This review contains spoilers
Finally, I thought, digging into the first scenarios of Live-A-Live, Asano has made a well paced game. The creators of the Bravely and Octopath series have remade a classic SNES game, a series of episodic self contained RPG adventures, there’s no way this can fall victim to the awful third act pacing that plagues those titles.
I was wrong.
Perhaps the original Live-A-Live is the true root of evil; the inspiration behind the terrible pacing in Asano’s original titles that take influence from it. It’s hard to say. All I’m certain of is that Live-A-Live starts off filled with charm, and finishes a total slog.
Spoiler free thoughts first; the game has seven scenarios you can tackle in any order which each represent a different time period and a different genre. A wuxia adventure, a wild west shootout, an Alien ripoff, etc. The quality varies but generally these are all fun and unique. There’s a really earnest effort to capture the genres in the RPG template in a way that- and I mean this in the best way possible- makes it feel like an anthology of the most ambitious RPG Maker titles.
The wuxia chapter was my favourite by a wide margin. I love the genre- secret techniques, rivalries, emotional breakthroughs, and the scenario has some solid twists which play well with the RPG character progression. The near future is another hit, some pulpy old fashioned shounen with psychics, punks and super robots.
Other chapters are more grating. On paper, the Distant Future chapter should be a hit, a claustrophobic murder mystery, but in execution it’s a drag, playing as a camera on legs scuttling between predetermined cutscenes where the human crew scratch their heads and say “Whose Footprints are these?”. The ninja chapter is just very long, both it and the Prehistoric chapter give you big rambling maps that are frustrating to navigate.
On the whole, the scenarios are excellent, and even the ones I found more frustrating all have fantastic endings where the pumping boss track “Megalomania” kicks in. These are far and away the strongest portion of the game, and the part I’d recommend. They constitute a half to two thirds of the overall playtime of the game and provide short stories and good memories.
Spoilers follow.
After completing the other seven scenarios you unlock the eighth chapter, the middle ages. While the other chapters push into unusual genres for JRPGs, this one plays it straight with a pat, by the numbers save the Princess quest for silent protagonist Oersted. The twist is that Oersted, becomes… dun dun dun The Dark Lord, the villain of the whole game!
It’s not a bad idea, but it fell totally flat for me. On the one hand, Oersted isn’t characterised throughout the chapter: he’s silent. Does he want to marry the Princess? Does he want to be a hero? The intention is that the player will naturally slip into this role as a hyper entitled chosen one, but I disassociated with Oersted the moment I was locked into several of his bad decisions. He stops being a silent protagonist at the end of the scenario when he opens his mouth to start whining loudly about how mean everyone’s been to him ever since he started murdering innocents wholesale. As a villain, he doesn’t hit any of the right notes- he’s not a fun evil-and-loving-it Kefka, nor a sympathetic Magus, nor even a guy-you-love-to-hate Gary Oak.
After Oersted the final-final chapter starts, this is the one that actually unifies all the characters from the different scenarios and brings them together for a final adventure. But the throughline is very weak, I get the impression that the scenarios were written individually and then the final chapter was written after the fact. Ostensibly, Oersted’s magical hatred powers cross the void of space and time, connecting him to villains in the far flung future and ancient past so long as they’re filled with hatred. In practice, this makes little sense. One of the villains is a T-Rex, a wild animal that just happened to try and eat us because we were nearby, but according to Oersted it hated our guts. Oersted can win the scenario and wipe out life on Earth, despite the fact that, you know, more than half the scenarios take place after the middle ages.
Regardless, for the final chapter you pick a protagonist. A highlight for me here is that your chosen successor represents the wuxia scenario, meaning I could play the final scenario as a heroine. There are, otherwise, no female party members.
Whoever you pick, you travel through the small generic fantasy world from chapter 8, recruiting the other characters. This is where the pacing dies- there’s a ton of RPG progression suddenly where everyone can level up, and a dungeon for each of the 7 characters to get their ultimate weapon. It’s a grind that manages to take up more time than any individual chapter beforehand despite having no real story to tell.
The finale has its moments, provided you did recruit all the characters. There’s a cruel twist if you skipped a character, dumping you into a bad end between boss fights. But once you’ve got the lot there’s a good moment where everyone shows up to do their turn and you get to absolutely wallop the boss with every super move you’ve unlocked. There’s no feeling of connection between the characters, but it’s still fun.
I really can’t emphasise enough how much the end of the game dragged for me. I completed the first seven chapters in a few weekends but struggled for months to come back to the finale, and thought over and over again “well at least there’s only a little bit more” before getting stung by hours and hours more play. In the end, I’ll try to remember the positives, because there were a lot of them, and even if the pacing was wonky I still made it to the end, unlike Octopath. I’m certainly glad I played it. If nothing else it deepens my appreciation for Chrono Trigger, a game that built upon Live-A-Live’s legacy to tie multiple time periods together more successfully.
I was wrong.
Perhaps the original Live-A-Live is the true root of evil; the inspiration behind the terrible pacing in Asano’s original titles that take influence from it. It’s hard to say. All I’m certain of is that Live-A-Live starts off filled with charm, and finishes a total slog.
Spoiler free thoughts first; the game has seven scenarios you can tackle in any order which each represent a different time period and a different genre. A wuxia adventure, a wild west shootout, an Alien ripoff, etc. The quality varies but generally these are all fun and unique. There’s a really earnest effort to capture the genres in the RPG template in a way that- and I mean this in the best way possible- makes it feel like an anthology of the most ambitious RPG Maker titles.
The wuxia chapter was my favourite by a wide margin. I love the genre- secret techniques, rivalries, emotional breakthroughs, and the scenario has some solid twists which play well with the RPG character progression. The near future is another hit, some pulpy old fashioned shounen with psychics, punks and super robots.
Other chapters are more grating. On paper, the Distant Future chapter should be a hit, a claustrophobic murder mystery, but in execution it’s a drag, playing as a camera on legs scuttling between predetermined cutscenes where the human crew scratch their heads and say “Whose Footprints are these?”. The ninja chapter is just very long, both it and the Prehistoric chapter give you big rambling maps that are frustrating to navigate.
On the whole, the scenarios are excellent, and even the ones I found more frustrating all have fantastic endings where the pumping boss track “Megalomania” kicks in. These are far and away the strongest portion of the game, and the part I’d recommend. They constitute a half to two thirds of the overall playtime of the game and provide short stories and good memories.
Spoilers follow.
After completing the other seven scenarios you unlock the eighth chapter, the middle ages. While the other chapters push into unusual genres for JRPGs, this one plays it straight with a pat, by the numbers save the Princess quest for silent protagonist Oersted. The twist is that Oersted, becomes… dun dun dun The Dark Lord, the villain of the whole game!
It’s not a bad idea, but it fell totally flat for me. On the one hand, Oersted isn’t characterised throughout the chapter: he’s silent. Does he want to marry the Princess? Does he want to be a hero? The intention is that the player will naturally slip into this role as a hyper entitled chosen one, but I disassociated with Oersted the moment I was locked into several of his bad decisions. He stops being a silent protagonist at the end of the scenario when he opens his mouth to start whining loudly about how mean everyone’s been to him ever since he started murdering innocents wholesale. As a villain, he doesn’t hit any of the right notes- he’s not a fun evil-and-loving-it Kefka, nor a sympathetic Magus, nor even a guy-you-love-to-hate Gary Oak.
After Oersted the final-final chapter starts, this is the one that actually unifies all the characters from the different scenarios and brings them together for a final adventure. But the throughline is very weak, I get the impression that the scenarios were written individually and then the final chapter was written after the fact. Ostensibly, Oersted’s magical hatred powers cross the void of space and time, connecting him to villains in the far flung future and ancient past so long as they’re filled with hatred. In practice, this makes little sense. One of the villains is a T-Rex, a wild animal that just happened to try and eat us because we were nearby, but according to Oersted it hated our guts. Oersted can win the scenario and wipe out life on Earth, despite the fact that, you know, more than half the scenarios take place after the middle ages.
Regardless, for the final chapter you pick a protagonist. A highlight for me here is that your chosen successor represents the wuxia scenario, meaning I could play the final scenario as a heroine. There are, otherwise, no female party members.
Whoever you pick, you travel through the small generic fantasy world from chapter 8, recruiting the other characters. This is where the pacing dies- there’s a ton of RPG progression suddenly where everyone can level up, and a dungeon for each of the 7 characters to get their ultimate weapon. It’s a grind that manages to take up more time than any individual chapter beforehand despite having no real story to tell.
The finale has its moments, provided you did recruit all the characters. There’s a cruel twist if you skipped a character, dumping you into a bad end between boss fights. But once you’ve got the lot there’s a good moment where everyone shows up to do their turn and you get to absolutely wallop the boss with every super move you’ve unlocked. There’s no feeling of connection between the characters, but it’s still fun.
I really can’t emphasise enough how much the end of the game dragged for me. I completed the first seven chapters in a few weekends but struggled for months to come back to the finale, and thought over and over again “well at least there’s only a little bit more” before getting stung by hours and hours more play. In the end, I’ll try to remember the positives, because there were a lot of them, and even if the pacing was wonky I still made it to the end, unlike Octopath. I’m certainly glad I played it. If nothing else it deepens my appreciation for Chrono Trigger, a game that built upon Live-A-Live’s legacy to tie multiple time periods together more successfully.