This review contains spoilers
My feelings on this game are complicated. My rating probably doesn't reflect that, but that's because I genuinely think this is impressive for a 1994 SNES JRPG in many ways, but also shows its age in a few others. People may raise their eyebrows upon finding out that I gave Octopath Traveler the same rating here, a game that apes this one nearly 25 years later, manages to say far less in 4x the time and in general plays it a lot safer. It's very formulaic, tells 8 very unnoteworthy stories, and half-heartedly ties them together at the end. But why couldn't I stop playing it? I put 80 hours into it in the week it came out. Live-A-Live, on the other hand, I felt a bit fatigued by in about 15 hours.
I don't want this review to be a full comparison of the two, but Octopath has had 25 more years of JRPG innovation to reflect on, and its gameplay systems reflect this. This simply isn't a fair comparison but I'm not some timeless entity, I'm just some gamer in 2021. Live-A-Live is a far more ambitious game, and accomplishes a lot more when you're not bogged down in battles (which unfortunately makes up a non-trivial fraction of the game). My favourite scenario was Cowboy, no doubt for its swift pace and sensible balance between story and gameplay. Ninja, on the other hand, was an absolute chore. Keep that emulator speed-up button nearby.
Combat isn't actually bad at first. Each character has a fun variety of moves, moving around on the grid is novel and plays a nice role in some fights, and certain things have been streamlined for the player's benefit. Three of the scenarios and the final stretch though, throw a LOT of encounters at you. Many of these are very easy to deal with, it just gets tiring fairly quickly. For every second you spend smiling at Live-A-Live's tributes to all these different genres, you will spend 5 more fumbling for the "run" option, or beating an enemy you have killed 50 times before. Many JRPGs circumvent this by keeping their encounters interesting, allowing the player to skip them in certain cases, or just making them incredibly quick to breeze through. This is by no means a unique criticism, and many games have it worse than Live-A-Live, but the added moves that come with the grid combat or many enemies doing nothing interesting, make it tiresome in this case.
I also don't think it holds up very well in challenging fights. Live-A-Live doesn't have many of these, but I had a notably easier time with the final boss after intentionally letting half of my party die, due to how enemies take turns in this game.
That's my main issue here, but I've also had a few too many moments aimlessly wandering about to trigger whatever event I need to carry on. Many games are worse than Live-A-Live at this though, this one's pretty reasonable.
Moving onto strengths:
Shimomura absolutely kills this soundtrack. All these great battle themes ("Difficult Fight" is one of my favourite JRPG battle themes ever at this point), she knocks it out of the park with these wildly different styles, it's genuinely hard to believe that these all come from the same game. You have, what, traditional Chinese, traditional Japanese, spaghetti western, rock, mecha anime opening, some cool atonal stuff, church organ shit? The last Shimomura-composed game I played was Radiant Historia where she got way too comfortable with her orchestral sounds and I can barely remember any of it honestly. There were moments in Live-A-Live where some songs were played a bit much, but overall this is a very strong showing sonically.
Narratively, this game feels like a response to the JRPG landscape of its time. "You guys like paying tribute to fantasy settings," it says, "why not try out any of these?" Live-A-Live doesn't try to tell the greatest stories ever told. These are stitched together "example" works of each represented genre, little appetisers — the Cowboy scenario isn't going to rival The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It throws these tight packages at you, and bails once you start getting used to your surroundings. I can see this not appealing for some people, as playing mini-tributes to these different genres may seem pointless when compared to something more cohesive and focused. But from the different textbox stylings to all the little secrets hidden in each chapter, it just feels exciting sampling these 7 different games. You're training these martial artists to carry on your legacy. Now you're storming a stronghold as a ninja, deciding who lives and dies. Now you're hunting for food as a caveman. And once the actual story emerges to tie this all together, you really appreciate the scope of this game. The final scenarios actually tell a pretty great story (for a 1994 JRPG at least). But you're deep enough into this game by that point that you probably stopped caring about having an actual overarching plot.
(I typed that entire paragraph not remembering what "vignettes" are called. I'll just leave that there.)
I really respect this game for its ambition, and it's definitely successful for the most part. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those where I'll have more fun reflecting on it rather than replaying it. But maybe the day will come when I'll want to kick Odie off the table again.
I don't want this review to be a full comparison of the two, but Octopath has had 25 more years of JRPG innovation to reflect on, and its gameplay systems reflect this. This simply isn't a fair comparison but I'm not some timeless entity, I'm just some gamer in 2021. Live-A-Live is a far more ambitious game, and accomplishes a lot more when you're not bogged down in battles (which unfortunately makes up a non-trivial fraction of the game). My favourite scenario was Cowboy, no doubt for its swift pace and sensible balance between story and gameplay. Ninja, on the other hand, was an absolute chore. Keep that emulator speed-up button nearby.
Combat isn't actually bad at first. Each character has a fun variety of moves, moving around on the grid is novel and plays a nice role in some fights, and certain things have been streamlined for the player's benefit. Three of the scenarios and the final stretch though, throw a LOT of encounters at you. Many of these are very easy to deal with, it just gets tiring fairly quickly. For every second you spend smiling at Live-A-Live's tributes to all these different genres, you will spend 5 more fumbling for the "run" option, or beating an enemy you have killed 50 times before. Many JRPGs circumvent this by keeping their encounters interesting, allowing the player to skip them in certain cases, or just making them incredibly quick to breeze through. This is by no means a unique criticism, and many games have it worse than Live-A-Live, but the added moves that come with the grid combat or many enemies doing nothing interesting, make it tiresome in this case.
I also don't think it holds up very well in challenging fights. Live-A-Live doesn't have many of these, but I had a notably easier time with the final boss after intentionally letting half of my party die, due to how enemies take turns in this game.
That's my main issue here, but I've also had a few too many moments aimlessly wandering about to trigger whatever event I need to carry on. Many games are worse than Live-A-Live at this though, this one's pretty reasonable.
Moving onto strengths:
Shimomura absolutely kills this soundtrack. All these great battle themes ("Difficult Fight" is one of my favourite JRPG battle themes ever at this point), she knocks it out of the park with these wildly different styles, it's genuinely hard to believe that these all come from the same game. You have, what, traditional Chinese, traditional Japanese, spaghetti western, rock, mecha anime opening, some cool atonal stuff, church organ shit? The last Shimomura-composed game I played was Radiant Historia where she got way too comfortable with her orchestral sounds and I can barely remember any of it honestly. There were moments in Live-A-Live where some songs were played a bit much, but overall this is a very strong showing sonically.
Narratively, this game feels like a response to the JRPG landscape of its time. "You guys like paying tribute to fantasy settings," it says, "why not try out any of these?" Live-A-Live doesn't try to tell the greatest stories ever told. These are stitched together "example" works of each represented genre, little appetisers — the Cowboy scenario isn't going to rival The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It throws these tight packages at you, and bails once you start getting used to your surroundings. I can see this not appealing for some people, as playing mini-tributes to these different genres may seem pointless when compared to something more cohesive and focused. But from the different textbox stylings to all the little secrets hidden in each chapter, it just feels exciting sampling these 7 different games. You're training these martial artists to carry on your legacy. Now you're storming a stronghold as a ninja, deciding who lives and dies. Now you're hunting for food as a caveman. And once the actual story emerges to tie this all together, you really appreciate the scope of this game. The final scenarios actually tell a pretty great story (for a 1994 JRPG at least). But you're deep enough into this game by that point that you probably stopped caring about having an actual overarching plot.
(I typed that entire paragraph not remembering what "vignettes" are called. I'll just leave that there.)
I really respect this game for its ambition, and it's definitely successful for the most part. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those where I'll have more fun reflecting on it rather than replaying it. But maybe the day will come when I'll want to kick Odie off the table again.