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But Live A Live as a whole really cannot be denied. The scenarios vary in quality from one to the next, and your individual tastes are probably going to influence how well you like each one. You’ll definitely want to see this one through to the bitter end.

A few tweaks to the way the story flows and a bit of new content help the narrative pop better than ever.

The gameplay changes have been made with a lot of wisdom, making little adjustments here and there to improve the game without sanding out any of its flavor. The presentation is gorgeous thanks to the new HD-2D visuals, some solid voice acting, and composer Yoko Shimomura’s lively new arrangement of the soundtrack. Square Enix’s remakes can be hit or miss, but the company really knocked it out of the park for this one. It feels like an RPG game jam that somehow still manages to weave an overarching theme. In terms of both mechanics and storytelling this gives Live A Live a very unique flavor. You can nibble on these scenarios as you like, playing parts of them and hopping over to others without losing your progress in any of them. Some will wrap up within an hour others will go on far longer. One or two feel more like a standard RPG, albeit in compact forms. Some are incredibly combat-heavy and force you to puzzle out the correct way sequence of actions to survive against overwhelming odds. Some of them feel more like mini adventure games than RPGs. It wouldn’t be the last time Square would play around with that idea, either.Įach of the scenarios has a very different feel despite sharing broad mechanics with the others. The player could choose to tackle the game’s seven scenarios in any order before everything came together for the final conclusion. The directorial debut of Takashi Tokita (the lead game designer of Final Fantasy IV and one of the directors of Chrono Trigger among many other credits) had an unusual idea at its core: a multi-chapter, multi-protagonist RPG with each taking on its own highly distinct setting. Live A Live might well be the most experimental and successful of that amazing era of Square’s history. A fellow could almost find himself believing in the possibility of Bahamut Lagoon and Treasure of the Rudras being localized if he wasn’t careful. And now perhaps the sweetest cherry of all, we have a fancy HD-2D remake of Live A Live. Numerous games that previously only had single releases like SaGa Frontier and Chrono Cross have been reissued across multiple platforms. Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 have full-on English versions. Seiken Densetsu 3/Secret of Mana 2/Trials of Mana not only got remade but saw its original release officially localized. Setting right what once went wrong, so to speak. Square Enix has been doing a lot of fishing lately. I would see screenshots with cowboys, cavemen, and ninjas, remember that whole-butt Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest installments weren’t being localized, and sigh at the heavy realization that something that odd would never see our shores. RPGs were still seen as a very niche genre, one whose few successes were almost entirely sword-and-sorcery affairs.Īs such, even back in those days where I dreamed big and didn’t care about the financial realities involved in making games, I never expected Live A Live to get a Western release. Over in the West, we saw almost none of the fruits of this initiative. No one could have blamed the publisher if it had chosen to play it safe and be the Final Fantasy Company, but it instead spread its wings and let its talent experiment heavily with the genre it was so popularly associated with. As the 16-bit era reached its climax, Square stepped up creatively in a big way.

The 1990s were a great time for Square virtually from start to finish. Let’s go! Reviews & Mini-Views Live A Live ($49.99)

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Today we have a few reviews for you to look over, plus some new releases and lists of sales. But how will we spend the month until then, beyond hiding in ice baths from the searing cruelty of the burning star that allegedly keeps us alive? With more games, of course! And ice cream! You must provide the ice cream yourself. A whole new month, and one that we know will end with the absolute banger that is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection. Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for August 1st, 2022.

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