05/08/2025
Live A Live – Eight Prototypes
Hark at my top 5 games on backloggd and see they're all from the corporation currently called Square Enix. This team of people has consistently put out works that have fully conquered my brain. I am predestined to love a Square Enix game. As the availability of new-to-me Final Fantasies and Kingdom Hearts titles dwindles, I find myself reduced to searching through Square Enix’s bin of less widely ballyhooed JRPG experiences.
Live A Live entered my life while looking at Yoko Shimomura’s Wikipedia page. Shimomura’s music from Kingdom Hearts has almost brought me to tears on public transport, so her name on a product firmly places it on my To Love One Day list. One Nintendo Direct (after I had already played the frankly unremarkable Octopath Traveler) showed Live A Live to me in all the dressings of HD-2D. Any day, I could’ve patched a Live A Live ROM with the English language and played it in an emulator. However, this release gave me a red rectangle to put on my shelf. I even went so far as to pre-order Live A Live for the Nintendo Switch, so sure it was going to be a new favorite, like Chrono Trigger had been when I played it for the first time in 2020. I began the game in 2022, impressed with its graphical style. However, after playing the prehistoric chapter, I found myself stuck an hour in, without the ability to go back and grind, so I put the game down for 5 years.
Now, in the year 2025, I started the game again after acquiring it in a Steam sale. In this purchasing decision, I understand how the game industry is more in the business of selling the fantasy of games than selling games. But that conversation would be too interesting to have in a Live A Live review. The graphics are still nice. I’m not so proud as to lie and say the visuals weren’t what pulled me in to buy this rather than emulate it. The graphics look like what I imagined games looked like when I was a child. HD-2D does look like Pokémon FireRed looked to me when I was five. So Live A Live is attempting to create a kind of hyper-nostalgia: a product that comes with a free pair of rose-tinted glasses.
The audience for this game, I imagine, are people like me, weirdos who recalcitrantly eschew the notion that the medium needs to evolve, who still insist they don’t make ’em like they used to. Even if we weren’t around to play ‘em when they made ‘em.
Live A Live, in particular, exists in this faux-nostalgia-baiting way as a game that was never released in the West. Why they haven’t done HD-2D versions of Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger, but have done Dragon Quest III and Live A Live, suggests they know they can sell these to people like me, people with an anemoia for this era of JRPGs, without getting much flak from those who realize the past isn’t what they remember it was.
I would love to know the opinions of Japanese players who did experience this game when it was new, and whether they’ve even stuck around in video games long enough to play the remake.
I understand the prestige of this game, how impressive it might’ve been in 1994 to have such widely different visual settings on the same cartridge. Even in 2025, the amount of pixel art and low-poly models needed to show all of these locations is no small feat.
JRPGs work because they force you to live in their worlds. They can be obtuse and boring, but they demand you slow down and breathe the world. Take this quote from Dragon Quest director Yuji Horii:
“The most important part of an RPG is the player feeling like they are taking the role of a character in a fully realised fantasy world.”
Live A Live, however, gives you eight trailers for possible JRPGs. The game feels like constant pitches for games they could’ve made. Each story lasts at most 2 hours, the present-day one under an hour. The game does not allow you any time to meaningfully connect with the characters you’re supposed to be roleplaying. It comes across as a tasting menu when I’d have preferred a single, well-designed meal.
It’s a terrible modern problem that starting a JRPG feels exhausting, even for me, someone who likes them. Live A Live asks you to start eight, with the promise they’ll come together in the end. The culmination gave me a feeling of familiarity with these characters I’d known for a moment and said goodbye to only a few hours ago. Maybe I started skipping text boxes by the end, but the ending came across as abrupt, and I didn’t have the emotional connection to these characters I’d have liked to.
Starting eight different JRPGs means starting from level 1 eight different times. The combat isn’t interesting enough at level 1 to make me want to be there eight times. There is an interesting system here. The tactics style has been done well before, and here, it feels prototyped, like the stories. Each character has an out-of-combat ability: the caveman’s smelling, which never really feels well-utilised, or the Edo-period ninja, who can hide from enemies on the world map. The Edo period in particular feels strangely designed; it sets you up for stealth, but without fighting, your level stays too low to survive mandatory encounters. Each segment feels like ideas for games that could have been.
These problems seem to make Live A Live a perfect candidate for a remake. If they’d been brave enough to take the foundations of the interesting thing laid out in 1994, they could’ve made a truly great game here. Instead, they shackled themselves to what had come before, with nicer graphics.