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Finished China, Wild West and Japan. Game's real neat, although I decided to pacifist-run Japan and that didn't go so well because game kinda esoteric in the back half of that. Definitely gonna go back and do a genocide run of that. I am gonna kill that fish. It's really, really apparent sometimes that this is a thoroughly touched-up game from the 90s. It's full of extremely cool and creative uses of tiny details that put tiny narrative bites in unexpected places, and it's also full of odd, clunky design choices, especially if you're trying to do a pacifist run of Japan. But overall, I'm loving it. I can't believe how novel it feels given how old it is.
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Jul 24, 2022 00:59
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 15:25 |
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With only light savescumming I managed to blunder my way up to the 4th floor of the castle without any guides. Some of it was a little weird but it seemed basically possible. Of course, I had no idea that the boss up there was mandatory and didn't count as a kill (the game seems ambiguous up to that point but I figured he was a human, if it was ever stated otherwise I must have missed it). After that is nonsense though.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:50
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They really had fun with the dialogue in middle ages didn't they? loving soliloquies left right and center. Voice actors seem to not fully know what to do with it but they clearly loved it.
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Jul 25, 2022 04:05
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So yeah, this sure was a video game. Sure makes some of the SNES Golden Age JRPGs make more sense, like, drat, it's super apparent how ideas from Live A Live took hold. It's a little weird to get my head around how to credit design elements of a game that came out nearly three goddamn decades ago and has been through a modern remake filter (albeit a very faithful remake filter), but the conclusion I've reached is that this game was wildly ahead of its time, and in some respects feels a little bit dated today, but it only feels dated by like, five or ten years. There are a couple points where you can really feel the Old JRPG Bullshit piling up, and it just wasn't in the cards for whole swathes of the game to be ground-up redesigned, so they're in here more or less as articles of faith and exist as little spots where the quality-of-life papering-over couldn't quite reach. But god drat. This game feels original still in 2022, maybe less mind-blowingly so than it might have in 1994 and especially now that the idea of an anthology JRPG about thematically connected stories isn't really revolutionary anymore but, like, god drat. The HD-2D glow-up certainly doesn't hurt either, although it's a shame the Switch struggles to run it at times. I love how distinct each chapter feels. Seven completely different tones, seven completely different genres, seven completely different styles of love-letter to seven completely different eras of film, seven completely different characters, seven completely different styles of play. I once read, somewhere (my fading memory says it was an Action Button review, but hell if I can remember exactly where) that the JRPG genre is like a canvas - game genres being generally more akin to how we might think of a "medium" in art than what we think of as a "genre" in film - which you then find ways to use to convey narrative. The battle system, the progression, the exploration, and, yes, events and dialogue. Final Fantasy II/IV turned heads by giving you a "battle" sequence in which you progressed by a means other than depleting the opposing party's hit points. That kind of thing. Live A Live is fruit turgid with that kind of creative application of genre. The Shifu starting at max level but with stats that are middling in context, and his young students who are weak but brimming with potential if they could only gain the experience is a great example of this (Fire Emblem fans will instinctively think about Jeigan and Est here, because Fire Emblem is another early wellspring of narrative concepts crystallised as gameplay systems). Everywhere you look there's stuff telling you things; every item description is from the viewpoint of a character instead of that of the developer, mechanical differences between characters are framed as differing ways in which they see the world, and the protagonists all fight differently in ways that feel like true expressions of who they are and where (and when) they're from more than they feel like a designer ensuring a diverse allocation of unit classes. This stuff seems obvious to us now, in 2022, but in its original context it was the cutting loving edge. These guys figured out how to paint a masterpiece on the JRPG Canvas, and then opened a gallery. It is readily apparent that this game was made by people who love video games, and it is just as apparent that even though Japan (and, allegedly, the world) wasn't ready for it at the time, the people who made it understood the value in what they had made, and took much from it with which to find later success. It's right and just that it got such a high-profile second chance, because it was an injustice for it to go largely unknown despite being a key influence for literal decades. Now with all of that said I'm going to complain at length about the most integral part of the game and the spoilers. So we're all agreed I think that it's kind of a deliberate joke that after seven distinct original and novel short tales told in a JRPG style we are then given the secret that ties everything together in a Fantasy Medieval Europe sword and sorcery tale about a princess and a dark wizard. It's a good joke. I found it funny for about two hours, which, probably not coincidentally, is about how long the Middle Ages chapter stalls for before pulling its rug. It's earned. The problem I have is that as what I can only assume is part of the joke, they bought back the random battles. And I don't find that quite as funny. So, like, here's the thing. The game, the whole game, up until now, has made such a point about averting the use of random battles. It's like it's saying, we get it, we understand that this has only ever been something we all put up with before a better way was found, a mission it shares with its contemporary EarthBound. It was, to an extent, fitting for it to then abandon this undertaking as part of its effort to misdirect the player about what's about to happen in the Middle Ages chapter, because it's committed to using every single stroke on that canvas to paint a picture of JRPG Cliché. Like the rest of the joke, it remains funny for a couple of hours. But unlike the rest of the joke, it doesn't go away. The JRPG clichés are dramatically thrown away, but this mechanical part remains. And round about the same time, the game sends Oersted out on a wander around the game's largest environment, with no direction provided. I don't know exactly how long I spent before giving up and looking up a guide to reveal the completely unintuitive, untelegraphed action that triggers the next plot movement. It can't have been that long, maybe forty minutes. But it felt like hours, because, as we know without question in 2022 and surely must have at least suspected in 1994 having gone to the effort to make a game that avoids random battles, having to scour a large environment while being interrupted every few seconds feels godawful. So, this bit in the middle of the game's most impactful chapter was a bit of a misfire. But, hey, it's one bit, which does eventually end, and then it's right back onto the plot train. So what does the game do after this? Naturally, it repeats the same conceit again, for an entire final chapter that you'll need to scour in even more detail for an even longer time. I can't lie. The fatigue hit hard during the climactic final chapter. Somehow, for some reason, the game decides at this point that what it needs to do now is go in even harder on the JRPG tropes than it already has. The assembling of your team, this is good, and we see there a seed that would later blossom in FFVI in particular. But once again you are scouring Live A Live's largest environment, without any real guidance, and with the constant interruption of random battles, and to add to that, there are now seven dungeons - dungeons? Now? - that you have to complete if you want your Good Ending. All that, and tracking down Sundown. It's, just, it's too much. It takes too long. It ruins the pace. There was not an opening for five more hours of content at this point. Our seven protagonists are, we're to believe, flung together across time and space and proceed to spend a ton of time grinding in complete silence before anything interesting happens. And I mean, look, once you get there, the final boss sequence is incredible. In 1994 the idea of a fleshed out fallen-from-grace tragic figure pulling cosmic overlord duty must have been faintly astonishing. In 2022 it is merely a very cool sequence. But they carry it. Oersted sells it completely with his absurd trauma conga-line and his reams of soliloquies. "My hate is yours, and yours is mine. To share, a history, so long as men yet live!". Today it's kind of a cliché, but this right here is why it became a cliché. God, I was sold on Oersted as a villain the moment he started speaking. It couldn't have been more on the nose if they faded out the background and had a spotlight shine down on him. I am Here for this plot and how it's brought home. It's just! The five hours of filler! After everything in those other chapters! (Also as much as I love the constant Elizabethan-ness of everything in the Middle Ages, there's also kind of a weird quality to it that I can't quite pin down; it's like somewhere between the editing room and the recording booths there was a disconnect, or maybe multiple disconnects at different points, often the meter of the lines will falter slightly as though nobody had ever bothered to actually try reading them out and observe they failed to match that iambic cadence, and other times the voice actors didn't seem to realise they were supposed to be reading lines in that way, or other times the lines have the wrong meter but the voice actors clearly cotton on and manage to deliver the line in a way that works. There's, just, something really weird happened and I'd love to spend days badgering all the cast and crew to find out what exactly.) Someone upthread said the game is both hugely ahead of its time and utterly of its time, and, like, yeah, that, basically. But I think the remake had a daunting task which it carried out admirably; I am given to understand the whole undertaking is astonishingly faithful, beat for beat and pixel for pixel with only extremely minor changes for some variably justified censorship purposes, but there's clearly been a lot of thought put in to transparency and quality of life, with only a few sequences that still evoke that good ol' 1994 Game Bullshit Feeling. I'm glad it was made (both times) and I'm glad to have finally played it. I see what all the fuss was about.
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Jul 27, 2022 23:08
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Looper posted:you should've tried running away from those encounters Good christ no. When I eventually figured that particular gimmick out I started on it and after like five battles I ran the numbers on how long it would take versus the reward and just figured it wasn't worth it. I'm just glad the game came out on the one platform still mercifully free of achievements because I get to be free of extrinsic compulsions to do nonsense like that.
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Jul 29, 2022 18:49
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Now that I replay the Japan chapter without the burden of pacifism, is it possible to reset the floor in the Prisoner's cell after freeing him and going through Amakusa Shiro? IIRC that's a Koban in that chest, and of course it can be restocked.
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Aug 1, 2022 13:30
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I killed the fish. Now for the mammoth. So much grinding...
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Aug 2, 2022 00:21
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The King Mammoth fight is not justifiable. Maybe in 1994 they had the excuse of not yet knowing better, which would have been fair, but given the things they did improve it's slightly staggering they didn't seem to rebalance this at all. As a rule, RNG sucks, and needs to be very carefully designed around in order to not suck. Invisible RNG sucks even worse. Invisible numbers and timers that aren't random might as well be, because you have to assume they could be the worst possible value at any given point. At the very least, games with invisible, random or invisible random numbers and timers need to take steps to make those things manageable. Basically what I'm saying is that it's complete bullshit that even if you play perfectly with every possible precaution he can just decide to cover himself in fire tiles and then have them proc immediately, even if you have Gori on standby and it's his turn and he literally just waited a single tick. To say nothing of this attack being usable consecutively with no downside. It can't be strategised around. The correct strategy is to get lucky, for five continuous minutes. There is no progress or momentum in this fight; either party (unlikely but not impossible to be the player) can turn it around in seconds and make or reverse a random amount of headway based on nothing in particular. I had one encounter today where I got lucky straight away and hit him with Stun, followed by a ton of stat downs, followed by Sleep, followed by Confuse, and between continuous Pokes and Scare Faces got him under 100 health. Then, whoops! One of them missed, and he did the thing, and recovered to full with there having been no possibility of stopping any of it. Also, if you beat the bullshit and win it's still random if you get the one thing you came for. gently caress you. Also, while hilarious on mechanical and narrative levels, the Cola Bottle is itself pretty broken, just in your favour, and isn't really a good reward because it kind of invalidates any content you apply it to. This is of course the supposed justification for having to fight a complete bullshit boss to get it, but that means; The rational approach to King Mammoth is not to engage with it at all, which is a good litmus test for something that should never have been in the game. It's not even worth bragging rights. Who would feel proud of beating it, when you could have simply saved the time? In conclusion, 
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Aug 2, 2022 11:01
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After the two hard-won but cola-bottle-less victories I had managed before that last post I went and ground the team up to Lv 16 and managed three more slightly irritating but fairly snappy wins and now I have beaten all of the superbosses. There's a Theory at work here, I'll give them that. There are signs of an intended system of threats and counters. There are, when you lay it out, a ton of good options for actually engaging with the guy. It's just, the combination of the two moves that carpet things in fire, his sky-high evasion even when you've got buffed accuracy, and the end-result inconsistency of how the tile timers work makes for a lot of surprise misery. Also, it is transparently bullshit that he can stack nine fire tiles worth of healing but if there's nine poison tiles underneath him only two of them count. Come on. I can only hope it's not the intended approach to grind to 16 and lean on Pogo's ultimate. I feel like King Mammoth is pretty close to optimal superboss territory where you can effectively keep things stable while whittling him down and managing your defences. It's just, way, waaay too much seems to hinge on getting lucky with his evasion, because it can more or less randomly ruin your otherwise correct management decisions and compound into reversing a ton of damage. (If I was speccing out the combat engine, my approach to tile procs would be a per element per character meter that fills up from zero in response to standing on a tile and the proc happens on that character when it fills up. It needn't actually be visible. This way there is a consistent burn rate, so to speak. I would actually make the damage number completely flat but multiply the fill rate by the number of tiles the unit is standing on, so King Mammoth wouldn't recover hundreds of HP but instead recover 24 every tick or so and your task is to cut it off before he recovers a meaningful amount, so the fire attacks remain appropriately stressful and will be disastrous if you dawdle but microscopic errors and chance can't completely gently caress you and you can make more considered tactical tradeoffs if you have something really important to do before he heals.)
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Aug 2, 2022 22:52
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 15:25 |
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I still haven't figured out how that minigame actually works in the remake. I mean, there's one version where one of the speech bubbles has Gori in it and you pick the haystack with Gori in it. But the other one, where the bubbles just show 3 and 5? I have no idea what you're actually supposed to be looking for there. I thought it was, like, one stack with the indicated number in it, but no? Nor is it the one with more, or less, guys in it. When that one came up I just skipped the animation and picked randomly. Whatever it is they were trying to communicate there went completely over my head. Also, like... I don't know how I feel about the no dialogue conceit for the Prehistory chapter generally. It's a cute idea, I guess, but it kinda feels like cheating when people just grunt and a speech bubble pops up with a picture in it and is understood, in a way that it doesn't feel like cheating when a game with a silent protagonist has them mime through a conversation. It tracks for certain things like when you pick up a scent and Pogo calls an image to mind. It doesn't really track for basically any time someone tells you something. It's a small thing. I feel like much of it could be fixed by simply never having someone pop up a picture bubble directly but instead have them just make a generic-sounding grunt of whatever kind and we see Pogo think about what it means because he understands, or by having them stand in your way and point when they want you to go somewhere, stuff like that. I feel like you could have made an event-identical chapter with these systems and have it feel coherent. At the very least, they should have taken out the "menu" at the artisan and have you decide whether you want to continue crafting by, y'know, continuing to give him items or literally walking away, like you do with the other guys wandering around. I'll grant you, this is a nitpick. But, it's a thing that I think they could and should have shored up, a lot, within the available scope, and that I think would have been welcomed if they had. I'm wont to think about such things in video games. And it bothers me in a way the stone cars don't.
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Aug 7, 2022 03:50
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