Live-a-Live (pronounced like "hive" for both) originally started as an Super Famicom game but was never released in the US. As I result I never had the chance to play it until this remake/remaster for Switch. The game is setup as 7 different characters which have their own self-contained chapter, each in a different time period. Each chapter also plays very differently. While the main battle system stays intact, it's used in some very clever ways.
Prehistory
In this chapter you play as a cave-boy in a ridiculous Captain Caveman style parody with bushy beards and Flintstones cars. The gameplay here is relatively straight-forward. You get the ability to "smell" which create little clouds on the map that you can interact with for random battles but it plays like a very condensed RPG. Through this you have a companion gorilla and can attack with things like farts and poop. The most unique part is that there is no dialog, just emojis and it leans on the expressive art-style.
Ancient China
Here you are a martial arts Shifu who wants to train an apprentice before he dies, inspired no-doubt by Kung-Fu movies. This really inverts the whole RPG idea. You start at a high level and by fighting with your disciples you train them and they gain levels. As such the battle system here mostly functions as plot device, you will pretty much win with no real effort but you get to choose who you fight. In the end only one of the disciples, the one you trained the most, is able to become the next Shifu. The final part of this chapter has you and your selected trainee fighting through a series of fights which I felt got a bit tedious.
Sengoku Japan
This time you are a ninja, trying to infiltrate an enemy diamyo's castle in what could be a samurai flick. You are also given the option to use complete stealth or kill people, whichever you prefer. This is by far the longest and most involved chapter. The map is huge and very non-linear making it very difficult to traverse. This can make stealth tedious as you will constantly have to dodge enemies as you revisit rooms. In the end, I couldn't be bothered and also needed to level up to beat a boss so I eventually chose violence. There are also multiple little side-quests and several optional bosses that are behind obscure secrets. Also, you are technically allowed to kill monsters but sometimes you need to reveal a person to be a monster by picking the correct dialog option. Very trial and error, I think it expects you play this chapter multiple times.
Wild West
The Wild West chapter is obvious modeled on western movies. You play an outlaw who needs to protect a village from bandits. This chapter has very little fighting (surprisingly). Instead it has you going to every building in the town looking for items which can be used as booby-traps. You need to both search and then give them to a villager to setup. This takes some time and you have a limited amount. I think I got them all and it wasn't terribly difficult either. At the end you fight with the big bad in a boss battle. This chapter is very short and easy enough that it's not very replayable.
Modern day
The shortest chapter of them all is the modern day. You play as a fighter who want to be the best. There is no overworld, instead you use a character select screen to choose boss battles against other fighters in what's clearly a parody of Street Fighter. You also don't level up normally, instead you learn techniques by being attacked with them, so it's not enough to win, but also to take a few hits to gain new abilities. You only have a handful of battles and it's over.
Near Future
This is probably the second most involved chapter which models itself on Giant Robo animes and tokusatsu shows like Kamen Rider. In this chapter you are youth with telepathic abilities who gets into fights with a biker gang to save an orphanage. The fighting and progression are pretty straight-forward without many gimmicks but it did seem longer than the prehistoric chapter. The climax has you piloting a giant robot to face off against an evil organization. These final battles are just for show though, it's nearly impossible to lose.
Far Future
The far future takes after 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien. Your character is a robot and there's actually no real fighting except the final boss. You can technically upgrade yourself by playing a game in the break room, but this is optional. Instead, you walk from place to place triggering scenes and watching them play out as an incident plays out on board a space-ship.
After you play all chapters the second part ties everything together. It's actually pretty satisfying and I don't really want to get too deep into spoilers since you should experience it. This last part does get very tedious though as the entire map has random battles and you cannot skip them, every few steps you either battle or run and once you don't need experience then it's very annoying. The last area also has a lot of optional content, you can either skip right to the end or build your characters up a bit. You should also be careful which character you pick as you cannot change it and the character I picked actually wasn't a great one once everyone was leveled up. Be sure to add some levels to characters not in your party as it will come in handy.
To be honest I'm not sure I'd call the gameplay great. It would be more tolerable in the SNES days, but it lacks a lot of modernization that I'm really surprised didn't make it in. We have autosaves and that's about it. Skipping or speeding up unnecessary battles isn't a thing, and several chapters have a lot of them. The battle system is okay once you get the hang of it but most battles either have some sort of trick or require leveling up, so they feel either impossible or super easy. As far as I can tell it is relatively unchanged from the original so it still has that SNES jank. What is truly excellent are the graphics and music. The HD2D looks really good. They took a slightly different approach than Triangle Strategy making objects more pixels sized and removing the corner shadows. The sprites have been updated from the original which used tiny sprites for overworld and bigger ones for battles. Now they are the same minus the stylistically oversized and detailed enemy battle sprites so of which take up the entire screen. The music is also fantastic. Each chapter has different battle music using instruments relevant to the time period. Edo Japan has an excellent koto riff, Near Future has a tokusatsu opening type theme, Prehistoric era has a lot of drum beats and the Far Future is mostly ambient noises. It's all excellent but the real star is the excellent boss theme "Megalomania" which later went on to inspire Toby Fox's iconic Megalovania.
It's interesting to see what other sorts of impact the game had despite never making it to America. The original game shares a lot of staff with Chrono Trigger and in many ways Live-a-Live feels like a prototype of it. You can definitely see the influence each time period had on Chrono Trigger, like the derelict far future, and the dinosaur infested pre-historic era. You can also clearly see the lineage of the sprite work to Chrono Trigger, it's hard to describe but the types of expressions are definitely there.
This was a fun one. I liked having a new classic RPG to play. One that's relatively compact but also a little rough and not over-optimized like many modern games are. While I would have appreciated some improvements to gameplay I can also appreciate leaving it like it was and concentrating on the presentation. I definitely showed me what we were missing all those decades ago.
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