First off, I'm beyond glad this game finally got the localization it deserved. Fans have been waiting an international release for literal decades, and it finally arrived.

After finishing it myself, I describe Live A Live as... an experience. A work of art. But not always a great videogame. It has a lot of ambition, but its ideas don't always stick the landing.

The game is an anthology of chapters, each set in a different time period and homaging a certain genre. Wild West, Sci-Fi, Prehistory, Wuxia, etc. Each can be completed in 1-3 hours, but they cram a LOT into that length, telling more complete and emotional stories than many far longer works.

These are loving tributes to the classics, and if you're familiar with those tropes, don't expect to be surprised. The Far Future chapter is almost an unofficial remake of Alien, Near Future draws heavily from Akira, Wild West is The Magnificent Seven, and so on. This is not a bad thing, as while they're cliches, they're well-written cliches.

One issue this causes though, is the chapters are wildly inconsistent in tone and often gameplay, and you'll probably like some more than others depending on your taste. I started with Prehistory, but its poop and fart jokes (right down to character MOVESETS) nearly turned me off the game, and while a lot of people love the Far Future, I'm not a fan of instakill adventure game horror and it has no RPG combat besides the tutorial and end boss. Edo Japan is where I feel the game stumbles with over-ambition, it's practically a sandbox with tons of ways to approach its goal, but in practice both a "pacifist" and "full murder" run require a guide.

By contrast, I loved the Present Day, China and Secret chapters. The latter two mix gameplay and story perfectly, while the first had the novel idea to turn Street Fighter II into a JRPG and managed to create a fun, balanced experience without a levelling system.

The actual combat system is a combination of old Final Fantasy ATB and grid-based movement. Characters can use any move they want, there's no MP system, but some moves require charge time and can be interrupted. I might be inexperienced with it, but I found it hard to come up with strategies, as it's hard to tell which moves are best with only vague damage descriptions like "low" and "massive", and apparently some moves scale off stats besides Physical/Special Attack and this is never made clear. From what I've read, the original version was even more obtuse with its moves, not even listing their status effects or displaying ATB timers.

The game also has issues with optional content. A few chapters contain superbosses that demand grinding far more than is reasonable (e.g to Lv 16 in a chapter that can be beaten at less than 10), and the final chapter contains a whopping SEVEN optional dungeons, which you have to trek through an overworld with constant random encounters to reach. I'd estimate at least half my playtime was spent in the final chapter alone, and that's without going for the superboss you get for fleeing 100 times, or the one requiring you to do the final dungeon twice...

But back to positives, the soundtrack has been incredibly re-arranged, and I have to give major props to the voice acting. The dub makes an effort to use region-appropriate voice actors for each chapter (e.g Chinese actors for the Imperial China chapter, actors experienced in Shakespeare for the Secret chapter) and performances are consistently great. And while I'm not a fan of HD2D (which is a massive hot take, I know), this is one of the better-looking examples I've seen.

Overall Live A Live is an excellent work of art but doesn't always PLAY well, preventing it from being a timeless classic like Chrono Trigger in my eyes. But Chrono Trigger came later, so perhaps that's an unfair comparison.