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Live a Live – A Waste of a Life

Started by Dracos, May 09, 2006, 12:09:12 PM

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Dracos

Years ago, Squaresoft was known for a golden age of remarkably awesome video game RPGs.  Even today many look back at that era as some of the best games of the time.  While this is half nostalgia, the other half is the oft ignored fact that Squaresoft didn't release all the games it made during this period.  In fact, it all but stopped releasing totally towards the end of the SNES period over in the US.  This is often backlashed against by great fans of the giant, but really, they did us a favor.  Today, finishing Live a live, I can sit back and truly respect just how great a favor they did us all by never bringing this should-have-been-aborted experiment to the states.

   For context, this was my second attempt at this game.  The first time frustrated me enough that I never finished a chapter of it.  Yes, chapter, the game is a chaptered game.  The second time through I heard some good things, I was more patient, and well, didn't have easy distractions nearby.  Silly me.

   Live a Live, released in 1994 in Japan, was an experiment in role playing game design.  Generally, a good thing, as it's necessary to expand the genre.  Given, most of them rightfully shouldn't leave the R&D department, it's still a necessary component to innovation.  It's even one that Squaresoft clearly thought was a success as seen by the technically unrelated (save for made by the same company) Saga Frontier using an extremely similar overall design to it.

The game offered seven character stories, each developed semi-separately and operating on the same battle system while providing a reasonably different experience.  Each of these were inter-related in a vast overlying storyline that spanned ages.  This is the kind of thing that nominally would merit fair praise to the game for its ambition.  Save they sort of forgot one important thing: Hiring a writer is important.   While not all the stories are bad, they are hamfisted as a rule and the ending combination of them completely degrades into material that would not be unexpected to see out of an elementary student's fantasy writing.  In effect, the game goes through nine chapters, seven character chapters that can be done in any order (and redone as well), an eighth special chapter, and then a conclusion chapter that wraps it all together in one of a few possible endings, most of which are pretty half assed ventures.  Unfortunately, despite the vastly different nature of the scenarios and the fact that you really only can use four characters in the end game, you still have to put up with all of the scenarios, whether you enjoy them or not.  They're all 'neatly' hashed into various categories too to specialize up the characters and provide for easy rapidly themed dungeons in end game.  It's admittingly, not all bad from the story perspective.  Some of the scenarios are pretty fun concepts, cliché sure, but at least semi-decent displays of it.   Overall though, the game's plot is a mishmash of nihilist postmodernist crap that was written with the grace and skill of trained monkeys.

   The graphics, done by different folks apparently, vary pretty strongly over the course of the game and are, as a rule, pretty decently nice more often than not.  Well, that's probably an oversimplification.  The overworld graphics, as a rule, are FF4-5 era stuff with some decent for the time period animation, even if this is a little late for that era of animation.  The in battle stuff is a fair leap forward from this with larger and more expressive characters and the not too rare neat battle animation.  Additionally, certain scenes have some nice animated components that are a step above this moving towards pixel art FMVs (there's only a couple of these).  Overall?  Probably the best thing going for the whole thing, despite all the rest of the problems.

   Actually, I'm somewhat lying.  I think the musician behind it is the best thing going for the game.  I really like some of the themes around the final boss and well, relistening it to be sure I'm not just being nostalgic over the end game themes, the entire soundtrack is genuinely quite good, catchy throughout while very appropriate to what's going on in the game.  It in fact is so good, I'm almost tempted to replay it.  Cursed nostalgic music!   The musician deserves tremendous kudos for what he did for the game.  And that probably ends the nice things I can say about the game there.

   The rest of what should be covered when discussing this game is the game design, the game interface design, the battle design, and the dungeon design.  For those with short attention spans, I'll provide the shorthand: They all suck horribly.

   Still with me?  Okay, let's hit them in order.  The game design depends on you going through all these chapters.  The nature of them being vastly different in theme and mechanic is good, except for the fact it means instead of being able to play a couple fun scenarios, you have to play them all.  Don't like westerns?  Who cares, you can't enjoy the ninjas and kung fu masters separately and still finish the game.  It's a mishmash that varies tremendously and semi-randomly in difficulty and theme.  Worse, you pretty much all start low leveled, so the game is effectively running over the same kind of level 1 terrain multiple times.  Not all scenarios were equal either, so come the end game, certain characters were likely to start overwhelmingly more powerful than the others.  More the game included several ridiculously arbitrary actions as secrets in the game, many of which also retained as their primary strategy farming respawning enemies and halting the scenarios for an hour or more.  Given that many of these scenarios only last a bit more than an hour to two of play, this sort of farming is a pretty significant chunk of gameplay.  Given, these were at least optional, but having almost the entirety of sidequest material require tremendous amounts of tedium time to play is a horrible design decision.  Personal favorite there for stupidity?  One of the bosses pretty much requires finding a secret character, leveling him from 1 to 16ish, and then fighting him, only to have that character cease to exist a mere 20 steps further from where you got him.  In other words, a character that existed for the mere purpose of taking out one tiny set of enemies and a hidden boss and then is promptly disposed of.  In fact, a little more than half the characters in the game that you spend time building up are only good for that scenario, which makes the fairly brutal farming requirements pretty vicious.  Finally, there was a set of endings, normally something cool, but the work that went into most of them was pathetic.  More work went into how it got there than a satisfying presentation of the end.  Some of them are even really cool concepts of how to tie it off, but promptly followed by weak 'sad end' lines without any elaboration.  The final one is reasonably nice at least, but the others simply aren't even remotely designed to let you feel it's a decent ending.

   The game interface might've been better in Japanese, but in general you deal with a tremendous amount of poorly defined items and an awkward interface in general to discover information.  On the equipment screen, everything outside of pure stat modifications from equipment is not visible.  You have to go back to the item screen and individually check out each item.  Total garbage given that the distinguishing factors between a good half the equipment in the game are these extra factors.  They created a bunch of items too, but for the most part it's not easy to determine what they do (save for using them!).  They often have meaningless descriptions, and while that might be the translation at fault, I doubt that the single line given can really cover what sometimes is remarkably specific and complicated effects and the issue that many of these items are not harvestable in any fashion, resulting in a situation where your only way to determine if an item is good for a situation is to use what may be an entirely irreplaceable item.  The skills, similarly, can be very difficult to distinguish in terms of what they do or their power level.  Thankfully this is alleviated in end game by the fact you'll pretty much always be simply using the move gotten by each character at level 16, which tends to trump strongly almost every other move.  As a rule?  Each character that had any amount of skills had about four times as many as I had ever reason to use, making selecting the ones I did need annoying during battle.  Most of them were either too slow or too weak to ever come into play in battle even if I wanted to use them for variety's sake.

   But now I'm really getting more into what's wrong with their battle system.  Live a Live used a time-based tactical grid style battle system for all of the fights in the game.  In a way, this was clever.  It was mostly expansive enough to cover all the various styles they were using for the scenarios and at a glance looked decent enough.  Sure, the fact that the grid was more of a rectangle than a square and used grid cells that were wider than they were tall while the characters tended to be taller than they were wide was a bit annoying at first in mapping the battle space, but it was something not terribly hard to adapt to.   What was really annoying was more the lack of foresight in other aspects of the battle design.  The system is time based, effectively, with time passing every time you're not in a menu, movement and moves each taking time to complete, and enemies moving whenever they hit their turn interval.  In addition, each move has a certain style of target (with or without grid radius of effect), which needs to be taken into account to hit an enemy.  For example, some moves will only hit enemies two squares away or directly diagonal to the player.  The system, in fairness, works reasonably well with one character in play as you can focus all your attention on him and move around quite a bit.  But this is a battle system meant to support four characters, and that's where it really starts falling apart.  With each new character, the difficulty of doing something increases.  They're all working off the same clock in effect and moving around to select a character who's about to get killed can often take more than the time needed to kill them.  Rather than feeling like you have four characters, it feels like you're playing a real time system and trying to ham your way through giving commands on both movement and action to four separate characters at the same time.  Worse?  They can't move through each other, so the battlefield is significantly more crowded and it's often much more awkward to get characters in position to use what is often hard to target special moves.  Getting to punching an enemy in the face can easily involve having to move a character around your entire party.  This does eventually lessen as a problem but only when the characters are getting exceedingly overleveled and thus it doesn't matter which you use, each 'best' move is likely to do the same 200-600 damage.  Yes, best move.  As mentioned earlier, despite most characters having 10-20 special techniques, you'll only ever use at most 4 of them, with possible slight uses of intermediary techniques and experimentation.  Some it is even less.  This doesn't make for a good move density, especially as these moves can be anywhere in the cluster of moves, meaning an average action involves mostly spending the time scrolling to the same move.  The game system does not use any mp and hp and life is regenerated to max at the end of every victorious battle.  The result?  Take the classic 'spam attack' of the ff games and add in moving and selecting from a menu that doesn't have it on top and you've pretty much got the experience here.  This isn't just end game either as throughout, most of the battles involved spamming the same move over and over.  Coincidently even when battles were constructed specially, these moves would often still be the idea setup, rendering mixing it up almost inevitably pointless.  As the moves cost nothing to use and never run out, there's usually never a reason to save up.  The hp system was kind of nice in terms of allowing harder battles more frequently, but it felt like an excuse not to do careful battle tweaking, particularly when running the tiny gamut between enemies that could do nothing or I had no reason to even pay attention to their damage as it'd all be gone shortly and enemies that pretty much instantly struck me down with blasts that did far more than my max hp.  The battle system, brutal as it was, did give a short reprieve.  Characters that were dropped to zero could be healed from an unconscious state assuming they weren't hit again.  If they were, they were taken out for the entire remaining battle.  This though was a minor bit compared to the insanity that was their experience system.   Similar to the Suikoden system, you build towards a static, 100 in this case, value and level each time you reach it, with enemies giving more or less dependant on your current level.  It's a fairly solid system usually and Suikoden has shown it to be serviceable.  This one though was handicapped by insanity in how the math was done.  It was particularly often that fights that posed no threat whatsoever would give tremendous experience, whereas fights that could kill all of the characters would give none.  This got particularly silly in the final chapter where ninety nine percent of the enemies rendered 0 experience per battle, and a single set nearly leveled my entire party each fight well into the 30s (which was ridiculously high in the game system).  This sort of sudden drop with difficult enemies delivering zero experience points was not localized to the final chapter either, despite it being far more evident.  Other chapters, most notably the psychics, included these silly collapses of the experience system, often matched with harder enemies that gave no experience for the trouble.  Overall, this pretty much finished the collapse of a stupid system as any incentive whatsoever to fight complex and troublesome enemies was removed and matched with encouragement to beat up on what became increasingly more helpless 'xp giving' foes.

   Finally, there were some genuine issues with stage design through it.  I think, for some reason, that the folks behind these dungeons were also the folks behind the FFIV Advance port, as some of the level design style seem the same.  Some were good, some significantly less so.  Each character was done with a given theme, later used to generate all of the dungeons in the last chapter and indeed the dungeon of their own chapter, for better or worse.  Some of these themes worked for really nice scenarios, such as the wrestler trying to be the best in the world.  Some were less so, almost encouraging failure and the usage of the ability to redo a scenario in order to figure out how to do the dungeon right.  The end dungeons varied strongly based on who you played with, ranging from the 'we're not even trying' absolutely straight path to the more detailed dungeons that they clearly spent actual time on.  As a rule?  They all came across as filler.  For many of the characters, you needed to do the dungeon to make them useful and as such they rarely had any depth of design, being one gimmick dungeons based around what was the 'theme' for the character.  These gimmicks also, as a rule, were not fun.  They were stalling action type things on average.  Two do deserve notes as neat, the robot and ninjas dungeon were fun with a suitable, if small, level of depth.  There were things to think about, more than a couple rooms, etc.  These dungeons are further hampered by the fact that absolutely every place in the entire final chapter draws from the same enemy set.  This means that through the 1-8 dungeons you go through in it, will grow very boring as you encounter the same enemies over and over again.  Many of which aren't even fun enemies and most of which can't be just blasted through.  This contributes to a sense of tiredness and tediousness with the final chapter.

   Overall?  I don't think the game was worth playing.  At all.  Get the OST.  Go watch an anime.  Just don't waste your time playing the game.  It was an experiment that shouldn't have left R&D in its state, despite lots of high production value art sections.  If you're really interested, go play Saga Frontier, which at least cleaned up some of these problems (Even if it has others) in its take on the 7 man scenario.  And no, I shouldn't have written something this long on such a game.
Well, Goodbye.

Anastasia

Since you allude to it a few times and they are quite similiar; what's your take on Saga Frontier? I find that I enjoy SF infinitely more than the mess that is Live A Live.
<Afina> Imagine a tiny pixie boot stamping on a devil's face.
<Afina> Forever.

<Yuthirin> Afina, giant parasitic rainbow space whale.
<IronDragoon> I mean, why not?