REVIEW: Live a Live is an experimental adventure adapted for our time

live to live was originally released for Super Famicom (the equivalent of SNES) in 1994 in Japan and had never formally arrived in the west, but that didn't stop a fan base from establishing itself on that side of the globe, and it's only now, twenty-eight years after the original, that the rest of the world has gotten to know the title officially in a remake protocols for Nintendo Switch made in a HD-2D aesthetics, which became a trend after the positive reception of Octopath Traveler.

Living one life at a time on Switch

One of the linear narrative normally it is the one that conditions the audience to always proceed along a predetermined path and its basic function is to expose a message to its receiver the way it is, morally immutable. The idea is to directly impact the receiver, without him exerting much control over the course of the plot. With the advent of technological developments, narratives began to exercise a participatory character, multiforme, which offers possibilities for the public itself to be in control.

Video games are one of those forms of storytelling, even in titles considered more “linear”. In Super Mario, for example, the fact that the player decides to jump or not on top of Goomba at the beginning of the game already configures a kind of multiform branch, since they are different possibilities for the development of the game, since this influences the score. and even though, in both cases, the finish line is exactly the same. The smallest decisions, therefore, matter.

This idea was taken to new heights by Live a Live, which became one of the main exponents of fragmented narrative, justifying a little the reason for having managed to raise a community of its own, even without ever having arrived in the West. Its basic proposal is to bring several individual stories e separated by time and space, as if the player had the opportunity to live several different lives (hence the name of the game).

These "lives" could - and can, in the case of the remake - be chosen in any order by the player, who directly influenced the game's progression in a broad way, assembling their own narrative puzzle. So, the moment the New Game is given, a list of nine different stories available to choose from, it's up to us to choose the first one that catches our attention and finally start your own adventure.

Such a fragmented narrative structure puts Live a Live in a field of experimentation — which is usually nothing more than an excuse for situations where certain ideas don't live up to their full potential right away. With several different small stories, what Live a Live does is precisely experiment, test, play with several different genres and apply them to the structure of an RPG, making small punctual adjustments that vary according to the given environment.

For example, the prehistory chapter already takes into account that its potential player will probably make choices within a chronological order, presenting itself as a kind of veiled tutorial with teachings of systems that will be repeated throughout the other fragments of history. What stands out the most here is the existence of a overworld in which the character can grind and by the complete absence of dialogue, implying that it is a plot that takes place even before the invention of the word.

On the other hand, the footprint brought by the Far Future chapter is completely oriented to the story, serving mainly as a lore dump, that is, excessive exposition of the mythology that the title tries to make and interconnect between the various plots. While the one that is theoretically the first — if we try to identify a kind of linearity through the historical chronology itself — proves to be a tutorial of gameplay practical with minimal history, the distant future serves as a mirror and brings a heavily narrative experience.

Filling this hole, there are other historical periods, each with its own unique proposal. The present tense, for example, is practically a boss rush, as it tells the saga of a martial artist who wants to become the champion of the world. The one from the wild west, in turn, is also quite short and brings a kind of puzzle with a predetermined time to be resolved. The fragment that takes place in Japan during the Edo period has a proposal Stealth which allows the player to engage in combat against enemies or simply sneak.

Adventures set in the near future — which is even the most traditional of all the segments — and in Imperial China (whose differential is the character that doesn't level up, keeping the same attributes until the end of its plot) close the main compendium. When all chapters are finished, the middle age is unlocked. Upon completing it, the final chapter, tying the entire plot together, is released. In terms of conclusion, there are three different endings that will depend on the characters chosen for the clash in the final chapter.

In general, this structure, as interesting as it is, ended up playing against the general quality of Live a Live, since all the adventures always end up showing a very precarious or unbalanced narrative in their rhythm and ways of exposing the plot. The prehistory chapter, for example, soon becomes boring because of its banal humor and which seems to have been made for a children's audience.

Even the other segments end up being a little to be desired in the depth they could present. No one is asking for a reinvention of narrative art as we know it today, but one would expect something more than an ordinary episode of a Saturday morning cartoon (a term commonly used in the United States as a way of exemplifying beat-up script structures). and uninspired, like most of these children's animations usually produced by the touch of a box, like the more classic Scooby-Doo series).

The overall impression, in the end, is as if Live a Live were a collection of adventures forged by illustrious creators of RPG Maker, given the scope and approach of each of these segments. And look, this is said with all the respect in the world, since the platform in question is capable of producing incredible experiences, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a software known precisely for being a gateway and branded precisely for the amateurism of much of what is produced in it.

Thus, as much as Live a Live is a title focused on experimental narrative, it lacked this test character so that there was a slightly greater focus on execution, that is, less theory and more practice.

A simplified RPG by Square Enix

The fact that there are several different narratives is not exactly a reinvention of the wheel, after all, they all drink directly from various styles and genres of other games that were already successful in the SNES era. However, the real insight of game design was to take all these thematic archetypes already beaten and bring them together in a single game with its own scope of gameplay, in this case, the RPG.

In direct terms, Live a Live's combat is the same as a simple turn-based action bar based RPG and a tactical RPG twist. It works as follows: with each action performed by the puppets involved in the battle, everyone's bar is filled and, once one is filled, it's the combatant's turn.

There are several possible actions, such as special attacks and use of items, in addition to the movement itself, which uses a cell system just like a tactical RPG. This also influences the targeting of attacks, which can be directed to cells near, far, by area, etc.

The central problem is that there are very few times when the player's skills are put to the test, as it is possible to simply level up on the basis of luck or with minimal knowledge of a system that is already considerably shallow. Even the attributes responsible for buffs, debuffs and nerfs can even be useful, but they hardly prove to be crucial to the course of the campaign. The challenge offered is tiny.

In the final stretch of each story, even stronger attacks are usually unlocked and the progress of the game becomes increasingly automatic and unbalanced. Considering the style of movement used by the combat system, understanding positioning is probably the main knowledge that the average player needs to have to get around in the conflicts of the game.

These ultra-simplified mechanics also have a lot to do with how little implication one narrative has over the other. It's no use leveling up a character too much or putting exaggerated skill goals, which require gate. After all, in this case, the game is correct, as it would be a waste of time to try to inflate even more the time of each of the narratives in Live a Live, which are intentionally succinct and purposefully focused more on the storytelling in itself.

Aesthetically speaking, Live a Live isn't necessarily bad, but it isn't exactly the best among those produced by Tomoya Asano, such as Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy, which follow the same HD-2D model, basically composed of three-dimensional polygonal scenarios with textures. in tilesets and with elements in spritework that contrast with the scenery.

while the work of sprite of the characters themselves is truly beautiful, the textures used in the backgrounds are a little precarious due to the intention to try to reproduce those used in the original game. Furthermore, it is noted that the absence of certain aesthetic effects, such as the fog that helps to disguise the serrated edges, had a negative influence on the general perception of the whole.

In contrast, the brightest upgrade received by the Live a Live remake is in its sonic attributes. The soundtrack, originally composed by the legendary Yoko Shimomura, received a respectful re-orchestration, optimizing the atmosphere brought by each of the stories that, because they are set in such different contexts, manage to take advantage of the variety of genres and styles that a Super Nintendo was unable to reproduce at the time of the original Live a Live. The voice work was also singularly positive.

Live to Live worth it?

It is interesting that the Square Enix, with the production of titles such as Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre, Bravely Default, or even Yoko Taro's Voice of Cards, has managed to find a self-sufficient production model for titles that are smaller in scope than what a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy would require, for example. Live a Live, in turn, ends up entering this cake. As much as the game is even too precarious in some aspects, it is undeniable that the treatment it received in the re-reading process was quite competent.

In addition, it may be skeletal by today's standards, but it is still an important piece of gaming history for having, with its experimental proposal for a multiform and branching narrative, opened the door to viability for what is widely considered one of the greatest RPGs already produced by the industry: Chrono Trigger.

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