The castle itself is mostly enclosed spaces, and is filled with secret passages, hidden rooms, and traps. Oboro’s chapter is his mission to infiltrate a feudal Japanese castle, free a prisoner, and kill Ode Iou, the lord of the castle. Level design in the caveman chapter is very, very simple, consisting mostly of linear caves and open areas. Naturally, the caveman chapter contains a ton of combat, and has one of the hardest optional bosses in the game within. The Caveman theme is even bought into the battle system – all of the caveman’s move names are simple sounds (“BashBash” and “BangBang” as examples). The story is relayed through pictures and the character’s actions, which works surprisingly well. Cavemen had no spoken language, and thus the entire chapter contains next to no dialog (only a single word is spoken the entire time). Take the Caveman’s chapter as an example. Each character’s chapter is wildly different from all of the others, and as I mentioned before, each has their own well thought-out design decisions. The first eight chapters each focus on a single character – ranging from a caveman, to a ninja, to a cowboy, to a robot. While Live A Live isn’t exactly a Shigesato Itoi masterpiece, it definitely has its moments. The game itself consists of nine parts, each done by a different artist, and each with its own design choices. Like Earthbound, Live A Live isn’t your standard JRPG. What resulted is a 20-or-so hour long RPG that makes Final Fantasy as a series look like the crap it is (or at least, the crap it has been since Final Fantasy 6). The premise behind Live A Live is simple – Square gathered a whole bunch of popular manga artists (most of whom no one in the US has heard of, even to this day), gave them a generic JRPG engine, and told them to have at it. That game is Live A Live, which unfortunately never saw a release outside Japan. There was a time, back in 1994, when Square released the second-best JRPG on the SNES, second only to Earthbound. However, Square wasn’t always like that (well, okay, yes they were).
“Rehashing sells” has been their motto for the past few years, to the detriment of the JRPG genre as a whole. It’s rare these days to see the Square-Enix name within a mile of anything original.
That game is Live A Live, which unfortunately never saw a release outside Japan."
"It’s rare these days to see the Square-Enix name within a mile of anything original.
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