This review contains spoilers
A SLIME draws near!
Command?
> FIGHT
OERSTED attacks!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there's nothing new under the sun.
it's a pithy statement to the point of reductiveness, as such things usually are, but there is a truth to it, not one that condemns, but one that liberates. forgive me for drinking deep of the well of ideology here, but even though all of us may indeed be the products of the words and systems that surround us, no one is quite the same combination of influences as any other, which gives us a wholly unique perspective. but this is also why ensuring our horizons are broad is important, because although we can never widen our scope enough to take in everything, narrowing it in turn only presses the walls in around us, and leaves us with only one path forward.
dragon quest, then, is not a wholly unique game that sprung fully-formed out onto the famicom, but was once that represented a conscious effort to translate a specific mode of game - the popular pc rpgs of the time like wizardry and ultima - and many of the decisions it made clearly have immense thought and care put into them as a result of this, and the result was a game that changed the landscape of the entire industry. but in doing so, it provided a template, a set story for how these things go. defeat monsters. gather experience. explore dungeons. destroy T̵̲̼͆̅͘ͅȟ̸̲̇e̷̡̬̪͛ ̶͙̰͇̍̓̏L̵̪̽̒͌o̷͍͛r̴͖̙͋̾̕d̸̘̜͔̅̋̽ ̷̳͌́̑o̸̪͌̚f̶̗̹͓̆͂ ̶̗̗͊Ḍ̴̪̽͠a̸̙͌̍r̸̜͎̾k̶̻̽.
games that came in dragon quest's wake drew from this story, telling it over and over again. i do not wish to claim here that dragon quest is the only truly original work in the entire jrpg form because that's clearly a completely unhinged and wrong thing to say, but i do wish to argue that the things dragon quest put thought and care into creating were adopted wholesale, without the same level of purposefulness, by many other games, creating an intrinsic language of expectation and reference that in turn provides a bedrock of norms through which audiences and creators can process the form. this is useful, both artistically and financially for both the audience and the artist, but by it's nature it narrows the scope of the form arround it, and allows ideas that were never challenged or interrogated, even ones as simple as defeating enemies to gain experience points, to crystalise around the work, creating something that may indeed be beautiful, but is unmoving, unchanging.
while there are heavier consequences to this - the widespread homogenisation of monetization and progression systems in games undoubtedly is self-served by their uncritical ubiquity, and many stories continue to carry forth regressive ideas built into their hearts because the creators are unaware of them or unwilling to divest themselves from them - one that should also be considered is that the more and more complex the language of norms around a form becomes, the more insular and closed-off it is at risk of becoming.
one need only look at the third most-important JRPG to release in july 2022 to see what this results in: a complete mess of a game, only barely held together by self-justifying tropes and glue that the prospective player - intimately familiar with the construction of and tropes of these games - will simply accept and enjoy singularly. ask a single question about it's world or it's characters or it's plot and it's illusion of cohesiveness will shatter instantly. why does the party react with such horror to someone killing for sport in this cutscene, but will happily recruit the sexy warrior woman who also kills for sport in the very next cutscene? because each one is a trope that carries a set of norms that is implicitly understood and accepted by it's core audience, and proves to be completely baffling to anyone who does not speak this language - or, indeed, Thinks for One Minute.
(i kinda like it though. i am a student of this language, after all.)
the games that result from this aren't necessarily bad, but i think truly exceptional works will strive to be more than the perpetuations of their genre, want to create an experience that aspires to more than simply playing the hits and playing them adequately. because when your path is narrow, there's really only one way forward.
which brings us, at last, to live a live, and to what makes it truly special. while I think this game is clever and inventive constantly, i don't want to let that be mistaken for a game that is unlike anything you've seen or played before. indeed, in many ways, live a live revels in cliche, with each of its scenarios merrily indulging in the rote tropes of its genre. the difference is not merely in the choice to tackle stories that are - still! - rarely glimpsed within the JRPG form, but in how these stories are told. these are not 7 different miniature jrpgs in one - these are 7 stories that, like the original dragon quest before it, think so carefully about each aspect of themselves, and use jrpg mechanics in unique and surprising ways to tell those stories. and because it earnestly and completely invests in these stories, they are brought to new and wonderful life.
i have seen the story of a master training a prospective student to succeed them, but until live a live, i have never so completely been that master, thinking carefully about what techniques most benefit each of the students under my care, and trying to teach what I can in the time I have left. when i see my student finally surpass me, i feel genuine pride, because them reaching Level 9 means so much when I have been stuck in my Level 8 ways for all this time. i've seen heroes scramble to put together traps and tricks in a time limit to defeat an overwhelming enemy, but by utilizing a creative conception of the RPG loop of rifling through chests and cabinets for loot, it becomes realized kinaesthetically in a way i've scarcely seen before. not every chapter is wholly successful - for me, akira's near future anime ova riff does the least work to make the beats it's playing sing with new life by relying on a conception of the cliches themselves as self-evidently worthwhile, in a way that is shockingly prescient of the direction increasingly anime-influenced jrpgs like tales and xeno end up taking - but in almost all cases, live a live's creative use of its mechanics, presentation, and design makes what could potentially be rote stories play in beautiful harmony, a harmony that resounds through the commonalities that exist through the stories. there's nothing new under the sun, after all, and so each of these stories, these ideas, feed into one another across history, ultimately fighting the same enemy - hatred - across all time, as a straight club banger plays over the same fight being fought across the millennia.
live a live's unwillingness to accept for granted the norms of the RPG extends to all facets of it's construction, and the battle system is the clearest case for this. random encounters do exist, but they are confined behind the bars of the kingdom of lucrece, rpg conventions being a malady that haunts that land as a sickness more virulent than any the lord of dark could spread. but even here, you are subtly encouraged to flee from battle much more often than you would in other games of its type, due to both the game's EXP system making rewards for fighting weaker enemies to be so utterly negligible as to be practically nonexistent, and the way it offers rewards for escaping from battles with a certain character. In comparison to earthbound simply skipping encounters when you hit them, whilst still giving you all the rewards for combat, such as they are, live a live instead invites you to exercise your own restraint, to consciously choose to sheathe your sword, which is an interesting wrinkle that adds a layer of intentionality to it's violence once you realize that this isn't one of the long list of other jrpgs where you should never really use the flee button.
the chapters that come closest to being purely normative in their play are prehistoric and near future, but even here, the former invites you to become a hunter by having your nose track encounters in the world, and the latter has enemies patrolling the city streets of neo-japan in such a way that you can avoid confrontation but can also get cornered and blocked off. both are thematic and evocative, as are wild west's maneuver of a long buildup to a single gunfight and edo japan's invocation of the idea that a sword drawn is a conscious decision that invites violence (slightly hampered by certain traps putting you in a position where you have no choice but to draw it), but it's the far future that has the most thoughtful approach to combat in the game: because it mostly doesn't have it.
well, that's not true. you can actually play an arcade game using the game's combat system at almost any time, but it is consciously a distraction, separate from the ongoing concerns of the ship. your role in this chapter is that of a witness: a silent observer to the sci-fi horror film playing out around you. here, live a live demonstrates a remarkable awareness of the limits of it's own form - combat is how you interact with this world and combat won't help you here: all you can do is watch, and make coffee, as personal tragedies play out in front of you time and time again. fittingly for a chapter that takes place at the farthest reaches of time and humanity, far future explores the furthest edge of it's systems by depicting a story somewhat beyond the reach of the framework it finds itself in. like a beacon of hope shot in the night, pleading for a more nuanced world than this one. it's not surprising that the final moments of the chapter have you explicitly use the medium of a video game to kill a nascent life form, nor is it shocking that there is a twinge of regret that this is the only way this could have gone. isn't it a little sad that this is the way games currently are?
each element of the game is so well-considered, so carefully constructed to resonate and cohere with the wider piece and with itself. never is something there simply because it is expected to be there, never is a trope invoked without care or consideration into how it can be made to work with the greater whole. and when assumptions are found to be lacking, where the gaps of implication they leave behind are too big to ignore, they are challenged.
the oersted chapter is something of a flashpoint both for the game's critical legacy - such as it is - and the narrative around it. after a series of adventures that use rpg mechanics in creative and exciting ways to bring these pulp adventures to life, ending with a rote dragon quest riff could only be a bizarre self-defeating maneuver. is it any wonder then, that oersted was doomed? it's easy to look at the final moments of the hero declaring himself odio, lord of the dark, near-exclusively, but it's the moments beforehand - elevated by the remake's tastefully extended script, producing that exceedingly rare remake that i prefer to the original, whilst still having things the original does better - that make it work. the princess' agonised cries over the man she actually loved being murdered by the uncaring mute she was betrothed to because he happened to defeat the man she loved in combat at a tourney followed by her suicide is the real shock of this chapter, one where the care and attention live a live shows to all the cliches it invokes is turned on the dominant form of it's genre, exposing the sexist ideology that persists through dragon quest's vision of the heroic narrative. oersted's blind adherence to the script of his genre might lead to him falling to the darkness, but i will point out that the game doesn't use this to say that dragon quest is evil - this isn't spec ops: the line for jrpgs. the story of a band of heroes setting out to defeat the evil is not the issue: it is doing so unthinkingly, accepting rewards and events blindly, of assuming a love belongs to you simply because you are the hero that is entitled to it. oersted is not evil because jrpgs are evil: he's evil because he didn't think for a single second about the narrative handed to him.
it's why the final chapter itself still plays out like a traditional JRPG: assembling a party and travelling to the final dungeon to defeat the final boss with the power of friendship. but because it earns it, because it does the work to make every single step on that journey, because it refuses to simply take for granted the baked-in assumptions of it's genre and it's form...it works. it feels natural, it feels right. there's a strong argument to be made that live a live is something of a naive idealist in how it argues that the broad arcs of these stories are never irredeemable but are corruptible through thoughtlessness, but when it makes it's arguments with this much care and confidence it's very difficult to quibble with it. i never have to feel like I have to stop thinking, or just embrace that this is the way this story has to go in order to enjoy it, like I might have to do for so many other modern jrpgs, that are so wrapped up in their own convulution that they forget to do the work to actually make you care. as jackson tyler touches on in their own piece on the game, live a live is arguably even better in 2022 than it was in 1994, because of the way the genre has changed and, maybe more importantly, the ways that it hasn't, becoming more and more wrapped up in the snake eating its own tail without bothering to ask why we have the snake eat the tail in the first place, what might be gained by doing something new.
there is nothing completely new under the sun. live a live knows this, and accepts it, but remains inventive, remains questioning, remains determined to push up against the boundaries of what rpgs - what video games - can do, to find new ways to tell old stories, and old ways to tell new stories, playing the old hits with a purpose and style that makes them sing like they never quite have before, and hitting out with some new singles that won't ever leave you. Inspired, and inspiring in turn: live a live is a game to make you love games, a creation to make you want to create, and a memory I don't think I'll ever forget.
Command?
> FIGHT
OERSTED attacks!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there's nothing new under the sun.
it's a pithy statement to the point of reductiveness, as such things usually are, but there is a truth to it, not one that condemns, but one that liberates. forgive me for drinking deep of the well of ideology here, but even though all of us may indeed be the products of the words and systems that surround us, no one is quite the same combination of influences as any other, which gives us a wholly unique perspective. but this is also why ensuring our horizons are broad is important, because although we can never widen our scope enough to take in everything, narrowing it in turn only presses the walls in around us, and leaves us with only one path forward.
dragon quest, then, is not a wholly unique game that sprung fully-formed out onto the famicom, but was once that represented a conscious effort to translate a specific mode of game - the popular pc rpgs of the time like wizardry and ultima - and many of the decisions it made clearly have immense thought and care put into them as a result of this, and the result was a game that changed the landscape of the entire industry. but in doing so, it provided a template, a set story for how these things go. defeat monsters. gather experience. explore dungeons. destroy T̵̲̼͆̅͘ͅȟ̸̲̇e̷̡̬̪͛ ̶͙̰͇̍̓̏L̵̪̽̒͌o̷͍͛r̴͖̙͋̾̕d̸̘̜͔̅̋̽ ̷̳͌́̑o̸̪͌̚f̶̗̹͓̆͂ ̶̗̗͊Ḍ̴̪̽͠a̸̙͌̍r̸̜͎̾k̶̻̽.
games that came in dragon quest's wake drew from this story, telling it over and over again. i do not wish to claim here that dragon quest is the only truly original work in the entire jrpg form because that's clearly a completely unhinged and wrong thing to say, but i do wish to argue that the things dragon quest put thought and care into creating were adopted wholesale, without the same level of purposefulness, by many other games, creating an intrinsic language of expectation and reference that in turn provides a bedrock of norms through which audiences and creators can process the form. this is useful, both artistically and financially for both the audience and the artist, but by it's nature it narrows the scope of the form arround it, and allows ideas that were never challenged or interrogated, even ones as simple as defeating enemies to gain experience points, to crystalise around the work, creating something that may indeed be beautiful, but is unmoving, unchanging.
while there are heavier consequences to this - the widespread homogenisation of monetization and progression systems in games undoubtedly is self-served by their uncritical ubiquity, and many stories continue to carry forth regressive ideas built into their hearts because the creators are unaware of them or unwilling to divest themselves from them - one that should also be considered is that the more and more complex the language of norms around a form becomes, the more insular and closed-off it is at risk of becoming.
one need only look at the third most-important JRPG to release in july 2022 to see what this results in: a complete mess of a game, only barely held together by self-justifying tropes and glue that the prospective player - intimately familiar with the construction of and tropes of these games - will simply accept and enjoy singularly. ask a single question about it's world or it's characters or it's plot and it's illusion of cohesiveness will shatter instantly. why does the party react with such horror to someone killing for sport in this cutscene, but will happily recruit the sexy warrior woman who also kills for sport in the very next cutscene? because each one is a trope that carries a set of norms that is implicitly understood and accepted by it's core audience, and proves to be completely baffling to anyone who does not speak this language - or, indeed, Thinks for One Minute.
(i kinda like it though. i am a student of this language, after all.)
the games that result from this aren't necessarily bad, but i think truly exceptional works will strive to be more than the perpetuations of their genre, want to create an experience that aspires to more than simply playing the hits and playing them adequately. because when your path is narrow, there's really only one way forward.
which brings us, at last, to live a live, and to what makes it truly special. while I think this game is clever and inventive constantly, i don't want to let that be mistaken for a game that is unlike anything you've seen or played before. indeed, in many ways, live a live revels in cliche, with each of its scenarios merrily indulging in the rote tropes of its genre. the difference is not merely in the choice to tackle stories that are - still! - rarely glimpsed within the JRPG form, but in how these stories are told. these are not 7 different miniature jrpgs in one - these are 7 stories that, like the original dragon quest before it, think so carefully about each aspect of themselves, and use jrpg mechanics in unique and surprising ways to tell those stories. and because it earnestly and completely invests in these stories, they are brought to new and wonderful life.
i have seen the story of a master training a prospective student to succeed them, but until live a live, i have never so completely been that master, thinking carefully about what techniques most benefit each of the students under my care, and trying to teach what I can in the time I have left. when i see my student finally surpass me, i feel genuine pride, because them reaching Level 9 means so much when I have been stuck in my Level 8 ways for all this time. i've seen heroes scramble to put together traps and tricks in a time limit to defeat an overwhelming enemy, but by utilizing a creative conception of the RPG loop of rifling through chests and cabinets for loot, it becomes realized kinaesthetically in a way i've scarcely seen before. not every chapter is wholly successful - for me, akira's near future anime ova riff does the least work to make the beats it's playing sing with new life by relying on a conception of the cliches themselves as self-evidently worthwhile, in a way that is shockingly prescient of the direction increasingly anime-influenced jrpgs like tales and xeno end up taking - but in almost all cases, live a live's creative use of its mechanics, presentation, and design makes what could potentially be rote stories play in beautiful harmony, a harmony that resounds through the commonalities that exist through the stories. there's nothing new under the sun, after all, and so each of these stories, these ideas, feed into one another across history, ultimately fighting the same enemy - hatred - across all time, as a straight club banger plays over the same fight being fought across the millennia.
live a live's unwillingness to accept for granted the norms of the RPG extends to all facets of it's construction, and the battle system is the clearest case for this. random encounters do exist, but they are confined behind the bars of the kingdom of lucrece, rpg conventions being a malady that haunts that land as a sickness more virulent than any the lord of dark could spread. but even here, you are subtly encouraged to flee from battle much more often than you would in other games of its type, due to both the game's EXP system making rewards for fighting weaker enemies to be so utterly negligible as to be practically nonexistent, and the way it offers rewards for escaping from battles with a certain character. In comparison to earthbound simply skipping encounters when you hit them, whilst still giving you all the rewards for combat, such as they are, live a live instead invites you to exercise your own restraint, to consciously choose to sheathe your sword, which is an interesting wrinkle that adds a layer of intentionality to it's violence once you realize that this isn't one of the long list of other jrpgs where you should never really use the flee button.
the chapters that come closest to being purely normative in their play are prehistoric and near future, but even here, the former invites you to become a hunter by having your nose track encounters in the world, and the latter has enemies patrolling the city streets of neo-japan in such a way that you can avoid confrontation but can also get cornered and blocked off. both are thematic and evocative, as are wild west's maneuver of a long buildup to a single gunfight and edo japan's invocation of the idea that a sword drawn is a conscious decision that invites violence (slightly hampered by certain traps putting you in a position where you have no choice but to draw it), but it's the far future that has the most thoughtful approach to combat in the game: because it mostly doesn't have it.
well, that's not true. you can actually play an arcade game using the game's combat system at almost any time, but it is consciously a distraction, separate from the ongoing concerns of the ship. your role in this chapter is that of a witness: a silent observer to the sci-fi horror film playing out around you. here, live a live demonstrates a remarkable awareness of the limits of it's own form - combat is how you interact with this world and combat won't help you here: all you can do is watch, and make coffee, as personal tragedies play out in front of you time and time again. fittingly for a chapter that takes place at the farthest reaches of time and humanity, far future explores the furthest edge of it's systems by depicting a story somewhat beyond the reach of the framework it finds itself in. like a beacon of hope shot in the night, pleading for a more nuanced world than this one. it's not surprising that the final moments of the chapter have you explicitly use the medium of a video game to kill a nascent life form, nor is it shocking that there is a twinge of regret that this is the only way this could have gone. isn't it a little sad that this is the way games currently are?
each element of the game is so well-considered, so carefully constructed to resonate and cohere with the wider piece and with itself. never is something there simply because it is expected to be there, never is a trope invoked without care or consideration into how it can be made to work with the greater whole. and when assumptions are found to be lacking, where the gaps of implication they leave behind are too big to ignore, they are challenged.
the oersted chapter is something of a flashpoint both for the game's critical legacy - such as it is - and the narrative around it. after a series of adventures that use rpg mechanics in creative and exciting ways to bring these pulp adventures to life, ending with a rote dragon quest riff could only be a bizarre self-defeating maneuver. is it any wonder then, that oersted was doomed? it's easy to look at the final moments of the hero declaring himself odio, lord of the dark, near-exclusively, but it's the moments beforehand - elevated by the remake's tastefully extended script, producing that exceedingly rare remake that i prefer to the original, whilst still having things the original does better - that make it work. the princess' agonised cries over the man she actually loved being murdered by the uncaring mute she was betrothed to because he happened to defeat the man she loved in combat at a tourney followed by her suicide is the real shock of this chapter, one where the care and attention live a live shows to all the cliches it invokes is turned on the dominant form of it's genre, exposing the sexist ideology that persists through dragon quest's vision of the heroic narrative. oersted's blind adherence to the script of his genre might lead to him falling to the darkness, but i will point out that the game doesn't use this to say that dragon quest is evil - this isn't spec ops: the line for jrpgs. the story of a band of heroes setting out to defeat the evil is not the issue: it is doing so unthinkingly, accepting rewards and events blindly, of assuming a love belongs to you simply because you are the hero that is entitled to it. oersted is not evil because jrpgs are evil: he's evil because he didn't think for a single second about the narrative handed to him.
it's why the final chapter itself still plays out like a traditional JRPG: assembling a party and travelling to the final dungeon to defeat the final boss with the power of friendship. but because it earns it, because it does the work to make every single step on that journey, because it refuses to simply take for granted the baked-in assumptions of it's genre and it's form...it works. it feels natural, it feels right. there's a strong argument to be made that live a live is something of a naive idealist in how it argues that the broad arcs of these stories are never irredeemable but are corruptible through thoughtlessness, but when it makes it's arguments with this much care and confidence it's very difficult to quibble with it. i never have to feel like I have to stop thinking, or just embrace that this is the way this story has to go in order to enjoy it, like I might have to do for so many other modern jrpgs, that are so wrapped up in their own convulution that they forget to do the work to actually make you care. as jackson tyler touches on in their own piece on the game, live a live is arguably even better in 2022 than it was in 1994, because of the way the genre has changed and, maybe more importantly, the ways that it hasn't, becoming more and more wrapped up in the snake eating its own tail without bothering to ask why we have the snake eat the tail in the first place, what might be gained by doing something new.
there is nothing completely new under the sun. live a live knows this, and accepts it, but remains inventive, remains questioning, remains determined to push up against the boundaries of what rpgs - what video games - can do, to find new ways to tell old stories, and old ways to tell new stories, playing the old hits with a purpose and style that makes them sing like they never quite have before, and hitting out with some new singles that won't ever leave you. Inspired, and inspiring in turn: live a live is a game to make you love games, a creation to make you want to create, and a memory I don't think I'll ever forget.
4 Comments
Something that has surprised me the most since I played this for the first time earlier this year is how much Imperial China has occupied my thoughts. It’s become definitely my favorite chapter in the game because while it’s for sure true that the game in general is good about how thoughtfully it merges it’s narratives to it’s mechanics in a way most RPGs and games generally don’t think to try for, I think IC does it The Most and with the most grace. Like every chunk of that map, every moment of pacing in those two hours, every stat on that screen, the way moves work etc etc it’s all blended into what I think I might call a perfect cocktail? I know a big chunk of my own write up was just listing all these things about it but it’s really remarkable! Sick fucking game I love it very much
Beautiful writing here... perhaps ironically for someone whose log entries can get very rambly, I tend to skim longer reviews. But this write-up caught my attention, made me think, and made Live A Live shoot all the way up my RPG backlog!
Removed by a moderator
I didn't close down the comment section for my Elden Ring review, that was locked by the website. You can tell, because it says so on the page. I've been tolerant of your prior post because you are a Literal Child, but do not, under any circumstances, tell me to my face that personal harassment that I have experienced did not happen. That is absolutely unacceptable. SunlitSonata was someone who was in the same discord as me, who I explicitly told to his face that I did not want to be around him because he was an unapologetic transphobe who made me deeply uncomfortable, yet continued to follow me around sites like Letterboxd, Anilist, and Backloggd, commenting on my stuff even after I told him explicitly not to. I don't know what the fuck kind of "Definitive Proof" you could possibly be looking for, but that is crossing so many lines on behalf of multiple people I don't even know where to begin. And demanding that I respond to his spurious and ridiculous comments on that ancient review that boil down to "oh here we go again with the POLITICAL AGENDA also you can go anywhere so any complaints about difficulty are dumb" is just hilariously obnoxious. I'm giving you a modicum of the benefit of the doubt here, because again, you are a literal child, but if you post stuff like this again in random comment sections of my reviews because you're mad at something I said in another reviews, I'm just going to throw the block at you.
saihara
1 year ago