Live A Live

"Best use of FF5's engine since FF5."

First, the obliviously obvious observation: This game WILL make you wonder how the heck Square could have messed up SaGa Frontier so horribly badly. Aside from the possible fact that no one who did Live a Live was actually called on to do SaGa. Who knew. But let no memories of the nasty present deter you from the joyous past of art-house creativity that never made it here in legal form. Live a Live is good. Wonderfully good. Even now I'm finding little secrets and/or treasures that I didn't know about the first few times through. It's only the lack of absolute clarity in presentation(and even this could be partially blamed on the fact that I lack the manual and the ability to read it and the game in its original Japanese) that keeps it from achieving a score of 10. Otherwise, it's exactly what one's looking for if one's searching for the complete old-school RPG experience, with the bonus of few chapters needing any excessive leveling up until the very end. This experience starts with the

GRAPHICs, ever so FF5 on the overhead maps, ever so FF6 during battle. As far as I can tell, this is AS IT SHOULD BE. Though not Amano-drawn, the detail is palpable, the emotion is noticeable, and even the chibi guys on overhead mode have some pretty nice variations in their characterizations. When Watanabe cries his poor little eyes out, you FEEL it. There is little that's noticeably spectacular about the spell effects, and the fact that some of them take a little while to cast can bore a bit after a few too many random battles. But they are most definitely worth enduring to advance the

STORY, which does a much better job of meshing disparate characters together in a common purpose than Seiken Densetsu 3 ever did. Not only does each character's journey fit very well with the overriding ''moral'' of the story, there's enough large and small details in every quest to make darned sure that you KNOW those characters you're going to be using later, consarn it! Few characters get the short shrift that might be tempting in a bunch of mini-quests like this one, and there's almost always more to be found out about those characters if you search around long enough. Not only that, but both during the game and at the end, you have the active choice of being good, evil, or just plain destructive(considering some of the nasty twists the game likes to throw at you, it does at times seem justified), and the game even rewards you with a unique piece of

MUSIC for pursuing the third option. Yoko Shimomura is quite masterful in the aural regard, though perhaps not as polished as Mitsuda or Oematsu. Despite her womanish nature, her techno grooves are a lot better than 99% of the SNES's techno music repertoire (excepting the Secret of Mana Dark Lich theme, but you really can't improve upon perfection.) Given the broad scope of times and places this game is set in, she really had her work cut out for her...and managed to succeed admirably in just about every representative musical style, whether its shogun-era Japanese riffs, Old West whistles, or just a simple repeating theme needed to create the atmosphere for a spacecraft gone psychotic. (And if you don't think simple repeating themes are effectively scary, go whistle that audio for the videotape on The Ring and see if the chills don't start running down your spine.) It matches the mood of the

GAMEPLay so well that one might even be forgiving toward the designers for taking such an overcomplicated approach to what on the surface is a very simple chessboard battle interface. Unless you're absolutely determined to find every secret, this will only become patently obvious once you get near the last chapter. Area-effect attacks and status changing attacks I can understand. Field-effecting attacks that turn friendly squares into elemental danger zones-even better. Highly powerful charge-up skills and the moves to cancel them...best of all! Gigantically vast array of items plus cumbersome interface that makes figuring out what item goes on which character and which attacks are powered the most by which item...huh? I'd have preferred a simple physical/elemental magical set of attack types, not the confusing classifications of blunt/sharp/mind/etc. Most other people I know of like to equip their stuff and sally forth to smash the evil people over the head, not spend time seeing whether an item would do better as a weapon, a shield, or an accessory. Some of the secrets, not to mention quite a bit of the in-game instructions on where to go next to advance the story, tend to be on the ''highly obscure'' side, most noticeable in the Near Future, Bakumatsu, and Science Fiction chapters. Thank goodness for FAQs, as they DO make the game that much more replayable, but just because we visit this site doesn't mean we want to have to consult it for every little clue on how to see 16-bit squareish people naked. Pixelated nudity should come naturally. I suppose these types of flaws are inherent on little art-house projects like Live a Live, but CHRONO TRIGGER was an art-house project too, and you don't see the guys who made THAT one lacking for money in which to localize it for US release! Such flaws as mentioned are both regrettable and easily fixable in an otherwise stellar game. The only way to get it and see how badly they rub you...is to emulate! Unless you both own a SFC copy of Live a Live and can read Japanese, you need to find the ROM somewhere in the nether reaches of the Internet cosmos and play it ASAP. If you can think of three reasons not too, cite them with references and send them to someone who cares.

Nintendo Logic: Live a Live turns up so many winners in this category that...it's funny! The entire caveman section is replete with body/sex-related humor, the Chinese chapter specializes in fat guys who move real fast, the Ninja chapter has enough stupid henchmen to make Dr. Evil envious, the near-future chapter is a somewhat complete rip-off of Akira's plot, and there's always the sick running Watanabe joke.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/12/02, Updated 11/12/02