Live-A-Live
Feb. 10th, 2012 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSeven eras. Seven heroes. Seven stories. From the time before spoken language to the sci-fi space travel future, they struggle against a mysterious evil. Will you live their lives and unravel how their stories fit together?
I started several scenarios over the years using the original translation patch. Right after I started this play-through in earnest, it occurred to me to check for an update, as this game had been on my backlog since 2005. (Yeah, I know, seriously.) Turns out, Aeon Genesis did a "deluxe" translation patch in 2008 that greatly improves the blocky, old-school font choices of the original, and tightens up the translation.
The graphics are very blocky, early-SNES style, reminiscent of back when they were still basically drawing NES sprites, just using more colors for them. Thing is, this came out in 1994, after Final Fantasy 6. Live-A-Live’s character sprites (out of battle) seem even more compressed than FF4; squashed into little 16 x 16 cubes. They definitely spent a lot of time on some of the set pieces and backgrounds, but their characters are stuck in the era where characters run in place for lack of any better indication that they're doing something.
Until the last chapter, monster encounters are generally spiked, not random. In the kungfu and ninja chapters, they're visible on the main map. In the caveman chapter, you can press Y to sniff for invisible enemies and they obviously occupy certain spaces and move around. Some chapters only have battles during cutscenes.
The battle system is grid-based, sort of active-time-battle. It's not clear how much "action time" things use up, though enemies can move or attack while you’re moving. Your characters cycle through actions and can pass their turns. Enemies use different attacks depending on where you approach them from: they might only be able to use bite attacks if you're in front of them, or trample attacks if you approach from below. Certain attacks can change squares to "elemental effects" like fire, ice, poison or electricity, which periodically activate and cause damage to anyone on them.
There’s no MP, though some skills have charge times or inflict a stat debuff on the user. It’s also not terribly clear what the skills do, though some inflict status effects or debuffs, some seem to be elemental, and many have different hit areas.
I think my big issue with the battle system is that it's too opaque for a good tactical system, but trying too hard to be tactical for an opaque early-rpg system. What it really needed was clearer in-game explanations of what everything was supposed to do and why things did or didn't work.
There’s no money at all (except when it's an item called "money", but even that can't be exchanged for goods and/or services), and only a few of the scenarios have "stores" of any sort, which are presented as item synthesis and basically function as trading games. (That you need trial-and-error and a lot of patience to get good equipment out of.)
The chapter/scenario system is more like Dragon Quest 4 than, say, SaGa Frontier. In the former and this game, the chapters are separate and you're expected to complete them all to complete the game. In the SaGa games that use character-based scenarios, there's usually a lot of overlap so that playing a different character is replaying the entire game, only with some cutscenes and quests changed. (Each chapter here has its own intro and credits, which gets a little ridiculous after a while, especially since most of the names in the credits are the same every time.)
…Upon reflection, I wonder if this project began life as a parody of DQ4, especially since the second-to-last chapter stars a classic jrpg protagonist but goes horribly wrong.
Some of the scenarios, such as the sci-fi chapter, play more like adventure games than jrpgs, as there's very little battling and a lot of wandering around looking for the right event flag to trip. (That chapter has one required battle, but a couple of instant-game-over conditions and a lot of trying to talk to the right people. It plays out as a "horror in space" adventure.) Only a few of the chapters require grinding (the last one, most notably), and several of them don't even allow it.
There's definitely difficulty in telling where to go and what to do next. And there's a decent amount of hidden content (bonus bosses, hidden items) that seems impossible to find without a guide. Really, this feels like the sort of game that would be really frustrating without a walkthrough or guide of some sort. I had significant issues in the Caveman chapter because there's no dialogue at all, just emoticons and the occasional pictogram. Granted, the story isn't terribly complex (boy meets girl, girl's tribe comes to get her, boy and girl get kicked out to fend for themselves), but it still wasn't clear where you needed to go and what you needed to do at any given point.
The difficulty level of the battles is often very uneven. Some of the battles are virtually impossible to lose, some are easy if you cheese the right attack and very difficult otherwise, and some (like the second-to-last battle in the knight's chapter, which has both a sleep attack and an HP-suck attack to use against your solo character) are incredibly difficult. Again, there are a number of places where you'll be tearing your hair out from doing trial-and-error, or you'll need a guide.
Comments by scenario:
Cube's Chapter (sci-fi): Mystery in space. Plays more like a point-and-click adventure game, with all fights except the final battle being optional. (And the one roaming monster kills you instantly on contact.) Cube is an adorable little silent robot who learns to make coffee. Most of the human crew…things don’t go as well for.
Pogo's Chapter (prehistoric): Fairly classic-rpg-like. You gain and lose party members, have to grind for XP and items, and can do sidequests. This chapter actually requires (and allows) some grinding, too. Enemies are spiked but invisible; you can press Y to sniff them out. There are a lot of "Easter eggs"--you can fully outfit your party before you fight a single battle by abusing a room full of cavemen and the item fusion system. (Each time you talk to one, another comes in. If you talk to the 20th, you get a stack of items. The trick is to stand by the door and count 19 of them, talk to one so the 20th comes in, then catch him just as he's entering.) You can go back to the second area later in the chapter and fight a hidden superboss for a special accessory, and there's a very well-hidden special weapon there, too. How anyone found these without a guide, I have no idea. (I couldn't find them WITH a guide!)
Sundown's Chapter (wild west): A short "kleptomanic adventure game" chapter. After the intro, you have a limited time to roam the town and collect trap items, then give them to the townspeople to set up. Depending on how many you find and get set, the final battle could be against a big gang of outlaws, or just the one boss. This is the story of the Sundown Kid and his nemesis Mad Dog, who briefly join forces to stop O. Dio and his gang from overrunning a town.
Xin Shan Quan's Chapter (kung fu): You play the old kungfu master, and must find pupils and train one as your successor. It's a couple of sidequests followed by a raising sim, followed by a dungeon. (Basically, you need to focus on one rather than spreading out the training, and the game will declare that one your chosen successor.) Then you need to take on the local thugs in a series of 2-on-2 battles.
Masaru's Chapter (modern): Masaru wants to be the strongest fighter of them all, so he challenges the world’s greatest. Somewhere between Mega Man and a fighting game, you need to beat opponents and learn their techniques. More specifically, you pick a portrait to enter into battle, then you need to get hit by a technique to learn it. Very short, this chapter is basically 7 strategic battles and little else.
Oboro's Chapter (ninja): You play a ninja with an invisibility cloak (press Y to activate), and have the option of trying to kill everyone are trying not to kill anyone. Enemies are visible and most don't respawn. The stealth aspect is problematic, particularly when playing using a keyboard rather than a controller. Also, killing everyone isn't as straightforward as it sounds, as you need to put off killing some people so you can trigger events and kill them later. Even more dependent on a walkthrough than most of the game. Pretty much the hardest chapter of the original set, because there are a limited number of things you can kill to gain levels, and it's very long.
Akira's Chapter (mecha): A psychic teenager in the near future--where robots powered by "liquefied humans" are the big new thing. Press Y to read minds. This scenario has a world map, similar in style to the SNES Shin Megami Tensai games. The enemies on the world map give enough XP that you level of every three encounters, and the encounters change every time you level up. So you can just fight 27 battles and max out at level 13 (when they stop giving XP) whenever you feel like it. Also, most of the battles feature a bunch of strong robots and a weak human, and killing the human causes all the robots to break down (same mechanic used by "trap masters" in Oboro's chapter). It also features a lot of going into bathrooms and sitting on toilets.
Oersted's Chapter: A silent, spiky-haired knight wins the tournament and the princess' hand, only to have her kidnapped by the demon king. Classic random battles, first instance of a full 4-person party. From the start, it seems very bitter about the classic "the legendary hero must kill the demon and rescue the princess" premise. Then Oersted accidentally kills the king, thinking he's the demon, and things rapidly go downhill and get very dark.
Final Chapter: If you play it as Oersted, it's really short, consisting of replaying the first 7 chapters' final battles as the bosses. If you start to lose, you get the best battle option of all time: Fight/Pass/Item/Armageddon. (It destroys everyone and gives you the credits. Winning the seven battles gives you a proper ending and credits for Oersted's chapter, the "sad end".)
If you play as anyone else, it's significantly longer than any other chapter, because it uses the map from Oersted's chapter (including his dungeon) and adds seven bonus dungeons that hold each character's best weapon. You can (and should) recruit up to three of the remaining six characters, who keep the levels and equipment they had when you left them. This means that grinding characters to beat bonus bosses and get special items has a purpose; and there are exploits like equipping Akira with robot accessories in his chapter and then trading them to Cube in this one. The bonus dungeons each have a gimmick (Cube's only has puzzles, Sundown's is timed, etc.) and require their associated character to enter.
Overall: It's a very ambitious game, all told, but I'm not sure the technology (or perhaps the development time) was quite where it needed to be to live up to its goals. The area graphics are vivid, but the characters are squashed and their emotive abilities are limited, which limits the game's storytelling abilities. The battle system is okay, it’s acceptable, but it gets really tiresome when you need to grind or when there's a high encounter rate. There isn't enough variety to it to fill out the entire game. (I actually would have preferred another more story/less combat chapter, or maybe one with real puzzles, in place of one of the combat-heavy ones.) The individual stories are fun but ultimately forgettable, because you don’t spend enough time with any character or set of NPCs to really get attached. I’m glad I played this for what it was attempting; but I doubt I’ll replay it.
I started several scenarios over the years using the original translation patch. Right after I started this play-through in earnest, it occurred to me to check for an update, as this game had been on my backlog since 2005. (Yeah, I know, seriously.) Turns out, Aeon Genesis did a "deluxe" translation patch in 2008 that greatly improves the blocky, old-school font choices of the original, and tightens up the translation.
The graphics are very blocky, early-SNES style, reminiscent of back when they were still basically drawing NES sprites, just using more colors for them. Thing is, this came out in 1994, after Final Fantasy 6. Live-A-Live’s character sprites (out of battle) seem even more compressed than FF4; squashed into little 16 x 16 cubes. They definitely spent a lot of time on some of the set pieces and backgrounds, but their characters are stuck in the era where characters run in place for lack of any better indication that they're doing something.
Until the last chapter, monster encounters are generally spiked, not random. In the kungfu and ninja chapters, they're visible on the main map. In the caveman chapter, you can press Y to sniff for invisible enemies and they obviously occupy certain spaces and move around. Some chapters only have battles during cutscenes.
The battle system is grid-based, sort of active-time-battle. It's not clear how much "action time" things use up, though enemies can move or attack while you’re moving. Your characters cycle through actions and can pass their turns. Enemies use different attacks depending on where you approach them from: they might only be able to use bite attacks if you're in front of them, or trample attacks if you approach from below. Certain attacks can change squares to "elemental effects" like fire, ice, poison or electricity, which periodically activate and cause damage to anyone on them.
There’s no MP, though some skills have charge times or inflict a stat debuff on the user. It’s also not terribly clear what the skills do, though some inflict status effects or debuffs, some seem to be elemental, and many have different hit areas.
I think my big issue with the battle system is that it's too opaque for a good tactical system, but trying too hard to be tactical for an opaque early-rpg system. What it really needed was clearer in-game explanations of what everything was supposed to do and why things did or didn't work.
There’s no money at all (except when it's an item called "money", but even that can't be exchanged for goods and/or services), and only a few of the scenarios have "stores" of any sort, which are presented as item synthesis and basically function as trading games. (That you need trial-and-error and a lot of patience to get good equipment out of.)
The chapter/scenario system is more like Dragon Quest 4 than, say, SaGa Frontier. In the former and this game, the chapters are separate and you're expected to complete them all to complete the game. In the SaGa games that use character-based scenarios, there's usually a lot of overlap so that playing a different character is replaying the entire game, only with some cutscenes and quests changed. (Each chapter here has its own intro and credits, which gets a little ridiculous after a while, especially since most of the names in the credits are the same every time.)
…Upon reflection, I wonder if this project began life as a parody of DQ4, especially since the second-to-last chapter stars a classic jrpg protagonist but goes horribly wrong.
Some of the scenarios, such as the sci-fi chapter, play more like adventure games than jrpgs, as there's very little battling and a lot of wandering around looking for the right event flag to trip. (That chapter has one required battle, but a couple of instant-game-over conditions and a lot of trying to talk to the right people. It plays out as a "horror in space" adventure.) Only a few of the chapters require grinding (the last one, most notably), and several of them don't even allow it.
There's definitely difficulty in telling where to go and what to do next. And there's a decent amount of hidden content (bonus bosses, hidden items) that seems impossible to find without a guide. Really, this feels like the sort of game that would be really frustrating without a walkthrough or guide of some sort. I had significant issues in the Caveman chapter because there's no dialogue at all, just emoticons and the occasional pictogram. Granted, the story isn't terribly complex (boy meets girl, girl's tribe comes to get her, boy and girl get kicked out to fend for themselves), but it still wasn't clear where you needed to go and what you needed to do at any given point.
The difficulty level of the battles is often very uneven. Some of the battles are virtually impossible to lose, some are easy if you cheese the right attack and very difficult otherwise, and some (like the second-to-last battle in the knight's chapter, which has both a sleep attack and an HP-suck attack to use against your solo character) are incredibly difficult. Again, there are a number of places where you'll be tearing your hair out from doing trial-and-error, or you'll need a guide.
Comments by scenario:
Cube's Chapter (sci-fi): Mystery in space. Plays more like a point-and-click adventure game, with all fights except the final battle being optional. (And the one roaming monster kills you instantly on contact.) Cube is an adorable little silent robot who learns to make coffee. Most of the human crew…things don’t go as well for.
Pogo's Chapter (prehistoric): Fairly classic-rpg-like. You gain and lose party members, have to grind for XP and items, and can do sidequests. This chapter actually requires (and allows) some grinding, too. Enemies are spiked but invisible; you can press Y to sniff them out. There are a lot of "Easter eggs"--you can fully outfit your party before you fight a single battle by abusing a room full of cavemen and the item fusion system. (Each time you talk to one, another comes in. If you talk to the 20th, you get a stack of items. The trick is to stand by the door and count 19 of them, talk to one so the 20th comes in, then catch him just as he's entering.) You can go back to the second area later in the chapter and fight a hidden superboss for a special accessory, and there's a very well-hidden special weapon there, too. How anyone found these without a guide, I have no idea. (I couldn't find them WITH a guide!)
Sundown's Chapter (wild west): A short "kleptomanic adventure game" chapter. After the intro, you have a limited time to roam the town and collect trap items, then give them to the townspeople to set up. Depending on how many you find and get set, the final battle could be against a big gang of outlaws, or just the one boss. This is the story of the Sundown Kid and his nemesis Mad Dog, who briefly join forces to stop O. Dio and his gang from overrunning a town.
Xin Shan Quan's Chapter (kung fu): You play the old kungfu master, and must find pupils and train one as your successor. It's a couple of sidequests followed by a raising sim, followed by a dungeon. (Basically, you need to focus on one rather than spreading out the training, and the game will declare that one your chosen successor.) Then you need to take on the local thugs in a series of 2-on-2 battles.
Masaru's Chapter (modern): Masaru wants to be the strongest fighter of them all, so he challenges the world’s greatest. Somewhere between Mega Man and a fighting game, you need to beat opponents and learn their techniques. More specifically, you pick a portrait to enter into battle, then you need to get hit by a technique to learn it. Very short, this chapter is basically 7 strategic battles and little else.
Oboro's Chapter (ninja): You play a ninja with an invisibility cloak (press Y to activate), and have the option of trying to kill everyone are trying not to kill anyone. Enemies are visible and most don't respawn. The stealth aspect is problematic, particularly when playing using a keyboard rather than a controller. Also, killing everyone isn't as straightforward as it sounds, as you need to put off killing some people so you can trigger events and kill them later. Even more dependent on a walkthrough than most of the game. Pretty much the hardest chapter of the original set, because there are a limited number of things you can kill to gain levels, and it's very long.
Akira's Chapter (mecha): A psychic teenager in the near future--where robots powered by "liquefied humans" are the big new thing. Press Y to read minds. This scenario has a world map, similar in style to the SNES Shin Megami Tensai games. The enemies on the world map give enough XP that you level of every three encounters, and the encounters change every time you level up. So you can just fight 27 battles and max out at level 13 (when they stop giving XP) whenever you feel like it. Also, most of the battles feature a bunch of strong robots and a weak human, and killing the human causes all the robots to break down (same mechanic used by "trap masters" in Oboro's chapter). It also features a lot of going into bathrooms and sitting on toilets.
Oersted's Chapter: A silent, spiky-haired knight wins the tournament and the princess' hand, only to have her kidnapped by the demon king. Classic random battles, first instance of a full 4-person party. From the start, it seems very bitter about the classic "the legendary hero must kill the demon and rescue the princess" premise. Then Oersted accidentally kills the king, thinking he's the demon, and things rapidly go downhill and get very dark.
Final Chapter: If you play it as Oersted, it's really short, consisting of replaying the first 7 chapters' final battles as the bosses. If you start to lose, you get the best battle option of all time: Fight/Pass/Item/Armageddon. (It destroys everyone and gives you the credits. Winning the seven battles gives you a proper ending and credits for Oersted's chapter, the "sad end".)
If you play as anyone else, it's significantly longer than any other chapter, because it uses the map from Oersted's chapter (including his dungeon) and adds seven bonus dungeons that hold each character's best weapon. You can (and should) recruit up to three of the remaining six characters, who keep the levels and equipment they had when you left them. This means that grinding characters to beat bonus bosses and get special items has a purpose; and there are exploits like equipping Akira with robot accessories in his chapter and then trading them to Cube in this one. The bonus dungeons each have a gimmick (Cube's only has puzzles, Sundown's is timed, etc.) and require their associated character to enter.
Overall: It's a very ambitious game, all told, but I'm not sure the technology (or perhaps the development time) was quite where it needed to be to live up to its goals. The area graphics are vivid, but the characters are squashed and their emotive abilities are limited, which limits the game's storytelling abilities. The battle system is okay, it’s acceptable, but it gets really tiresome when you need to grind or when there's a high encounter rate. There isn't enough variety to it to fill out the entire game. (I actually would have preferred another more story/less combat chapter, or maybe one with real puzzles, in place of one of the combat-heavy ones.) The individual stories are fun but ultimately forgettable, because you don’t spend enough time with any character or set of NPCs to really get attached. I’m glad I played this for what it was attempting; but I doubt I’ll replay it.
Re: Well...
Date: 2013-04-24 01:54 am (UTC)I like the original Game Boy SaGa games (or Final Fantasy Legend), but some of that's nostalgia value. I actually did a Let's Play of FFL3 on Talking Time. I tried Unlimited Saga, and that was a mess, and I tried Romancing SaGa 3, and couldn't really get into it. SaGa games are a mixed bag, at best.
Re: Well...
Date: 2013-04-24 03:43 pm (UTC)Oddly enough, one of my favorite RPG's to run through every once in a while is Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Partially because it's so easy, but also because the music is awesome, and the game is good if you don't mind the enemies being insanely easy to kill and the story being the most cliched thing ever. Makes me wonder sometimes if FFL3 might be a game to look into.
Re: Well...
Date: 2013-04-24 09:16 pm (UTC)