at the start, then have to recruit the others by finding them in the overworld. Each character has an optional dungeon hidden in the overworld as well, which will reward them with their most powerful weapon, and net you experience you’ll probably want for the final boss. These dungeons each have a different gimmick, with some being well worth the effort, while others are a slog. Without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the finale is very climactic and a great ending to the game, if rather easy if you’ve done all the dungeons. There’s also a “bad” ending you can get by selecting a specific character as your starting protagonist here (don’t worry, it’s easily telegraphed which one it is), that was pretty unprecedented at the time of the game’s release, and is still a blast to play here.

All in all, there are a few moments where the game misses its mark; the prehistory scenario, sometimes even with the map the objectives aren’t so clear (there’s a particular moment in the Middle Ages that stands out to me as being overly frustrating), and a couple chapters struggle with having too many encounters with not enough variety in enemy types. There’s also some elements that may wear thin on more ‘modern’ gamers, like superbosses or items that are extremely hard to stumble upon by chance. But the highlights more than make up for these shortcomings - the entirety of the Edo Japan chapter, the thrilling boss fights, the novelty of the distant future and wild west episodes, the fun with experimenting with newly unlocked skills. Even when you know what direction the plot is going to take, it doesn’t distract from the game’s charm, or decrease your curiosity to continue exploring. If you’re a fan of retro JRPGs, this game comes highly recommended. Square Enix has at last done this cult classic justice.

Final Rating: 8.5