I highly recommend playing that before you play this visual novel. You can pre-order the game here.The fan visual novel where you get to fall in love with Sans! This is a non-commercial, non-affiliated fanwork based on the game UNDERTALE by Toby Fox. This review was based on a copy of Live A Live provided by publisher Nintendo. In the end, I don’t think Live A Live’s draggy final act sinks the game as a whole, but my initial spark of excitement had faded a bit by the time those final-final true ending credits rolled. By comparison, I probably spent 6 or 7 hours trundling around the Middle Ages map. That’s disappointing, because the first two-thirds of Live A Live were so well-paced, with each chapter serving up a perfect 2-to-3-hour movie-length story that didn’t overstay its welcome. The Middle Ages map is not that big, and frankly, by the end of the game I was very ready to say goodbye to it.Īdmittedly, Live A Live does come to a properly epic conclusion which ties together all the game’s disparate timelines and stories nicely, but in the hours before that climax, I felt my attention waning.
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And it doesn’t end once you’ve collected everyone, as you’re pretty much required to grind through a series of dungeons if you want to be powerful enough to take on the final boss. You actually spend two chapters running around the Middle Ages map – a first that’s already more drawn out than any other chapter in the game, and a second in which you gather all the party members from the first seven chapters. Random battles, something (thankfully) largely missing from the rest of Live A Live, are suddenly introduced, as is heavy amounts of backtracking. Of course, we’ve seen this “knights and princesses” fantasy setting countless times before, and the gameplay becomes more traditional as well. Unfortunately, after you play through Live A Live’s first seven chapters, an eighth time period, the Middle Ages, is unlocked, and this when the game takes a turn for the humdrum. More than one chapter features no XP or leveling and the Distant Future doesn’t force any sort of combat on you until the very end.Īt this point, you may have impression that I loved Live A Live, and indeed, I was pretty wowed by the first two-thirds of the game. That said, while Live A Live is ostensibly an RPG, Square wasn’t afraid to completely cast off the genre’s trappings when it suited them. Sections of the game that rely heavily on combat do tend to drag a bit at times. Honestly, the system isn’t that deep, with most battles not being particularly challenging. All use the same combat mechanics, which combine an Active-Time-Battle-style turn system with a grid-based battlefield you can position your party on. There are some things all of Live A Live’s chapters share. Most unique of the bunch, the Distant Future is essentially a horror-tinged sci-fi visual novel. Present Day is modeled after fighting games with the player taking on a series bosses with Street-Fighter-style intros. The Wild West almost feels like tower defense as the focus is on boobytrapping a town to fend off bandits. Edo Japan tasks you with stealthily infiltrating a castle packed with Metroidvania-style shortcuts and secrets.
It isn’t just the tone of the stories that change, each chapter toys with how the game play as well. Prehistory is a silent slapstick comedy (with a surprising number of sex jokes), Imperial China is an ode to kung fu legends and movies, Near Future is your classic giant robot anime setup, the Distant Future is a dark mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, and so on. Each of the Live A Live’s time periods offers its own unique tone. Each chapter tells its own independent story and they can be played through in any order, although the meta story of the mysterious ultimate evil you’re fighting ties them all together. Live A Live isn’t your typical 90s-era JRPG, and it immediately sets itself apart from its contemporaries by letting you choose from seven chapters, each taking place in a different time period - Prehistory, Imperial China, Edo Japan, the Wild West, Present Day, the Near Future, and the Distant Future.