It’s really incredible how much you can accomplish within a genre space with what feels like very little to work with if you’re only willing to step outside of convention even just a little bit. There’s a commonly tossed off criticism of modern AAA games that is often deployed unthinkingly or without proper elaboration, that they “look like HBO shows” or like Hollywood blockbusters, with the understanding that most Hollywood blockbusters these days look like shit even as they dominate pop culture. I’m guilty of using this shorthand myself. I think when people say this it doesn’t mean that it’s bad inherently for video games to pull from other mediums for filmic inspiration, only that it’s bad to unthinkingly chase trends and replicate the aesthetics of things that are popular despite an absence of actual artistic intent or merit behind the inspiration beyond that. I actually think that it is generally cool and good to take overt influence from your inspirations if you pull it off. Across its disparate chapters, Live A Live not only pulls popular tropes and story structures from the genres it flits between, but more than once openly, probably actionably lifts scenarios directly from popular movies and tv shows. It does so with aplomb, and the game is better for it. It steals these things and adapts them to the strengths of the formats of 90s Square Enix JRPGs and this is the key difference between wholesale merging the plots of Every Toku Show From the 70s through 94 and Akira and something like the way we talk about your average modern Sony Studios game. There's a lot more intentionality in the selections and the implementations here even as the actual references and stylistic touches are a LOT more overt.

But it’s not JUST that one chapter of this game is Just Alien Plus 2001 A Space Odyssey, it’s also that the game knows when to mess with the structural conventions of RPGs, and, wisely, that is Almost All The Time. Of the seven main chapters of the game, only two of them even remotely resemble a typically structured RPG, with regular combat encounters, story interludes, equipment, etc. And even then, one is set in caveman times and playfully communicates its small story entirely through pantomime. Each of the seven chapters is set in a different time period and the wide array of settings is utilized to get really playful with the verb sets without ever actually changing the fact that you interface with the game via traditionally JRPG means.

For example, the kung-fu themed chapter has essentially no true combat encounters, focusing on the story of an elderly master finding, selecting, and beginning to train three possible successors to his martial art. A couple times you beat up some like, muggers, but they go down in one shot. The combat screen is also used during training sessions with the students, and the attacks you use on them most frequently will be the ones that they learn. As you engage in more and more training sessions the students’ stats increase rapidly and it starts to become evident that this powerful master who mops the floor easily with the local town’s shitty rival dojo’s riff raff, is actually a frail man nearing the end of his life. This is communicated as well via the stats screen and the fact that by session 12 Li or Yuan MIGHT almost get you to take a knee as it is by the ever-more-frequent scenes of the master huffing and puffing when he gets up in the morning. And that’s all there is as far as combat goes! You COULD grind, I guess, in ONE zone in the map, but it’s out of the way of all of the story scenes, there are only like five non-random enemies there, and they don’t even spawn in if you ever have to walk through that part of the map for a story reason. And that makes it all the more effective when finally, at the end of this chapter, the water boils over and the drama arrives and the tension breaks into an explosion of real violence. The climax is way more impactful than it would have been if you had been fighting tigers and bandits as you walked up and down the mountain paths for the two hours leading up to it. Every chapter is like this, and three of them are potentially devoid of combat entirely if you feel like it.

Even when the game is at its most tedious, in the two chapters that lean the hardest into normal JRPG conventions, there are always strong aesthetics (for example Yoko Shimomura is here doing the definitive, standout work of her early career in a decade that includes osts for street fighter 2, Mario RPG, Legend of Mana and Parasite Eve), and even excellent encounter design to compensate for the fact that you’re participating in The Grind. The Mecha chapter is mostly made up of encounters where there is one weak enemy you can take out that will end the encounter immediately and get full experience but as you level up the pattern, numbers, and strength of his robot minions will become stronger or more complicated, which not only makes getting to the weak leader harder but also increases the risk/reward present where if you DO kill all the robot minions first you get items that upgrade your own robot party member, which is the only way to power him up because he doesn’t level up via experience points like your human characters. It’s a layer of tactical depth that isn’t present in most of the rest of the game’s encounters (some of them though! The ninja chapter is a notable exception and the wrestling chapter is entirely comprised of intense combat strategy puzzles with no play outside combat whatsoever – something for everyone!) but usually isn’t necessary because of the prioritization of other shit than combat.

Live A Live was directed by Takashi Tokita, most famous for his work as lead designer and/or director on Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger, and Parasite Eve, as well as SPECIFICALLY just event planning for Final Fantasy VII, and the scenario design was largely handled by Nobuya Inoue, famous for, well, this, and then for leaving Square a couple years later to cofound Brownie Brown and direct Magical Vacation, Magical Starsign, and Mother 3 before that company was tragically entirely subsumed into Nintendo’s first party support studio network. Clearly there is a design lineage here, with both of these creative leads interested in playing with the form and format of the JRPG – making games where atmosphere, narrative, and aesthetics take precedent over combat design or length. A lot of that DNA is present here in Live A Live, and it’s very telling that these guys, even an up-and-coming big shot like Tokita was made to exercise these design sensibilities in Square’s comparatively lower budget, smaller in scope, unpopular-even-in-the-country-it-got-released-in project of 1994, compared to the much more traditionally designed and obviously mass appeal Final Fantasy VI. I’m not a young adult in Japan in 1994 so I can’t say how much of this is a natural progression of popularity given Final Fantasy’s momentum as a series vs Square actively choosing to abandon this one to the wolves. Probably a little of both. Hopefully now that it’s getting a proper international release with the upcoming HD-2D remake, it’ll get some of the recognition I think it sorely deserves.

It's not that this game didn’t have any influence, but it definitely feels to me like that came more from the general interests and careers of its staff than from explicit love for Live A Live, which is a shame, because even with a shockingly, borderline offensively tedious final chapter this is easily, without question the most formally interesting and simply pleasurable traditional JRPG I’ve ever played. Games don’t get ANY better than Live A Live. A classic. A titan. Honestly shocking to me that they kept making these after this.