Live a Live (Switch): I Lived, I Laughed, I Loved

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Live a Live (Switch): I Lived, I Laughed, I Loved

What Scenario will you start with?
	Prehistory (Caveman)
	Imperial China (Martial Arts Master)
	Edo Japan (Ninja)
	Wild West (Cowboy)
	Present Day (Wrasslin)
	Near Future (Mecha)
	Future (Sci Fi)

[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

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Looper: Mar 1, 2012

live a live, or as i like to call it, pog a pog

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 05:34

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 13:56

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

i just started prehistory and i love that the interaction prompts are all just "..." because pogo doesn't know words. this remake has felt very affectionate so far and yeah all the new little features enhance what was already there

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 07:15

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Glagha posted:

I am currently trying to beat the Prehistoric super boss because I'm an idiot.

Edit: well I think the king mammoth won't show up anymore if you get the rock of rocks? Because try as I might he won't spawn anymore. Well that sucks but I don't care enough to start over at this point.

he will! i just started that fight after getting the rock, please pray for me

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 21:29

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Glagha posted:

Maybe not after a completed chapter save then? Because I tried to go back and do it after completing it and now he won't show up, which is also when I got the rock.

that i can't attest to, but i do think it would be very strange

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 22:23

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Dr Pepper posted:

Oh my gosh the start of the Near Future chapter.

👁️👁️

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 07:30

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Novasol posted:

King Mammoth is much more reasonable when you realize the fertility item is an area heal, which buffs you, and has infinite uses. Combine a hard rock and a stone knife. Level 10 should be fine as long as one of your characters is spamming it.

i also found the electric prickly stones (beast fang + stone knife) very useful, they're a consumable but they create a 3x3 lightning field so you're not wholly reliant on gori for cancelling the king's healing, and it does more damage than the poison tiles

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 15:53

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

you don't need to grind that much to beat the mammoth king, i did it without issue at level 12 and yes i AM bragging about it

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 18:23

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Unlucky7 posted:

Just finished the Far Future chapter, and it is in the running for my favorite chapter in the game. That said there was one black mark I have on it (big spoilers): where Rachel picks up the �stupid and goddamned crazy� ball again out of nowhere to run out of the rec room against the behemoth. I know by that point it has gone full horror movie, and someone is bound to do something dumb but it still felt kind of out of nowhere and it came too soon after her first freak out. I can only justify it as her realizing that the thing could be eating Kirks corpse, maybe

Also, I think I may have did an unintentional skip, where after the first Rec room scene I went to Rachel and then met her on the bridge, which kicked off everything, instead of going to Kato in the computer room. Probably missed a couple of scenes there. Not that it felt that stuff was missing; just interesting and weird

i like to think that decimus had been messing with her and maybe even the others beyond what you see, because otherwise yeah she acts like a complete dumbass lol. but yeah at that point specifically she believes the behemoth is gonna get at kirk's corpse

# ¿ Jul 26, 2022 05:54

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

ninja chapter is so good, just metal gear solid in jrpg form

# ¿ Jul 26, 2022 16:03

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

EclecticTastes posted:

I think the Aeon Genesis translation is still very much worth playing for anyone who enjoys the remake, as a sort of companion piece. Seeing the original design, as well as a different take on the script, makes it an excellent companion piece for anyone who enjoys the game enough to want to see it from multiple angles.

i really like how it uses different typefaces to fit each chapter, and even though (edo chapter) mimic mammet is a better name considering oboromaru's name could be anything, i'm still quite fond of o-robo

# ¿ Jul 26, 2022 21:19

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

poison works pretty well iirc, and don't be afraid to use your items! if you can beat either of the bonus bosses you definitely won't need them for the chapter boss

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 18:13

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Fedule posted:

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 Clich�. 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 clich�s 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 clich�, but this right here is why it became a clich�. 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.

you should've tried running away from those encounters :twisted:

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 18:14

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

anyway i finished this last night and i adored it, 10/10 incredible remake of an incredible gem

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 18:16

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

fujin scrolls work as well

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 18:29

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Truxton posted:

Unless Akira's in your party. Then there's a random chance you wind up in his bonus dungeon.

only before you finish it! and you should because it's one of the more important ones

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 20:05

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

Please circle back to this once you've seen the remake version. I dunno what the original/Aeon Genesis version did, but I absolutely loved the remake's take.

also i meant to reply to this earlier but, :yeah:

the english va's read of in blood and lead and death is one of my favorite lines in the game

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 20:07

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

og pogo being a hideous napkin sketch is unfortunate but gori being a nasty goblin king is essential to his character

# ¿ Jul 30, 2022 22:32

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Harrow posted:

Interestingly, none of the HD-2D games released so far have shared a dev team. Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy have the same director/producer and have a bit of overlap but otherwise they were made by different studios, as was the Live A Live remake (and presumably the upcoming Dragon Quest III remake). HD-2D isn't one studio's thing but just a new style that Square Enix is using for a bunch of games by different in-house and contracted studios.

the end credits have a special logo for hd-2d like it's an official engine or software or something

# ¿ Jul 31, 2022 19:00

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

hail to the king

# ¿ Aug 2, 2022 15:07

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

i also found it an easier fight in this version, visible charge meters and the game not lying to you about how much fire tiles heal him made things a lot more immediately manageable

# ¿ Aug 2, 2022 20:51

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

mammoth king is very evasive but i got a lot of mileage out of crafting prickly stones, which create lightning tiles for some reason and do noticeably more damage than poison over the course of the battle (and can be used by either character, critically). pogo's ultimate can do a lot of damage but it's so unreliable and the debuffs so severe it's probably my least favorite ultimate attack lol

# ¿ Aug 2, 2022 23:03

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

EclecticTastes posted:

You do not. You only really need four save slots: A pre-final chapter save where each of the three inheritors is an option, and one pre-Oersted save where you can still access and replay the other chapters.

you can still access the other chapters at any time now

# ¿ Aug 3, 2022 20:17

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

i got the impression the tournament wasn't for the throne until oersted advanced to the finals, because he's an established warrior and the king at least was pretty enamored with him

# ¿ Aug 4, 2022 17:08

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

not all the jokes on prehistory land but i like the bit where pogo and zaki are yelling at each other with their knocked down snes sprites

# ¿ Aug 7, 2022 05:30

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

no one said you had to be smart to go into space

# ¿ Aug 8, 2022 19:22

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

he's not that either because they removed his dash

# ¿ Aug 9, 2022 18:27

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

and also, maybe don't kill the person your dating's dad, relationships don't often recover from that

# ¿ Aug 10, 2022 02:35

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

it's okay, you're just being thorough

# ¿ Aug 10, 2022 18:38

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Last Celebration posted:

Yeah, how DO you get Worldbreaker’s Wrath before the endgame? I just figured it was there as something to unlock in the final chapter but in the credits Masaru’s using it in his own chapter.

there's a loading screen hint about it now and there's a fairly cheeky picture in the final chapter credits that also hints to something hidden in a specific fight

# ¿ Aug 18, 2022 01:45

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

Unlucky7 posted:

My read was that it wasn't so much Oersted himself as it was the last bit of Goodness, the man he was, prying itself out of the monster that he became to strike himself down.

this was my interpretation as well

# ¿ Sep 3, 2022 14:48

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 13:56

Looper: Mar 1, 2012

also the new true ultimate final boss might have a kinda thematically bland design but it was also clearly based on the eighth statue in archon's roost and i can respect that design decision

# ¿ Sep 3, 2022 14:50

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