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All seven of these tales play differently to the point that some of them even leap into entirely different genres.

However, there are more differences to these stories than just their main characters and their settings. Off the bat, Live A Live asks players to select between one of seven distinct protagonists for stories set across different time periods. Worse, the final portion of the game will require more of a grind than anything that came before it, which can feel off-putting. Although it's one that makes Live A Live feel almost like two separate games by the end, because the opening chapters are bite-sized in comparison to the big finale, which can go on for over several hours by itself. It's an ingeniously clever plot device, one that starts off as a narrative experiment and all comes together in the end for an epic climax. However, as players begin running through these chapters and seeing the resemblance in nomenclature between each tale's antagonist, it starts to sink in that all of these stories are loosely tied together. I'll go into details shortly, but no two chapters are the same, either narratively or in terms of gameplay. What's immensely fascinating about Live A Live's presentation is that all seven of these stories are presented differently. One takes players into the Stone Age, another goes into the Japanese era of the Shinobi, another one explores Imperial China, and it goes on all the way through to the distant future. All of them tell tales from totally different time periods.

Instead of telling one overarching story, Live A Live consists of seven distinct and different short stories. However, the presentation is unique for a game like this. I will note here that it does eventually become that. A tale that spans the agesĪt first glance, I assumed that Live A Live was a lengthy JRPG, something that spans somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hours. Having played through the game myself, I can now say that Live A Live is worthy of its high praise, even if it starts to taper off towards the end.

While it never officially released in America, the game has achieved a high cult status. One of those games is a 16-bit JRPG called Live A Live from Square Enix. Having become a worldwide phenomenon over the past 40 years, it only makes sense that in that amount of time, a game or two misses the North American shores.

Video games have been around for a long time.