And you kow what that means!
In this post and more, I'm going to go through "Live a Live", the best game me and a couple of people on TV Tropes with access to an awesome fan translation and emulator have played!
It's best described as a grid-based JRPG: you walk around in the world following the story, and then when you get into a combat encounter, you fight the enemies by moving about on a grid and using your moves, hoping not to die.
Think Chess but with gunslingers and kung fu masters.
The twist (and something I've not really seen done outside of "Romancing SaGa" and the openings of Wild Arms games; side note: PLEASE PLAY WILD ARMS 3) comes in the execution and delivery.
The player is asked to pick from 7 stories in various points in time, each with a different protagonist, genre, twist on the formula and (unfortunately) also different in quality. This allows the game to mix and match and effectively be a blender in ways very few other games or even films are able to do so, and there'll definitely be a genre here for everyone. The saga stretches across time and has one or two recurring fragments (a very clear one in each chapter, but also little threads here and there which come together sweetly), and in a clever little bit of creativity has a different art director for each chapter, though the music is all done by the bloody excellent Yoko Shimamura. Her music ties it all together: she does some fantastic Morricone-esque Wild West scoring one moment, some tribal drum based cavemen music the next, to wild fancy funky electronica for the future, and a creepy, Gothic baroque organ-based theme which... I'm not going to spoil for you here. Oh, and this is the boss theme for every chapter, it fucking rules and I am going to leave it here without further comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rf8Dj7PRAI
Now that that beauty is playing in your head, and making you feel like to are actually kicking insane amounts of ass, I'm going to go through each chapter in chronological order. Many guides I have read don't recommend playing them cronologically, but I do: you start strong, end stronger, and sandwich the worst chapter between two of the best. Plus the whole thing then feels like an epic time travel adventure it was meant to be.
I'll be reviewing each of them on their own merits, and with little nods to how they start to come together, likely over several parts and posts, because despite the differing length of each chapter this game manages to weave a truly sprawling and epic narrative, with one of the best twists in gaming history. Without further ado: Here we go!
Chapter 1: Contact The caveman chapter. You play as Pogo: a brash, loud, crude but ultimately endearing little cave boy with green hair and a monkey best friend.
This one is, at its core: a simple love story, and one of the easiest chapters to grasp. You follow Pogo as he falls for a mysterious girl named Bel, about to be sacrificed by an evil rival tribe (led by an evil chieftain, who is father to Zaki: a sexy redheaded man who only wears a lizard. Roll with it) to the great dinosaur god O-D-O! Pogo, smitten and a bit of an idiot, rescues her, is exiled, and must find a way back home. Zaki, the aforementioned son of the rial chieftain, is hot on his trail to come and retrieve the girl so that they may all be spared from the wrath of this great demonic lizard. As Pogo and Bel travel the hostile, unknown, primitive lands mankind is taking its first tentative steps to, they discover not only each other but perhaps a chance to prevent this crude, primitive world from being destroyed before it has a chance to blossom...
This one is sweet, cute, and all too charming: your most powerfully broken attack is your monkey friend Gori (because he's a gorilla...) throwing poo at the enemy. It's that sort of chapter. Your special "gimmick" here is to sniff and search for enemies to fight, and becomes the closest to a traditional JRPG with grinding and levelling mechanics, but doesn't really outstay its welcome: it's short and sweet, and you embark on a journy of romance and early communication, a love story pretty much told without words and done solely through actions, like a mime play, it's fun! In a cool bit of narrative integration: Bel gets a healing spell at level 7, representing her growing love form Pogo manifested as a song. I like that, it's integrating the narrative into the gameplay.
The biggest gripe is that there is absolutely no way to know how to get crafting materials (it has a crafting mini game, but do cut them some slack: it was 1994, before crafting became a fucking scourge we know and hate today) and the gear you need without a walkthrough. I found out how to do it by looking at a rather excellent walkthrough (RPG shrine has a rather EXCELLENT write up on the game in general, and a walkthrough here: provided for your pleasure http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/snes/lal/walkthrough.shtml). I shall let you read about how to get the gear, give it a moment.
Yeah, that's some GRADE A bullshit right there!
How the hell was a rational person with a human brain supposed to comprehend this nonsence?! That's the sort of riddle a talking monkey on meth would pose to the concept of colour.
Here's some of Shimamura's work on this chapter, a funky and quirky little number called "Kiss of Jealousy":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJgCo7e0EpQ
This chapter is good. A good, solid start. Pogo, Bel and Gori make for a cute throuple, you save a tribe of pink gorillas, you fight dinosaurs, and the whole thing ends with Pogo redeeming himself in the eyes of his tribe by teaming up with Zaki to do battle with the great evil dinosaur O-D-O itself, refusing to sacrifice people to it and instead carving humanity's own path. And then they live happily ever after!
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