Kind of an inverse of Judgment where this has some of the best gameplay in the series but the story is a lot more mid than the first game.

Possibly has some of the most versatile combat in the series. All of the different fighting styles are a blast to play around with, though it doesn't quite feel as frantic as Y6 and some enemy encounters towards the end are a bit annoying. The boxer fighting style specifically is a huge change of pace for this, and it makes you genuinely feel like you're playing some kind of brawler/boxing game hybrid.

This game smooths out a lot of the edges of the first Judgment, to the point where it feels a lot closer to a mainline Yakuza game. The stealth segments are significantly less plentiful, which is great because those really brought down the first game. The chase sequences are also less common as well. You spend less of the playtime doing things like using drones; the investigation sequences are still pretty common, but they're more straightforward and akin to bits in Ace Attorney.

I guess the problem that does come with some of this is that it ends up feeling more forgettable amongst the series. The gameplay here really feels similar to Kiwami 2 in some regards. I guess that's kind of a hard problem for this franchise to overcome but it's still there.

The story is.....hm. The main players and villains feel revealed too early on to grip me the way Judgment's did. I also think it's kind of incoherent thematically since the main bad characters of the game kind of have a point even if they went too far, and what theme I can juice out of it feels like the game is saying that Japanese law needs to be tougher on bullying as a crime, which.....I don't really agree with? I mean bullying is a problem, but the systemic issues that cause it are more rooted in underfunded schools and poor home childhood home life caused by our economic material realities and overworked parents. This game doesn't really go into any of that and sometimes feels like the equivalent of a middle schooler starting an "End Bullying" campaign at their school. But I'm probably reading into this too much; this game clearly went for a soap opera-ass story like a lot of the earlier Yakuza games and isn't thematically as interesting as the first game. And it very much succeeds in this regard! The characters are a lot of fun, it's constantly doing interesting things in its story, the emotional beats hit. I'd describe it as fun but disappointing. The game is still better than the first though, by virtue of just holistically being more fun.

Jesus, this game is.....something else man. The maps are huge, in a way I really don't like. In order to break up the gameplay and not irritate myself I played this game a few times a week for about 30 minutes a night over the course of a year. I ended up having some really memorable experiences with it that way. The skirmishes, when broken down into their pure gameplay, are a lot of fun. This game has a lot of mechanics I appreciate; I love the way the arena works. The fact that you can position units in such a way to have a dancer take care of four on a single turn. The fact that a lot of non-mounted units actually have a pretty big advantage if you're not playing for LTC in terms of their speed, which I quite liked with time.

But it's just....so monotonous sometimes. Some gameplay sessions were literally just moving units. Hell, some gameplay sessions were me RE-MOVING units wherein I load up from an earlier save after I realized I moved my units in a way that wasn't to my liking. It's just....boring.

The plot has interesting ideas but they mostly seemed executed in a way that was sorta basic compared to later games. At least to my understanding, my Japanese isn't great and I didn't play the fan translation.

I realize that some of my issues are because I played this game on original hardware untranslated. But I'm not critiquing Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the game these zoomer FE fans download from some dude on Discord and play on SNES9X with graphical filters or whatever. I'm critiquing Fire Emblem: Seisen No Keifu, the game that a version of myself two decades older might have bought from a local import shop in 1996 (or even maybe an alternate version of myself that got into retro gaming earlier in the mid-late 2000s but is otherwise the same). That game is brilliant in pieces but also pretty frustrating. But it sure looks nice on a CRT. Take that, zoomers.

Live-a-Live is a good game, but it's also a very interesting game, probably more than it is good. I at least respect the parts of this game I don't really like.

I feel like you can sort of break up this game's chapters into two categories: The chapters that play and flow more like traditional JRPGs (Prehistory, Imperial China, the Near Future, and the Middle Ages), and the more experimental ones (Twilight of Edo Japan, the Wild West, Present Day, and the Distant Future). The more traditional chapters are all a pretty good time; paced decently well, okay to good dungeon design, memorable setpieces. They all kind of end up never really reaching their full potential because of their length, though. Something like the Near Future especially feels just kind of like a condensed RPG that can't reach its full potential because it can't develop its characters more fully. I do think their quality varies some; Prehistory is a bit weaker than the others, and the Middle Ages feels more interesting and memorable than the others, but I'd say they're all "pretty good" on their own.

The more experimental chapters are uh....mixed. Edo Japan and the Wild West I think have pretty good execution. but I'm not really big on their concepts to begin with. I'm not super into games designed around learning and remembering stage layouts, nor does a "Metroidvania Stealth Game" sound like something up my alley, so my issues mostly have to do with the types of games those chapters try to be. Present Day, though, fuckin' rules; I love it when games have a pure-combat arc that's just a total riff on wrestling (see chapter 3 of Paper Mario tTYD), and this delivers in spades. It's unfortunately easily the shortest part of the game, but I still had a blast with it. Distant Future, though, I think is honestly a total flop. It's really interesting, and really experimental to make a combat-less dialogue driven mini-RPG, especially for 1993. It feels very indie game-esque. But the writing just isn't good enough to sustain it, and the story is mostly just a subpar riff on Alien. It was interesting to see it done in a game like this but I don't think it really works.

And then there's the ending, which has a cool concept (that was much better fleshed out in FF6), but ultimately ends up feeling kinda grindy and repetitive. The bonus dungeons each character has feel sorta tedious and bullshit in terms of how they're designed; they're not hard at all, but the friction that exists doesn't feel well designed. The actual final dungeon and encounter, though, rules and brings this thing to a pretty memorable end.

Overall, it seems like a mixed bag, but I liked more of it than I didn't, really. And the parts that I didn't like were at least memorable.

I also have to mention the combat system, which totally owns. Chrono Trigger was 100% a step back from this. The fact that it's grid based forces you to consider positioning a lot more, and the abilities are varied enough to have niche utility in different situations, even if they're not super well balanced across the board (some characters end up being way more useful than others). If nothing else, if you're a fan of RPG boss battles, the ones in this game are worth the price of admission alone.