One of the changes the remake introduces is showing the player what an enemy is weak to, as well as what category each of the abilities the player has falls under. Attacking enemies from behind is also more effective most of the time. Positioning plays a key role here, as different abilities have different ranges to them. When a party member’s turn rolls around, you can move them around the grid before selecting an ability. Battles are an interesting mixture of the ATB system (of Final Fantasy games from the SNES era) and grid-based movement. So far, I’ve been heaping a lot of praise on the game, but when it comes to the gameplay, things get a bit more difficult. With the many different countries the game takes place in, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality throughout. The game is also fully voice acted to boot, and I found it to be very well done. Each time period has a distinct style to the music that really stands out. Yoko Shimomura, the original soundtrack composer, was brought back to do the soundtrack for the remake, and she knocked it out of the park here. The sound department is certainly no slouch either. I wish I had a Switch OLED, because I imagine it looks gorgeous there. The colour palette pops out of the screen and the environments of the 7 time periods are awe-inspiring at times. Honestly, out of the three RPG’s I’ve played with this art style, Live A Live might just be the best looking. It’s a mixture of 3D environments and old-school 2D sprites that create a very beautiful looking game. As I mentioned before, Live A Live utilises the HD-2D we’ve been seeing from Square Enix in the past few years. I normally start with the gameplay aspect whenever I write a review, but this time, I’m gonna start with the presentation side of things, as it’s a lot more straightforward. I find the best samurai defence is to draw green lines all over them. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed it a bit, and the payoff at the end was cool, but it’s an experimental structure for a game that debuted on the SNES. If you played Octopath Traveller and didn’t like the story for that reason, then maybe Live A Live isn’t for you. Live A Live isn’t some sweeping epic that focuses on saving the world, the 7 stories are on more of a personal level. If you’re looking for a traditional RPG plot, you’re not going to find it here. As you progress, you’ll find out what exactly connects the various time periods together, but I won’t go into too much detail. RPG fans out there will probably already be making comparisons to Octopath Traveller, another RPG done in the HD-2D style that also structures its plot on several separate stories. Live A Live is a turn-based RPG (most of the time) that focuses on 7 people from different time periods, ranging from prehistoric times to the distant future. So, when it was revealed that Live A Live would finally be coming out of Japan in the form of a HD-2D remake, I was pretty excited to finally be able to give it a go. 28 years is a long time, and it’s given the game a bit of a reputation as a lost classic. Live A Live (Live is pronounced like “Live Show”) is one of those SNES RPG’s that has been confined to Japan ever since its initial 1994 release. I bring that up because it’s very relevant to the game I’m reviewing here. Of course, these days, most games are released worldwide, making this a problem of the past. Something about RPG’s just didn’t inspire business confidence in bringing them over to the continent back then. The Super Nintendo was absolutely jam packed with RPG’s! Well… unless you lived in Europe… We basically got next to nothing in that regard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |