In this last example, Live A Live even manages to squeeze outlaw gun duels into the rigid confines of its turn-based battle design. A brief western-themed chapter that cribs from The Seven Samurai/ The Magnificent Seven’s siege involves laying traps for incoming raiders while a timer counts down.

In the “Distant Future” segment, a baseball-shaped robot with glasses solves problems by walking around a sci-fi spaceship, eschewing almost all combat in favour of chatting with the ship’s crew (and serving them cups of coffee). The aforementioned martial artist chapter consists entirely of one-on-one fights, selected through a Street Fighter-style menu. While most of its stories involve the usual experience point-gathering and item- and equipment-hunting of a ‘90s Japanese RPG, plenty of the chapters play fast and loose with expectations regarding what can be built atop these genre foundations.

Live A Live shines when it experiments within the design conventions this kind of game provides. Actions are taken by scrolling through lists of moves and tools in a menu. Fights take place on grids that resemble digital graph paper, the player character and their group arrayed against a selection of enemies who politely wait in a queue for their chance to attack or heal. There is, for example, a ninja tasked with rescuing a political prisoner from a well-guarded 19th-century Japanese castle, a young man trying to win the affections of a woman in an unnamed prehistoric land, and, in one of the best of these tales, a martial artist who travels the globe beating the snot out of rival fighters in order to become the strongest warrior in the modern world.Įach of these stories is structured within the loose framework of a turn-based RPG. This is largely due to Live A Live’s structure, which breaks the game into just under 10 short stories featuring characters living in vastly different periods of time.

READ MORE: ‘MultiVersus’ preview: no need to break the bank to enjoy this brawler.

Live A Live, the newly remade version of a 1994 Super Famicon RPG never released outside of Japan, is more like a weekend of whirlwind visits to tourist attractions. Most traditional role-playing games feel like setting out on a long road trip.

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