Live A Live (Switch)
Live A Live is a tale told across time, heroes from prehistory all the way to the distant future all rising up to defend those who need it. Perhaps appropriately then, this role-playing game is almost a game across time, released originally for the Super Famicom in 1994 but not seeing release outside of Japan until 2022 in a loving remaster that straddles a line between past and present in its presentation. Utilizing what it refers to as an HD-2D style, the world and backgrounds are vivid 3D spaces while the characters are two-dimensional pixel art creations, enemies and bosses intricately detailed while normal characters are a bit more reserved in their design while still fitting in because of wise coloring and staging decisions.
When you begin Live A Live, you are presented with a selection of seven different eras you can play in whatever order you please. While it can be said that the game as a whole is a role-playing game with a tile-based combat system, each of these chapters approaches how it tells a self-contained story quite differently, to the point a few chapters barely even have battles at all. This is because the different time periods aren’t all just different settings for a similar game style, the main unifying factor between them being that an antagonist eventually arises whose name is a variation on Odio. This connecting thread will eventually pay off in the more robust content played after you have gone through the short stories tied to each time period, but most of them will take around 2 hours to complete, making them almost like feature films where you quickly enter the specific place in time to see how its tale is told and what twist it will bring to how you play the associated chapter.
Live A Live’s chapters hit on a good spread of time periods, obviously favoring the past since it can evoke real eras from our world but having two future chapters as well that can delve into familiar science fiction concepts like space travel and giant mechs. There isn’t really any effort to make the past feel like it’s a realistic picture of the times though, not only does the ninja chapter feature you fighting things like spirits but the prehistory one has a group of cavemen driving around in cars made of stone. However, the aesthetics are definitely rooted in what one might expect of something like a Wild West tale while at the same time having superb music that creates a thematic sound for each era that leans well into the narrative focus of the chapter. The distant future’s eerie solitude is matched by subdued electronic sound while the near future’s more heroic tale instead tries to sound more triumphant and energetic to match its tale. Yoko Shimomura’s compositions include many excellent and memorable melodies even when they’re covering familiar musical ground like Imperial China’s music tracks all leaning into fairly common instrumentation for a martial arts tale, the spectacular soundtrack continuing to add to this game’s impressive artistic direction.
The actual stories told in each time period though are more variable in their quality, partly because of the ambitious effort to set things apart so much between them. Prehistory for example exists before language was even invented, characters communicating instead through pantomime and speech bubbles that show images. It’s easy enough to glean the simple tale told in the distant past but it is also slowed down by this approach to conveying information. On the other hand, the distant future is an excellent self-contained story where you play as a small robot that was just created aboard a spaceship where things are rapidly going wrong. The drama and mystery presented contains many twists and effective character writing that your playable character has the perfect excuse for being thrown into without knowledge and needing to gather the context gradually to eventually learn the truth of what’s going wrong. The Wild West chapter on the other hand is one of the most standard tales for the setting possible, a drifter blowing into town and needing to protect the towns folk from a gang of criminals, but because Live A Live doesn’t linger in any tale too long, its more traditional ideas can also stand well beside the ones that are a bit more creative or feature a compelling angle. The story that starts to be told after you complete these time periods also serves as a fitting way to start examining the themes of heroism and tradition at play, and while it won’t dive too deep into them, it does serve as an effective escalation after you have tied up the initial offerings and are ready for something meatier.
The different play styles across the chapter are often the bigger draw to trying them out. One of the more compelling concepts at play is seen in the Twilight of Edo Japan, this ninja-themed chapter involving the infiltration of a castle where you can choose to be stealthy and try to slip through without killing anyone or simply massacre your way to your target. The effort needed to take the more peaceful route involves engaging with more environmental puzzles, but this chapter even makes some battles into small puzzles as well so it’s not mindless if you do try and go for the simpler but less rewarding route. The distant future’s tale of intrigue and suspense has almost no battles so it can instead focus on a compelling story with some characters who get some more time to develop, but then you have the present day where a martial artist goes on a globe-trotting adventure to learn techniques from various warriors so it ends up almost exclusively battles. Even with the fight focus that chapter has you trying to bait out special moves from your foes so they can be added to your arsenal, but there are some ideas that aren’t quite as effective as others. The Imperial China story has you playing as a martial artist training his pupils and this mostly manifests as easily defeating them in battle over and over for a bit, but it’s not completely shallow as it also lets you choose who your successor will be and there are some battles with more teeth to them after the training sessions.
All in all though, the combat system does take a while to get going, seemingly because the ability to choose which time period to start with necessitates that it can’t start off too challenging and the length of each chapter sometimes means it doesn’t have long to escalate in difficulty. In Live A Live, all the battles happen on a 7×7 grid you can move about on, attacks having different regions they target that necessitate proper placement to execute or avoid. Your characters are often given a fairly wide range of unique abilities with different affinities and effects, and with no resource system in place you are free to use them as you please and better engage with interesting powers. There are some limits to keep some powers in check, there being a casting time for the stronger stuff and such abilities can be interrupted, but in general the range of powers does make selecting your desired skill a bit more substantial even if you don’t have to worry about things being too difficult to start. Only once you start unlocking the story content after the freely selected time periods do you start to really rub up against battles that start to test your ability to manage health, pick the right moves, and grow your strength by standing your ground since otherwise you can flee freely from most non-story battles. It does take a while to get to this point in the game and a few bosses before you reach it are a bit weaker than you might expect because the game is afraid to ramp things up, but the battle system does eventually start to be enjoyable on its own merits rather than needing twists like some movement puzzles or the technique baiting other chapters use to give them something appealing to latch onto.
Thankfully, Live A Live’s split focus means easy early combat doesn’t undermine the experience, and there are even a few touches added to this release to streamline some moments. A radar in the bottom right of the screen helps you reach objectives when they might otherwise be unclear for example, and there’s even an effective use of it in one time period’s tale where a character’s own aimless state leave you with no designated direction to head. Even if a part of the game isn’t testing your skills much, it often steeps you in the mood and aesthetics of its era enough that it’s still easy to get wrapped up in the experience, and the voice acting can help sell this quite well. Some characters like Mad Dog in the Wild West chapter, a bounty hunter angling to hunt down your character, are made far more charismatic by having their dialogue voice acted and some of the late game content takes on an almost poetic structure that could be hard to read appropriately but is wonderfully realized when you hear the characters speak. The near future story does feature a few strange accents, perhaps a speculative attempt to come up with how people might sound down the line, but then the distant future just has more typical voices but ones that definitely bring out the emotion in one of the game’s best told stories. While Live A Live juggles plenty of different story styles and approaches them with different degrees of effectiveness, there will almost always be some element that is done well enough or some concept compelling enough to keep you on board.
THE VERDICT: Live A Live brings its many tales across time alive with gorgeous visual direction and some phenomenal musical themes, a good degree of creativity making visiting each new era a unique experience. The unifying combat system does take a bit too long to truly become challenging, but various chapters twist it into new shapes so it doesn’t grow old and the variety in special abilities and positioning tactics means it does come into its own later in the adventure. The different chapters do vary in how effective they are, some like the Distant Future thriving on a compelling narrative while Imperial China’s martial arts plot putters around for a bit too long, but the chapters don’t outstay their welcome and ultimately come together into an entertaining and varied package.
And so, I give Live A Live for Nintendo Switch…
A GREAT rating. Live A Live doesn’t hit the mark on everything it attempts, but it never outright fails with any of its time period tales. Prehistory’s dialogue-free approach is a bit rough, but it’s also a cute and silly comedic story that has its own flavor. Slapping around your students in the Imperial China tale is a bit basic, but it’s a gorgeous chapter visually and the combat does come together once the training is complete. Helping a town set up traps in the Wild West is a completely unique play style in the game that helps make a fairly cliche premise more intriguing, and with the late game starting to emphasize the battle system more you are given a heap of more challenging action after the entertaining but quick stories that set things up for a more involved follow through that is almost as long as the early chapters combined. With some chapters like Near Future and Prehistory leaning on regular battles a bit more than others it does feel like the game could have started to lay out more dangerous and demanding battles earlier in the experience and a few important bosses do lose some sting by being so easily trounced, but Live A Live also doesn’t sacrifice its more effective focuses just to rope in tough battles. The Distant Future works so well because it can maintain its focus and keep you on a quickly evolving plot that still takes the time to establish important ideas and personalities, so not cluttering that with insubstantial fights keeps it consistently engaging. There will be usually something to keep the energy going even if the fights you are experiencing at a point are pushovers, and while any one story could perhaps use more time to build up its characters or themes some more, the package is certainly stacked quite well with entertaining ideas so that it doesn’t feel like it’s lacking a reason to keep playing through the tales across time.
Live A Live is a collection of experiences, some admittedly more imaginative than others but all of them special in their own way and better for being willing to break away from the combat format. In fact, doing so makes that longer late game more interesting because it is where the combat becomes more of the focus and can come into its own, and while that doesn’t make some of the tame fights in the early chapters better, the creative approach to designing each time period means there is instead a more important element that demands the attention and helps it achieve some sort of success. The artistic elements are certainly the most exceptional and consistently high quality part of the experience, but Live A Live’s ambitious ideas still work well even though they’re technically not novel since they’re being polished up for a rerelease 28 years after their initial debut. Live A Live can make a classic tale of good vs. evil feel distinct across the years, that commitment to a unique approach for each era a more captivating direction than just applying a different coat of paint to the same type of gameplay.