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Looper posted:only before you finish it! and you should because it's one of the more important ones I didn't realize until after I finished it that the blue wisps you see in the dungeon are interactable and The spirits of everyone from Lucrece, and Akira can read their minds to see what they think of current events. Highly recommend people go through it just to see what Hasshe, Streighbow, Uranus, and Alethea think of the current situation
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Jul 29, 2022 20:09
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In the final chapter isn't there also a boss that attacks you if you run away too much? I mean I think it gives a good piece of gear or something so I'm sure you might wanna do it intentionally but still
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Jul 29, 2022 20:27
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Glagha posted:In the final chapter isn't there also a boss that attacks you if you run away too much? I mean I think it gives a good piece of gear or something so I'm sure you might wanna do it intentionally but still There is, if you do that 100 times. It drops a piece of cosmic gear, which while just being good gear also protects against petrification.
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Jul 29, 2022 20:33
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Finished the Western chapter. It's actually not that hard to finish all the traps and easily wipe out all of the Crazy Bunch minus O. Dio if you haul rear end which I ended up doing. I also decided to pick one of the slower townsfolk after getting everything at the Saloon so that he'll be nearly done after I get everything in the other buildings and I can send him out again. After that, it was set everyone with the traps (and Annie and Billy with the right ones), wait until the barkeeper comes back and then drink myself before sending more people with the remaining required traps and then keep drinking until the boss fight. Speaking of that, O. Dio is probably one of the more durable bosses compared to Ou Di Wan Lee and Odie O'Bright due to having alot of health but without any backup, he's pretty predictable. I can guess he's way harder if you decide to be a crazy person and take on the entirety of the Crazy Bunch (which, if there's a Steam release for this, that's definitely one of the achievements). Anyway, might as well go to the Near Future. I'm hankering for some anime and the Near Future is very anime.
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Jul 29, 2022 21:36
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SettingSun posted:There is, if you do that 100 times. It drops a piece of cosmic gear, which while just being good gear also protects against petrification. It's important to note that Pure Odio dishes out petrification quite often, so spreading those items out among your final team will keep them safe from that.
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Jul 29, 2022 22:04
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Pyro Jack posted:Finished the Western chapter. It's actually not that hard to finish all the traps and easily wipe out all of the Crazy Bunch minus O. Dio if you haul rear end which I ended up doing. I also decided to pick one of the slower townsfolk after getting everything at the Saloon so that he'll be nearly done after I get everything in the other buildings and I can send him out again. After that, it was set everyone with the traps (and Annie and Billy with the right ones), wait until the barkeeper comes back and then drink myself before sending more people with the remaining required traps and then keep drinking until the boss fight. Speaking of that, O. Dio is probably one of the more durable bosses compared to Ou Di Wan Lee and Odie O'Bright due to having alot of health but without any backup, he's pretty predictable. I can guess he's way harder if you decide to be a crazy person and take on the entirety of the Crazy Bunch (which, if there's a Steam release for this, that's definitely one of the achievements). Fighting the entire Crazy Bunch at once isn't as bad as it seems on paper as long as you at least made the effort to grab everything in town, the way they're all packed together makes them all very susceptible to
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Jul 29, 2022 23:59
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Beat the King Mammoth at level 9. It was killing Gori in three hits and Pogo in four, so I wasn't ever in any real threat of dying. In general it feels like the difficulty's been toned down some in the remake, but it's been years, so I can't say that for sure. The VA list at the end of the chapter was a surprise. They got Megumi Ogata in to do the caveman who communicates entirely through screaming? Apparently she doesn't even have any other roles in the game! That's hilarious.
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Jul 30, 2022 06:12
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Einander posted:Beat the King Mammoth at level 9. It was killing Gori in three hits and Pogo in four, so I wasn't ever in any real threat of dying. In general it feels like the difficulty's been toned down some in the remake, but it's been years, so I can't say that for sure. I'm beginning to feel like this was some SE executives passion project and so they were able to get some silly stuff for a remake of an old game that had flopped on its original release.
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Jul 30, 2022 06:37
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Dr Pepper posted:I'm beginning to feel like this was some SE executives passion project and so they were able to get some silly stuff for a remake of an old game that had flopped on its original release. From what I understand Takashi Tokita, the game's director, has been fighting like hell to get this game remade for a long time, and the HD-2D team were apparently huge Live A Live fans who cite it as a major inspiration for Octopath, so the whole thing is just a giant labor of love.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:02
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Talking JP voice acting in general, is it me or did they specifically get a lot of actors who were especially prominent in the 90’s? I’m not like, ultra familiar with seiyuu but a lot of the credit names pop out as familiar even if I’m playing in English, and it would be pretty cool if that were the case given it’s a remake of an SNES game and all.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:08
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Wouldn't surprise me, they got freaking Hironobu Kageyama to sing Steel Titan's theme, and he's Mr. 90's Anime Theme Song himself.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:11
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Last Celebration posted:Talking JP voice acting in general, is it me or did they specifically get a lot of actors who were especially prominent in the 90’s? I’m not like, ultra familiar with seiyuu but a lot of the credit names pop out as familiar even if I’m playing in English, and it would be pretty cool if that were the case given it’s a remake of an SNES game and all. Tomokazu Sugita has so many roles specifically because he was a huge fan of Live A Live when it came out. As for the rest of the cast, that could be part of it, but most of the cast are veteran voice actors who've been huge since the eighties, as well. Worth noting is that pretty much every famous person in the cast has worked with Sugita before (also he once had a fake rivalry with Tomokazu Seki over who was the best Tomokazu), some of them very recently, in fact (he played the male protagonist in Super Robot Wars 30, among other characters in the series, and a pretty large chunk of the big names in Live A Live's cast has mecha anime credits that have appeared alongside him in either 30 or the Alpha trilogy). Hironobu Kageyama also ties into this, as not only did he do some big anime intros in the nineties, he's also one of the original members of JAM Project, which is the band for mecha anime intros, including the intro to every (non-handheld prior to PSP/3DS) Super Robot Wars since Alpha Gaiden. Which is the real reason he was likely tapped for the Buriki Daioh theme (well, that and he has a deeper vocal register than Masaki, who'd have probably done it for free). So, what I'm saying is, there's a non-zero chance Tomokazu Sugita made a bunch of calls to his voice acting buddies to rope them all into the game.
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Jul 30, 2022 08:42
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I didn’t know that about Sugita, really glad he got to work on a passion project like this.
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Jul 30, 2022 09:08
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Does my heart good to see a number of people experiencing this game for the first time here. Game is amazing, remake is amazing, love this piece of art. The complete lack of love for Hong in here is disappointing though. My boy deserves better.
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Jul 30, 2022 09:42
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Last Celebration posted:I didn’t know that about Sugita, really glad he got to work on a passion project like this. Yeah, he even did one of the prerelease livestreams (in Japanese) where he talked a bit about how much he loves the game. Another fun bit of casting trivia is they actually got the official Japanese dub voice for Sammo Hung, Yuu Mizushima, for Sammo/Hong. If Sugita did have a hand in getting the cast together, he would have likely met Mizushima just a couple years ago, as they were both doing One Piece at the same time, during the Whole Cake Island arc (Sugita as Charlotte Katakuri, while Mizushima is currently playing Kawamatsu and all three of Big Mom's pals/weapons: Prometheus, Zeus, and Napoleon). YoshiOfYellow posted:Does my heart good to see a number of people experiencing this game for the first time here. Game is amazing, remake is amazing, love this piece of art. At least Tokita made sure he got the voice he deserves. Well, kinda (the Japanese performance is a little whiny).
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Jul 30, 2022 09:48
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https://twitter.com/ore825/status/1552956562599055361?s=20&t=Lp8P0VGLgBGzVyqAu8DG6A Apologies for the double post, but in digging up further fun trivia about Live A Live, I found this charming video where some Japanese cooking twitter apparently got sponsored to cook up a Gutsy Taiyaki (Guts & Glory Special). By the way, the other Live A Live fanboys on the cast are Kenji Akabane (Akira's VA, of Shin Mazinger fame), and Tomohisa Hashizume (Oboro's VA, a fairly young voice actor who got his big break in Attack on Titan). And to close off, here's a great archive where you can see the old artwork from the SNES version, including the original art that the various mangaka made for the game when designing the characters. The remake puts everyone in a unified art style, but the art for the original was quite different. Of particular note is Oboro's chapter, which features the work of a young Gosho Aoyama, a mere month or less before the first chapter of Detective Conan (development for Live A Live began in December of '93, while Detective Conan began in January of '94, which means his initial design of Oboro may have been made either before or concurrently with one of the longest-running manga in Japan). EDIT: Okay one more thing. After being confused for years at this point about the Japanese name of who the localizers are calling James, Genma, I just realized that if you account for the frequent crossover of N and M sounds in Japanese, the name is most likely meant to be read as Gemma, as in Giuliano Gemma, star of the Ringo movies, among many other spaghetti westerns. EclecticTastes fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 10:15
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That art is pretty neat, i think I like the old art for Imperial China better for conveying the “tone” of each character at a glance, but…umm, I’m pretty happy with the current art style for Prehistory, no offense to the original artist. Kinda surprised Beru’s shell bikini never fell off after looking at the original art.
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Jul 30, 2022 12:19
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Last Celebration posted:That art is pretty neat, i think I like the old art for Imperial China better for conveying the “tone” of each character at a glance, but…umm, I’m pretty happy with the current art style for Prehistory, no offense to the original artist. Kinda surprised Beru’s shell bikini never fell off after looking at the original art. Fun fact, that dude, in particular, sucks poo poo! The year after Live A Live, he began publishing a manga series where he openly declares that Japan Did Nothing Wrong In WWII. This includes such classics as "Pearl Harbor was justified", "Nanking? More like Nah, king, I don't think that happened!", and many more! He was also a coordinator for the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which published a similarly revisionist textbook taken up by a few private schools (and, fortunately, nobody else). He also heavily implied that he thinks 9/11 was totally justified because America does imperialism in the aforementioned manga series. And this is why we don't talk about Yoshinori Kobayashi.
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Jul 30, 2022 13:21
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Oh, well, I was kinda pussyfooting around how I really felt to be nice because i guess it fits the vibe of “dumb slapstick and fart/wiener jokes, but in that case thank goodness for the redone Prehistoric art, the old art makes Gori and Pogo look like horrific goblin men.
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Jul 30, 2022 14:02
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I remember reading that Akira was a frustratingly weak character in the original, but playing through Near Future now he seems to have a pretty cool and varied set of abilities. Did he get buffed in the remake, or will he fall off hard at some point?
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Jul 30, 2022 14:49
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Last Celebration posted:Oh, well, I was kinda pussyfooting around how I really felt to be nice because i guess it fits the vibe of “dumb slapstick and fart/wiener jokes, but in that case thank goodness for the redone Prehistoric art, the old art makes Gori and Pogo look like horrific goblin men. I have a theory about that, actually, as Kobayashi's other work doesn't look like that. All of the mangaka involved in Live A Live were young up-and-comers who'd won awards within the past several years, so it's possible that whatever authority figures they had pushed them into the gig, and while some approached it with enthusiasm (Yumi Tamura even made an unlicensed prequel manga for Cube because she loved the smol robobean so much), Kobayashi may have just been resentful about it and deliberately did a bad job out of spite. "Here's your generic fuckin' caveman, a hideous monkey, a dude with a lizard on his dick, and whoa wait hold up lemme draw some big ol' tiddies on here." Tokita went and made gold out of it, but it's entirely possible Kobayashi simply didn't give a gently caress and hated having to do it. Harrow posted:I remember reading that Akira was a frustratingly weak character in the original, but playing through Near Future now he seems to have a pretty cool and varied set of abilities. Did he get buffed in the remake, or will he fall off hard at some point? I haven't gotten to the remake's version of his chapter, but a lot of SNES Akira's moves had comparatively low damage with enormous ranges, and his best move was single-target and had a pretty hefty charge time (also he's not really tough enough for extended time in melee range against most foes).
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Jul 30, 2022 14:56
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Akira is probably the weakest of the protagonists if you’re ranking them in order, if only because his niche (being the best at aoe damage) is less useful in boss fights, but he’s still pretty good.
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Jul 30, 2022 15:01
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One thing that's been interesting about his scenario is the encounter design. It feels like they put extra effort into designing encounters to make you think about Akira and his party members' abilities and how to use them. A lot of them are "leader" encounters where the leader is vulnerable to something Akira can do but positioned just out of range of any of his damaging abilities with some hard-to-pass arrangement of robot minions in the way. Or the Commander-type enemies who hit really hard but are super resistant to anything your party members can do so you have to put Akira at risk to do real damage to them.
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Jul 30, 2022 15:13
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So I don't think they really buffed Akira or anything, but my theory is just the game is a lot more transparent about it's mechanics now so it's a lot easier to tell what the hell is doing to happen when you do stuff. The original game didn't tell you enemy weaknesses and resistances if they even existed in the game, and the move descriptions were very short, so from the point of view of someone playing the fan translation you just see a move that just says like "Mother Image: Vision of Mom" and you do it and it does like 10 damage to a group of enemies you could easily draw the conclusion that he sucks. In this game you can tell what moves are going to be effective against what enemies and get a ballpark description of how much damage and the status effects of a move so he's way easier to use effectively.
Glagha fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 15:33
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Glagha posted:So I don't think they really buffed Akira or anything, but my theory is just the game is a lot more transparent about it's mechanics now so it's a lot easier to tell what the hell is doing to happen when you do stuff. The original game didn't tell you enemy weaknesses and resistances if they even existed in the game, and the move descriptions were very short, so from the point of view of someone offering the fan translation you just see a move that just says like "Mother Image: Vision of Mom" and you do it and it does like 10 damage to a group of enemies you could easily draw the conclusion that he sucks. In this game you can tell what moves are going to be effective against what enemies and get a ballpark description of how much damage and the status effects of a move so he's way easier to use effectively. Yeah I think Akira's chapter would be really frustrating if I couldn't see enemy resistances. Even then, later in the chapter you start running into random grunts who are practically immune to Akira's abilities in general (they take 0 damage from something they resist and like 2 damage from everything else), which feels kinda weird, having a lot of random encounters where your main character's main skillset just stops working. I could definitely see this chapter really sucking if you also just didn't know what half of those abilities did in the first place.
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Jul 30, 2022 15:58
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All this talk of the Near Future reminds me to go start it since I'm done with the Western chapter. Went and named the main character of that chapter Kuwagata. You can probably get the joke if you have some knowledge of what'll happen later, what anime the chapter is referencing and who his Japanese voice actor is. Speaking of names, I should go and show who I named in the past three chapters. For Imperial China I went with Fist of Rhalgr, for Modern Age I went with Takeru Saito and for Western I went with The Sunset Rider Kid.
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Jul 30, 2022 16:25
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It's a shame this game wasn't a bigger hit, it could've inspired 3 decades of JRPGs where all the cutscenes are just the characters pointing and grunting at each other and sometimes a gorilla mugs at the camera.
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Jul 30, 2022 19:51
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og pogo being a hideous napkin sketch is unfortunate but gori being a nasty goblin king is essential to his character
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Jul 30, 2022 22:32
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Item Getter posted:It's a shame this game wasn't a bigger hit, it could've inspired 3 decades of JRPGs where all the cutscenes are just the characters pointing and grunting at each other and sometimes a gorilla mugs at the camera. It kind of inspired a ton of stuff anyway.
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Jul 30, 2022 22:57
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Yeah the original Gori's laugh was quite literally just Mutley from Wacky Race/Dick Dastardly cartoons which is hilariously for that kinda lovely sidekick character. The new one by comparison is an actual laugh. Harrow posted:Yeah I think Akira's chapter would be really frustrating if I couldn't see enemy resistances. Even then, later in the chapter you start running into random grunts who are practically immune to Akira's abilities in general (they take 0 damage from something they resist and like 2 damage from everything else), which feels kinda weird, having a lot of random encounters where your main character's main skillset just stops working. I could definitely see this chapter really sucking if you also just didn't know what half of those abilities did in the first place. But I do genuinely wonder how much of that is balanced around you crafting Taro's weird goofy as hell accessory weapons.
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Jul 30, 2022 22:58
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I love all the little unique things they do with the status menu, and the places they slip them in kinda amaze me. Chapter 8 In the very brief moment between Hasshe's death and losing Streighbow from the party, the party menu accounts for it and decides to throw in some foreshadowing:
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Jul 31, 2022 01:52
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EclecticTastes posted:https://twitter.com/ore825/status/1552956562599055361?s=20&t=Lp8P0VGLgBGzVyqAu8DG6A That is quite some knife the princess has.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:06
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Bloodly posted:That is quite some knife the princess has. i think some of the medieval art is from a mobile game?
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Jul 31, 2022 02:24
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MonsieurChoc posted:It kind of inspired a ton of stuff anyway. At the bare minimum, it inspired/influenced Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve, the various FFIV spin-offs, and Octopath Traveler. However, it's also likely that Kazuhiko Shimamoto carried this experience forward in working on the character design for Mobile Fighter G Gundam, meaning that without Akira, Domon Kasshu might not have had the iconic look we know and love. Also, given the influence on Octopath Traveler, one can assume Triangle Strategy benefited similarly. And this is just stuff that's been made explicit or has a direct line one can draw to it. Indirectly, it could have served as a source of inspiration for now fewer than three prominent voice actors, influenced dozens of later games (hell, it may have borrowed the "multiple storylines" concept from Romancing SaGa, but SaGa Frontier may have done some borrowing of its own by making its plotlines entirely separate, rather than the Romancing SaGa 1 and 3's singular main plots with character stories just interwoven). Not to mention how it might have influenced the sound design work of Yoko Shimomura, as well. The ratio of how influential the game is to how well-known/popular it is is pretty wild for Live A Live. Booky posted:i think some of the medieval art is from a mobile game? Yeah, the medieval characters were designed entirely in-house rather than using a manga artist, so they didn't have large-size images until later works started referencing them. Shame they didn't get Amano to give 'em his usual treatment.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:49
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Yeah some years ago (2015 or so?) there were a couple Live A Live crossovers that made a bunch of new art for that chapter. I believe it was 2 games: Final Fantasy Dimensions II (which is a SaGa game?) which gave us updated art of LAL's final boss(obvious massive spoilers), and something called Holy Dungeon, which is where that fancy art of the Middle Ages characters comes from (including this one very spoilery character design that isn't in EclecticTastes' link but actually ended up as the basis for a design in the remake and mentions that the cape Oersted is wearing is Straybow's).
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Jul 31, 2022 02:50
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I have beaten Live A Live (2022, Nintendo Switch, English). I think that remakes often reveal that there's no hard distinction between the application of contemporary amenities (fancier visuals and audio, more convenient and informative UI) and the alteration of design. Sometimes the original design was subject to constraints which no longer apply; sometimes the effect of the original design has been impacted by the changes that make it a remake; sometimes the remake process is taken as an opportunity to revisit design elements which may have been errors or were simply undesigned in the first place. The process of remaking tends to put into conflict the desire to remain faithful to the source material while releasing it from compromises forced upon its original production, and the exigencies of commerce mean that these dilemmas are often resolved according to the principle of what would be most profitable this quarter, rather than what would be most artful or respectful or fun. Remakes are derivative works which are implicitly presented with the bold (but, I feel, attainable) claim that for most purposes they supersede their originals. I say "most purposes" because it's plainly impossible for them to supersede the original for all purposes: trivially, archivists and historiographers don't want any variation or revision to escape their attention, and remakers err in trying to work around the impossibility of perfection. Anyway, this is one hell of a remake and one hell of a game. I don't regret waiting for it, even though the original had been available to me in fan translation all this time. User interface design is one of the few parts of game design that I think have gotten unequivocally better over the decades. Both in 1994 and in 2022, Live A Live is a game based on the concept of using RPG mechanics in different ways to tell a variety of stories, and a contemporary user interface that clarifies those mechanics even further, making those emotional beats more direct and clear (along with the parts where it simply makes the game less confusing to play). The concept is easy to explain: an anthology JRPG, consisting of short and archetypical stories, each exploring some concept too extreme for a full game, united by their consideration of a common theme. To keep the stories approachable, they consist largely of film pastiches, though I think this decision resulted in them having another common element, one which isn't really related to the "humanism" motif uniting the chapters: there's like no women in this thing. That's pretty hosed up. But the reason it's possible to overlook that deficiency is because the main thrust of the whole game is not its narrative content as such, but the way it is told, its formal innovation, its experiments with the structure and techniques of games. The breadth of those experiments have made it hugely influential (even if a couple of them resulted in revealing that while you can do that, you probably shouldn't), so to an English speaker experiencing it for the first time, it's like discovering a missing link in the evolution of games. It's such an inspiration that it's even got me wanting to fire up RPG Maker a little bit. Over the years I've unknowingly played many games that I didn't recognize as paying homage to Live A Live. And I've got to say: a lot of things done first by Live A Live in 1994 are still being done best by Live A Live in 2022.
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Jul 31, 2022 07:52
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It kinda sucks about the dearth of female protagonists, but at least the remake devs felt the same way since Octopath is a 50/50 split and the girls there seem generally cooler than the guys.
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Jul 31, 2022 09:39
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i've Finally been able to sit down and start playing!! i'm almost done with the kung fu chapter and i was wondering if i should give my disciple the shifus better equips before confronting the baddies? also, 
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Jul 31, 2022 09:41
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In that scenario, note that you will have the chance to change your equipment right up until you actually talk to the boss. There's a reason why you might want to do what you suspect, and it's because that fight is one-on-one, so things the shifu has equipped won't be any help to you, but that's something that makes it immediately apparently whether you might want to reload a save. Unlike the original, there's no difference between items equipped on the main character and equipment held in your inventory at the end of the chapter. Similarly, there's no benefit to refraining from collecting treasure in any given scenario. This is a nice improvement because you can basically just play naturally.
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Jul 31, 2022 09:48
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Booky posted:i've Finally been able to sit down and start playing!! i'm almost done with the kung fu chapter and i was wondering if i should give my disciple the shifus better equips before confronting the baddies? you definitely should at some point, but it’s not a nonstop gauntlet without any rest to pause and reequip so it’ll be fairly obvious when you should do that.
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Jul 31, 2022 09:51
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