21.2 hours played
Written 13 days ago
A great concept that I really like as a concept, but that has not translated well into a game. Mild spoilers ahead.
Live A Live lets you play through several chapters (and a bigger final chapter), with each chapter having it's own protagonist, set in a separate time period and starring it's own little story. I love that as a concept; playing different characters, maybe with some different mechanics depending on the time period...but the execution ranges from mediocre to frustrating. The soundtrack and graphics are fantastic, however, as are the battle animations - just to name some positives ahead of the negatives.
To start, most of the stories are extremely short. One of them I finished in under an hour, some of them were a little bit longer, but rarely more than 2-3 hours at the absolute most. This little time does not suffice to give any depth to the world, the story or the characters and as a result, I found it hard to care about most of them. Interestingly enough, I enjoyed the prehistory chapter the most, because it attempted to do something unique with it's lack of words, and the near future chapter was somewhat cool, but most of the chapters lacked something to make them unique or more interesting.
Characters do not get enough room or time to really grow or characterize themselves, and so we have cardboard cutouts that mostly fail to be interesting, aside from the characters that are "self-explanatorily cool" for lack of a better term because they are themselves somewhat unique (Cube and Pogo). And while each chapter does have a small unique thing going for it - for example, encounters in prehistory are sniffed out instead of random, or mind reading in the near future chapter - it's not enough to truly make them feel unique instead of the same thing with a different palette.
The final chapter then brings all of these characters together, for some reason (it's not really given a satisfying explanation imo) to defeat one final threat. The way everything is set up in that final chapter is kind of cool, and the ending is very satisfying, but it also turns into a huge grind to be able to beat a game as you now have to level up all characters you would like to use to even stand a chance against the final boss, leading to several hours of grinding. At least there are some unique dungeons for every character to get good equipment, but even so, it just feels unnecessarily stretched out to add that final bit of playtime and even with leveled characters and good equipment, it's a chore.
The other problem is that all the chapters are using the same battle system, and I have a couple dozen problems just with the battle system alone. It's both grid- and time-based, a terrible combination, because it makes it very hard to determine who acts when. Some attacks need to be charged up, some are instant and the battles are wildly unbalanced, with some being super easy and others being unbearably hard, in part because of how difficult it is to determine the turn order, which also leads to you getting comboed easily - and if a character dies by being hit when downed, they are gone for the rest of the battle.
This lack of balance becomes especially apparent in the final battles, where even with some grinding, attacks will almost instantly kill you. Then you need to heal, which takes up a turn, and then the enemy can attack again, leading to very little damage dealt to the bosses. The animations are cool and there are some creative skills, but fighting was very unfun to me and it's most of what you do in Live A Live.
Overall, the game felt a bit like a chore to complete. With every finished chapter, the potential of the game slipped away more and more. The final chapter was interesting for an hour or two, but then turned into a huge grind just to finish the game. With stories that are all too short, motivations that are all too obscure (which, apparently, is in part because the translations are different than the original) and a battle system that made my hair fall out, I think LIve A Live should have stayed on the SNES and never be remade, or at least received more QOL improvements than it did. I liked some of it, but overall, there are vastly better RPGs.
