A look back at: Live-A-Live

This is an example of a game I'm really glad to have played. I heard quite a bit of Live-A-Live, it's numerous styles of gameplay, and what you could do within it, as well as the amazing final chapters of the game. Indeed, this is one they pretty much keep you glued to, because until you get to those final chapters, you're not getting the full experience out of this game.

It's difficult to describe just about each and every scenario in the game. The grid-based combat system is an oddity, but one that works well for some actual tactics, along with a few abilities that need to be charged, which makes for one tactical sort-of RPG that actually manages to fair rather well. But that's not what makes the game good. It's the variations on how things work and how you get into battles, as well as the storylines in each chapter go by. The random encounters are a thing only for the final chapters, and that's the only minus they have. For other chapters, they are a number of different things, whether it's finding animals via scent, playing some mini arcade-game for no really good reason, selecting which opponent to fight in the rings, or playing a semi-stealth sort of game where you can choose whether to kill everything or no one.

See, the seven separate storylines all have their main plots of importance. We see during the present time Masaru's drive to be the greatest fighter in an almost Ash Ketchum-like fashion. We see the prehistoric chapter be nothing but comedy given how no one really knows how to speak at all in that time period. We get to see the badassery of the ninja Oboro as he chooses to annihilate the leader of the rival clan. The Western chapter has some bandits invading a town, and two rivals work together.

Now all is not set for some fun, comical, action-oriented plots. The ones I described above actually are the most mild ones. Mechanical Heart, the future chapter, is definitely not this, as it is a survival horror story where you actually control the robot Cube, and things go wrong on the ship which cause people to die. Blood Flow somehow has an even worse premise, where people from places such as orphanages get liqueified in some ritual. The Kung-fu chapter may be the saddest of these all, given how the old master needs to find students, and while he finds three, two of them die, and then the master does as well at the final conflict, meaning the last student now is the only one who mastered that Kung-fu art.

But all these don't even compare to the final chapters of the game. The hero of that chapter, Oersted, is fairly standard. The chapter in itself is fairly standard. But the utter deconstruction of this cliche plot proved outright amazing and made me love it. It shows just how bad it is when everyone started to hate Oersted, and then of course he decides to become a villain because he really doesn't have anything else left to say for it. The final chapter, you either play as him and his incarnations against the other heroes, for two bad endings, or as any of the other heroes, where they can team up and such, find separate dungeons, and, well, yeah, Odio himself. It's absolutely amazing how Square managed to pull off so many great plots in one game, but they did. It's too bad this one never did in fact make it out of Japan. It's a game that really would have been respected for doing so.