Release Date: September 2, 1994, & July 22, 2022
Systems: Super Famicom & Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Square & Nintendo
Developer: Square & Square Enix
Time Spent: 39 Hours, 16 Minutes*
38 hours, 6 minutes
Today's article is the continuation of Monday's article and our look at LIVE A LIVE, the remake released on the Nintendo Switch in July 2022. The previous article was all about my experience playing as the seven characters in the game, the order that I played through with each character, and my general thoughts about the game. There were a handful of spoilers, but this article is all spoilers because I could not talk about the game without talking about the end game, which is not very publicly advertised if you were not already unfamiliar with the game. So just a heads up.
~*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT*~
So there is an endgame here. Two actually. After completing the seventh story, you unlock The Medieval Era where you play as the wandering Knight Oersted who, in the briefest sense, has to rescue a princess from a recently revived evil dark lord. Standard Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy-type storyline. This chapter was a lot of fun, and on some levels felt like a return to more traditional JRPG mechanics, but only to a certain extent. You had your starting castle and the surrounding village and a handful of locations on the region map. While there were two towns you could visit, there were no shops to visit to buy either upgraded gear or supplies, all of which you had to find out in the world either by scavaging from treasure chests or plants. There are additional characters who joined your party so at one point you have a full party of four characters who become fleshed out beyond the typical hero with a sword.
I was surprised mixed with a little shock to find that this story in particular ended up tying all of the other seven stories together by essentially showing you how the antagonists in each of the chapters, who all have a name derivative of the name "Odio," how he came to be and affected the stories/lives of all of our main characters from past to future. How this story unfolded was very cool because it is not often that you play through a character's story only to find out that they are now the bad guy (Castlevania: Lords of Shadow). The only downside to The Medieval Era story was that it was significantly longer than any of the previous chapters, maybe close in length to Akira's which came out to about 2-3 hours (I think), but it was much more involved with gathering gear, gathering additional party members, leveling up, and quite a bit of dungeon crawling.
Then, after you complete The Medieval Era, you are once again prompted to choose a story to play through (after a slightly confusing "To Be Continued..." screen), but now there is one titled "The Dominion of Hate," with no clear or obvious protagonist as you are able to choose from any of the previous chapter main characters. Because I did not know which character I should pick for whatever the game was going to throw at me, I decided to pick Masaru Takahara because that was the character that I first started the game with and it only made sense (to me) to "finish" the game with this character again. Well, I accidentally picked Akira from The Near Future and only realized it during the opening scene where Akira is taken from his time and transplanted in The Medieval Era, or at least a pocket of The Medieval Era after Oersted has assumed the name/role of Odio and is the evil dark lord.
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As you make your way through The Medieval Era map that you had just spent the last 3+ hours in, I did feel a little burnt out, but only because I had been used to experiencing a different environment with each chapter, so coming back to this same setting after just completing the longest of the eight stories, felt a little downtrodden. That being said, discovering that the characters from all of the other chapters were discoverable too and that all of them could join your party. Granted the characters were all at the level they were when you finished their respective story, so The Sundown Kid might be at level 8 while Earthen Heart Shifu was at 12, and Akira, whom I started with would be at level 15.
At first, I was not sure who I wanted in my final party and was just accepting people when I came upon them because why not? Plus you had to have each specific person in your party in order to access their specific dungeon. This led to a lot of unintentional grinding for the current characters in my party although once each character learned their respective ultimate move/ability, leveling plodded along at almost 2-3 XP per battle (leveling up once they reach 100). Cube was a bit of an outlier in this regard as it did not earn XP like any of the other characters and could only "level up" by using Robot Parts which seemed rather sparse. The only character that I did not take into my party (and therefore did not go through their dungeon) was Pogo (The Distant Past) as I found that I just did not vibe with his moveset and at that point, having already gone through the other six dungeons, I was honestly feeling a little burnt out.
When I finally went up against the dark lord Odio, I had the following members in my party:
Akira - The Near Future (Lvl: 21)
The Sundown Kid - The Wild West (Lvl: 19)
Cube - The Distant Future (Lvl: 7)
Oboromaru - Twilight of Edo Japan (Lvl: 18)
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I am glad that I ended up going with Akira because he has a lot of AoE attacks that can take out a lot of enemies all at once, sometimes even reaching the leader of the group and prematurely ending the battle. The Sundown Kid was great for ranged attacks and he ended up learning a powerful attack that would attack a small area 12 times while the To Hit % was lower and only dealing medium damage compared to some of his other attacks, in the final-final battle, he definitely came in handy dealing a lot of damage, often topping out at around 500 damage, when characters would normally be doing 100-150 damage per strong attack. Cube ended up being my healer because he had a reactionary ability that healed himself and anyone else around him, so having The Sundown Kid hang out around Cube attacking from a distance was a useful tactic. Plus Cube's penultimate move, Maser Canon could only be performed at enemies that were a specific distance away, usually on the other side of the battle grid, and could not damage adjacent enemies. Lastly, I had Oboromaru because he was a decent fighter with slightly different AoE attacks that used different elements than Akira, and with his higher speed/agility, it often meant that they were the first to move/attack each battle because a lot of his attacks had low charge times.
I know that there is a lot that I have left out about the individual chapters in the previous article and I probably could have written an article about each character as they really felt like their own separate game with Oersted's chapter and The Dominion of Hate tying everything together. And even within The Dominion of Hate, collecting all of the characters and exploring their ultimate weapons while exploring dungeons that represented their struggles and personal experiences were all fun to experience. There is really so much more to this game than what I have been able to say this week (including the MIDI Week Single), especially about the stories and journeys each character took in their respective chapters. Like how I ended up with Shifu's particular protege, or how I glossed over the material exchange mechanic with Pogo's chapter, and how/why I might have unintentionally made Oboromaru's chapter more difficult than it needed to be by killing as few people as possible. It is just too much to cover in two articles, even with this one only looking at two chapters, albeit two of the longer chapters in the game.
I had a lot of fun with LIVE A LIVE, which I am hoping is obvious at this point. Half of this comes from the game itself, ignoring the fact for the moment that it is a remake and just enjoying the varying mechanics used to tell this unique story and experiencing a different way in telling a single story through multiple perspectives. The other half is playing a game that was originally released between Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger, during the Golden Era of SNES JRPGs. I experienced a strange sensation when playing LIVE A LIVE that I can only explain as some kind of first-time nostalgia. Maybe? It is like when people say that they wish they could play their favorite game that they have already played 30 times for the first time all over again. That was how I felt playing LIVE A LIVE, as if I had played this game before, but I did not really know where each story was going or how it would end.
Now I wish that I could play this game over again, but I may wait to do that because I now have Octopath Traveler II to start up and Dragon Quest XI to eventually buy (after I finish Triangle Strategy, and Bravely Default II).
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
How Many People Cried
P.S. I also highly recommend this interview that the director Takashi Yokita did with Famitsu in February 2022. The website is in Japanese but Google was able to translate the page well enough so that the interview made sense. There were a lot of questions answered in this interview that I was surprised to find, like what the deal was with there frequently being a father killed in front of his kid in a lot of the chapters
*P.P.S. Just a heads up that the final series of battles in the game, after your final save, including the time spent watching the credits, was, for me at least, took me one hour and 10 minutes. This kind of upped the stakes quite a bit during the final-final battle since I knew that it would be a lengthy trudge through multiple boss battles.
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