Past meets present: Live A Live
A classic from the 16-bit era finally gets a worldwide release.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Live A Live’s history is a fascinating one. That it wasn’t localized and released outside of Japan doesn’t make it special nor unique: as I’ve noted plenty of times before, Japan had about twice as many Super Famicom releases as North America had Super Nintendo ones, so Live A Live existing on the side of the coin that kept it local isn’t much of a shock. It’s not even the lone highly praised SquareSoft game from the era that failed to make it stateside: I only played Bahamut Lagoon for the first time last year for a reason, and the first ever unofficial translation I ever used — what, over two decades ago now? Years before the official Game Boy Advance re-release, for sure — was for Final Fantasy V.
No, it’s the reason that Live A Live didn’t make it out of Japan that is one of the first notable bits about its eventual path to an international release. It was actually supposed to have a worldwide release, just like Final Fantasy VI (III) did and Chrono Trigger would, but Square didn’t think it was even going to sell well in Japan, according to Takashi Tokita, the game’s original creator and producer, so they instead focused their efforts on localizing other titles that might actually put up numbers. Live A Live sold 270,000 copies, which would have qualified as a success for a Japan-exclusive RPG made by companies that weren’t Squaresoft, but as this was a Square game — Final Fantasy IV sold 1.5 million copies in Japan alone, Final Fantasy V 2.45 million, Final Fantasy VI 2.55 million, and so on, all for the Super Famicom — it was considered a failure.
There was also the belief of Square localizer Ted Woolsey that the game’s spritework wasn’t as obviously impressive as that of FFVI or Chrono Trigger, which is part of why Square might have thought the game wouldn’t sell well enough to justify localization, so seeing their fears borne out at retail must have sealed the deal if it wasn’t already. Which effectively made Live A Live lost a bit to time and place, outside of unofficial translations like Aeon Genesis’ that allowed those of us who aren’t in Japan and can’t read Japanese to experience the game. Still, the audience for these kinds of translations isn’t large: Live A Live remained mostly an unknown quantity to people who weren’t out there seeking out every unofficially translated gem in existence.
You know who liked Live A Live quite a bit, however? Nintendo. That they published the international version of the HD-2D remake recently released as an exclusive for the Switch is no accident: the reason it made it to the top of Square’s pile for a remake is thanks to whomever at Nintendo was a fan of the game. Apparently, according to Tokita, it was Nintendo asking Square to put Live A Live on the Wii U’s Virtual Console service for the 20th anniversary of the game that started the process that would result in it receiving a remake and international release. There were those at Square, like Tokita, who had wanted to give it another chance for years, but the opportunity never arrived until Nintendo inquired.
Nintendo’s own interest in Live A Live shouldn’t be a shock. While Nintendo obviously loved having the heavy-hitting Square JRPGs on their systems as exclusives back in the 90s, what they really loved was the weird stuff Square put out. Let’s think for a moment about the history of the two companies. They were linked together during the NES and SNES eras, but then split apart when Square wanted to release the expansive Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation thanks to it being disc- rather than cartridge-based. Nintendo lost Square’s support entirely until the two kissed and made up during the GameCube’s and Game Boy Advance’s lives, but Nintendo still found ways to get some of that Square magic on their systems despite the split.
Around the same time as the Nintendo/Square split, a number of Squaresoft’s employees with experience on titles like Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG left the company to form Love-de-Lic. While none of the three games by that studio ended up on Nintendo platforms, two of the three studios that formed out of its ashes focused in those spaces quite often. Skip Ltd. was responsible for Chibi-Robo! as well as the vast majority of the Art Style games on the DSi and Wii, such as PiCTOBiTS. Vanpool has former Love-de-Lic employees at it as well, and has developed a number of Nintendo-published games as well, such as Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, the Dillon’s Rolling Western titles, co-development credits on three of the five Kirby games on the Switch, and co-development work on both Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario titles.
Megalomania, a song you’ll hear quite often in Live A Live, is one of the finer moments of Yoko Shimomura’s excellent soundtrack — her first for Square after years on high-profile Capcom releases.
Brownie Brown, which developed the Shigesato Itoi-led Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance, was also composed of former Square employees who struck out on their own and ended up as a subsidiary of Nintendo’s after developing games in the Mana series. The Magical series of JRPGs published by Nintendo was also their doing, and they assisted Level-5 during the initial run of Professor Layton games when they were exclusive to Nintendo hardware, as well. (Brownie Brown has now split, with the remnants remaining at Nintendo as support developer 1-Up Studio, and the rest forming the independent Brownie — 1-Up has helped out on some of the best Nintendo games of the last decade.)
And then there is Monolith Software, which very vocally formed out of frustration with Square’s obsession over Final Fantasy and sales over taking risks like the team that developed Xenosaga and would go on to form Monolith wanted them to do. Nintendo didn’t pair up with these disgruntled developers right away, but they did get them to develop GameCube-exclusive JRPGs while still with Namco, before purchasing Monolith and making them a subsidiary. That’s gone pretty well for both sides.
Notice a pattern here? Nintendo loved a whole bunch of the talented developers that made the games that were never quite as significant sales-wise as the Final Fantasy series Square was understandably obsessed with, and found a way to work with or outright buy the studios that formed out of the disgruntlement that caused those people to leave. Those responsible for Live A Live didn’t go as far — Tokita has been with Square this whole time, for instance — but it’s pretty easy to draw a line between Nintendo’s longstanding enjoyment of that particular side of Square and their eventual publishing of this remake.
Now, this isn’t meant to give them too much credit for what’s within the game itself: it’s just to explain why we now all have the chance to experience the game they enjoyed enough to pester Square about re-releasing it in the first place. And we should be glad they did, because Live A Live is incredible.
Here’s how Live A Live works: it’s a turn-based Japanese role-playing game, with battles fought on a grid. You have a number of attacks at your disposal which have differing ranges and attack powers, your health regenerates after each fight, and you’ll spend some time equipping gear and using items, too. Sometimes the battles are random, sometimes they are fought with foes seen on your screen when you interact with them. There really isn’t much more detail to give you than that extremely generic description of how a JRPG works, because each scenario in Live A Live plays out a bit differently, in ways that make each slightly tweaked battle system seem refreshing and new-ish.
That’s kind of Live A Live’s whole deal: familiarity presented to you in a way that makes it feel both like a known comfort and like it’s treading new and exciting ground. It’s basically Tropes: The Game, and it works exceptionally well, because it does exactly what it needs to do in order to keep those tropes from feeling like a negative. I’m not a “tropes are inherently bad” person, but Live A Live is designed in a such a way that it would appeal to someone who does feel like that.
You will play as a cave man with his ape friend, in a JRPG setting where there is no dialogue, just gestures and impressive sprite animation to help you understand what the game is communicating to you. You’ll take part in the saving of an old west town threatened by bandits, where the combat is pretty standard but how difficult that combat will end up being depends heavily on how quickly and efficiently you can scrounge up items to defend the town by setting its citizens to work arming traps. You’ll train the successor to an ancient Chinese martial art, and then have to deploy what you’ve learned in the ultimate test as that student, with a significant chunk of that scenario’s gameplay being fights with the students to train them in your ways. You play as a ninja with a choice: kill everyone — and I mean everyone — you meet in order to achieve your goal, or spare the literal one hundred lives you can spare, making things more difficult on yourself but keeping your soul and conscience far cleaner. A small helper robot on the run from a powerful creature of fantasy, trapped on a space ship. Square asking and answering what Street Fighter would be like if it were turn-based. The protagonist whose whole scenario was certainly written after seeing Akira one too many times, if such a thing is even possible. You’ll find yourself in basically every setting you can imagine, but they always feel both fresh and fully realized, not like items on a checklist.
Basically every time that I began a new scenario, I was blown away and found myself thinking it was going to be tough to top it. And yet, that kept happening, without diminishing what I had already experienced, too. Each of the game’s seven initial (and seemingly unrelated other than continual references to similarly named big bads) chapters are all excellent for reasons that are both the same and different, with each subsequent scenario you play successfully reinforcing that the game as a whole is great, and that there really should be more anthologies switching things up with the confidence Live A Live does out there.
The pacing of the chapters is also phenomenal. Story twists that extend the game length aren’t really a focus: you get in, you have a scenario laid out in front of you, and then you play it for somewhere around an hour or three, depending. This is not to say that the narratives lack any surprise or turns or what have you, but everything, especially in those first seven chapters, is just distilled in a way that means you’re getting the purest, most efficient version of a genre-based idea with JRPG elements attached, in whatever time period or setting you’re in. The western feels incredibly westernish, but also like it belongs in Live A Live. Despite the almost total absence of combat, the far future scenario where you play as the tiny robot feels of a piece with heavier action scenarios, just like the prehistoric chapter without dialogue is still able to convey a story that’s easy to follow along with and feels at home next to scenarios that are much more narrative and dialogue focused.
The soundtrack is also excellent: saying Yoko Shimomura is a talented composer is a pretty obvious statement at this point, but Live A Live was her first game with Square, and even if you’ve never played it before, you’ll certainly recognize the style. Megalomania (embedded earlier) is a personal favorite of Undertale developer Toby Fox, for instance, and the name Megalovania for a song in that game is no coincidence.
(It also rules that Fox once went to a Live A Live concert, and the performance just so happened to combine the two songs together into a live remix — no wonder Fox is taking part in the next scheduled Live A Live concert as a special guest instead of an attendee.)
If you know your Xenoblade songs, too, Shimomura’s work will certainly sound familiar, to the point that there are a couple within Live A Live that would have perfectly fit into the soundtrack she composed a few tracks for, that of the original Xenoblade Chronicles. The whole soundtrack is worth a listen, but given this is a Nintendo-published game in North America, of one that few people played in the first place in its original form, you’re going to have to dig for it yourself. Embedding it here will probably just get the uploader an angry email full of legalese.
Anyway. The ninth and final chapter, unlocked after you’ve completed the initial seven and then the “this is how these scenarios all tie together” eighth chapter is actually a little less enjoyable than the rest of the game because of what makes Live A Live thrive to that point. It goes to the very explicitly JRPG well of optional dungeons and an obvious need for leveling up, its openness and less linear nature something of a distraction after the laser-focused setup of the bulk of the game, where the optional deviations like hidden boss fights truly felt optional instead of “optional, but you’re going to want to do this, or else.” This last chapter is still good, and putting a bow on the interlinking narrative is worth the effort, as it ties together everything you’ve experienced to this point, but it’s the most traditional part of the experience and suffers for that, comparatively speaking.
Even with this note, there might not be a better 20-hour JRPG on the Switch. This is in part because modern JRPGs are so expansive that there aren’t many of that length around anymore, but even if the console was stuffed full of these shorter outings and they were of a high quality, Live A Live would stand out. And as much as I love a lengthy JRPG that’s worth it, it felt amazing going from something of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s size and scope to Live A Live’s highly focused, in-and-out experience.
And hey, good news: the Live A Live remake sold over 500,000 copies in its first month. Maybe it’ll finally get the recognition it deserves from more than just a critical point of view, and won’t be forgotten for decades at a time again. And maybe it won’t be the last previously hidden gem from the Super Famicom that gets the HD-2D treatment, either.
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