Live A Live, Tokita's anthological struggle against ontologic Hate

Developer: Squaresoft (Super Famicom original), Historia and Square Enix BD2 (Remake)
Publisher: Squaresoft, Square Enix
Director: Takashi Tokita
Scenario writers: Takashi Tokita, Nobuyuki Inoue
Composer: Yoko Shimomura
Genre: turn based JRPG with positional elements and multiple scenarios with wildly different themes and settings
Progression: the player must complete the first seven scenarios, unlocking an eight one and, later, a grand finale involving all the previous protagonists
Country: Japan
Platform: Super Famicom (original release), Switch, PS4, PS5, PC (remake)
Release date: September 1994 (original), 2022 (remake)

While anthologies of initially unrelated short stories built to foster an overarching narrative are a popular device in both literature and movies, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron to Altman’s Short Cuts and Anderson’s Magnolia, historically they have been a bit of an hard sell for the videogame medium, even if Japanese RPGs have been able to repurpose this storytelling technique by offering multiple scenarios focused on different characters or settings, either separated or connected in a variety of ways, with Akitoshi Kawazu’s SaGa franchise as one of the main proponents, including its very last releases, Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond, and Dragon Age Origins’ alternate prologues as an admittedly rarer WRPG example.

Then again, despite many RPG series employing this device over the decades, none have brought this peculiar format as far as Live A Live, a truly unique turn based JRPG released by Squaresoft on Super Famicom back in 1994 which was later remade as part of the HD-2D line in 2022 for Nintendo Switch, later being ported to PS4, PS5 and PC.

Riverhill Soft’s Burai was one of the first JRPGs offering multiple scenarios focused on different protagonists, predating Romancing SaGa and Elnard

-FROM BRECHT TO SAKAGUCHI

Live a Live was the brainchild of Takashi Tokita, back then a young developer at his directorial debut. Tokita, initially interested in pursuing a career as a theater actor due to his interest for Western classic and contemporary plays, was brought to the videogame industry in 1985 by the potential he felt in this budding medium, with Yuji Horii’s Dragon Quest II reinforcing his belief in what videogame RPGs could bring to the table as an art form a few years later.

Dragon Quest II contributed to shape Tokita’s perception of the potential of videogame RPGs

Filled with enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by this medium, young Tokita managed to find a place at Squaresoft, working in a variety of minor roles as a part-time staffer assisting the likes of industry legend Hironobu Sakaguchi, the abovementioned Akitoshi Kawazu and Hiromichi Tanaka while they created the first three Final Fantasy games, patiently waiting for a chance to let his creativity run loose while also contributing to other lesser known titles like Tanaka’s Cleopatra no Mahou, Kazuhiko Aoki’s Hanjuku Heroes or Hiroyuki Ito’s Tom Sawyer, with his role in Kawazu’s very first SaGa on GameBoy, known in the West as Final Fantasy Legend, being one of the most meaningful in this early phase of his career.

His first chance to fully showcase his skills came during Final Fantasy IV’s development, when he could finally work on the game’s scenario and character arcs, developing a strong connection with that title’s heroes and overarching themes in a game that ended up contributing quite a bit to the history of Japanese RPGs. Indeed, aside from the impact it had on Tokita’s career, Final Fantasy IV was also a pivotal moment for its own franchise’s narrative identity, building on Final Fantasy II’s own epic story by offering the kind of dramatic, character-driven storytelling the series would become known for and, as we will see, also contributing (even if by contrast) to Tokita’s future effort, Live A Live.

Tokita’s work on Final Fantasy IV’s scenario was his own major breakthrough, heralding some of the themes he would later subver in Live a Live

Then, in 1993, Tokita finally felt he had built enough expertise to try his luck at shaping his own project from the ground up, pitching a unique concept that was immediately greenlighted by Squaresoft and would end up as Live A Live around a year and a half later upon its September 1994 Super Famicom release, mixing the experiences he had made until then working on the Final Fantasy series and playing other RPGs with his own love for theater, movies and experimental storytelling.

Back then, a number of Japanese RPGs had already introduced stories based on multiple scenarios focused on different characters roaming the same world, like with Riverhill Soft’s Burai, which in a way could be considered as Octopath Traveler’s precursor, Produce!’s Elnard (1993), better known in the West as 7th Saga, or Squaresoft’s own Romancing SaGa (1992) by Kawazu, not to mention generational gimmicks like Phantasy Star III’s, but none had tried to push this format as far as Tokita did with Live A Live, offering discrete stories not just set in different worlds altogether, but also focused on noticeably different systems and progression styles, sometimes even de-emphasizing combat altogether.

Live a Live’s starting sven scenarios

-THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Among the seven main scenarios initially available in Live A Live, for instance, you have a Wild West-themed one (itself a rarity in JRPGs, with Libros of Chilam Balam on PC98 and the western-punk Wild Arms franchise providing a few other examples) where a silent gunslinger must join force with the bounty hunter searching for him in order to setup the defence of a village before a bandit raid, blatantly inspired by The Magnificent Seven, setting up traps before the time limit expires with the help of townspeople, while the Prehistory one is a Giatrus and Flintstones-style slapstick love story wholly conveyed through non-verbal clues, from emotes to grunts, with a unique scent-based system allowing caveman Pogo to find animals to hunt.

Then you have a Far Future scenario set on a spaceship where an adorable little robot has to help the crew during a crisis mixing Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with plenty of adventure elements and a single story-mandated fight, a Present day story heavily based on Street Fighter with a Ryu lookalike fighting other characters in a world tournament (a setup later followed by King of Fighters Kyo, a JRPG spin-off of SNK’s crossover series) and learning their moves, Blue Magic-style, or a Near Future chapter mixing Raideen, Akira and countless other references while resident psychic Akira, whose special ability allows him to read the thoughts of all NPCs, unveils a conspiracy and becomes the pilot of a Babylonian super robot.

The Present Day scenario, an homage to Street Fighter and all beat’em ups, allows the player to directly choose the ordere in which you face the rest of the cast, so to speak

There are also two Eastern Asian-themed scenarios, namely the Imperial China one, featuring an old shifu going out into the world to find apprentices that can learn his techniques through a number of training battles and ultimately face a brutal enemy, not to mention a Bakumatsu-era ninja romp focused on shinobi Oboromaru’s quest to free Sakamoto Ryouma (the late Edo ideologue of imperial resurgence that has achieved everlasting popularity in Japanese history, later on being featured in videogames like Hakuoki and Yakuza Ishin) from a fictional evil daimyo inspired by Oda Nobunaga and his supernatural allies, with a stealth system allowing the player to potentially explore the castle, a huge dungeon with plenty of secrets, while avoiding all fights.

While each scenario is linear enough, not to mention quite short given how some can be completed in less than an hour, there are still a number of very meaningful changes the player can introduce to the narrative with their own actions, directly influencing the identity of the shifu’s final disciple, for instance, or the fate of the bounty hunter in the Wild West chapter or, again, deciding if Oboromaru’s quest to free Ryoma will be pursued by staying shrouded in shadows, with no one among the castle’s denizens even realizing his presence and no lives taken, or through a veritable massacre, allowing for some replayability value.

While Tokita envisioned all those dramatically different stories, which vary wildly in their tone as much as in their settings and underlying inspirations, helped by another young developer that joined Squaresoft after him, Nobuyuki Inoue (which will later work on titles such as Legend of Mana and Triangle Strategy), each chapter’s art direction reflected the game’s anthological nature by using different artists as character designers, like with Spriggan’s Ryoji Minagawa, Detective Conan’s Gosho Aoyama or Basara’s Yumi Tamura, among others, making Live a Live’s manual quite a colorful and diverse experience.

In fact, Live A Live’s Super Famicom box art challenged the standards of traditional RPG cover illustrations not just because of its composition, but also because it featured characters designed by seven different artists.

What they do have in common, though, aside from Yoko Shimomura’s inspired soundtrack adapting to each context while preserving a cohesive muical identity, is a strict adherence to their own tropes, highlighted by the sheer amount of references each chapter has crammed into their short playtimes, and an underlying focus on love being able to triumph over hate after facing a number of trials and hardships, a theme partially implied by the game’s own mirrored logo, which can be read as Live A Evil.

-A MEDIEVAL DECONSTRUCTION

All those conventions, though, are suddenly broken by the eight chapter, unlocked after beating all the previous seven and not featured in the game’s manual or cover: featuring what initially seems to be a traditional shounen fantasy story about young warrior Oersted going on a quest to save his princess and the kingdom of Lucrece alongside his best friend Straybow (or Streibough, according to the remake’s localization) and two older heroes, this story is actually a rather brutal subversion of those archetypes, shattering all the certainties Japanese RPG fans had built about what Campbell would call the hero’s journey monomyth while playing series such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and, also, acting as a foil to Cecil’s redemption arc in Tokita’s previous work, Final Fantasy IV.

The eight scenario, which ends up acting as a prequel explaining the rise of hate (or Odio, since Tokita opted to use my own language’s word for hate) as a conscious force menacing all of Live a Live’s multiverse in different ways, could also reflect the way young Japanese creators like Tokita were adapting to the new reality of their own country’s sudden fall from grace, with the Lost Decade’s financial turmoil shattering the expectations about life and society built by their parent’s generation after recovering from the Second World War up until the late ‘80s, forcing them to reassess their role and their self image in a context often filled with uncertainty, even more so for those working in a young, if promising, industry such as gaming. It’s no surprise, then, that Oersted’s story was also the first scenario envisioned by Tokita, informing all the others rather than being built afterwards as their counterpoint.

Then again, for all its brutal deconstructionism, Oersted’s quest is still by far the most traditional RPG experience provided by Live a Live up to that moment, offering a regional map, frequent fights and a number of dungeons acting as a way to introduce the player to the final scenario, an epilogue where one can choose one among the previous heroes as the final protagonist, exploring the kingdom of Lucrece in an open-ended format featuring multiple secret dungeons with a full set of ultimate weapons, all the previous main heroes acting as optional recruitable characters (you can only bring along a party of four, though), a number of different endings and plenty of secrets.

Least but not least, the epilogue allows Live A Live’s combat system enough breathing space to feel like a core part of the game, instead of the connective tissue between wildly different scenarios that often marginalized combat in order to spotlight their unique gimmicks.

-LIVE A GRID

This is welcome enough, because once Live a Live actually gives a chance to its systems they do end up feeling quite interesting, mixing instanced grid maps giving movements and each skill’s area of effect a huge relevance with an Active Time Battle-style action economy mixed with a traditional turn based interface in a way reminiscent of roguelikes, where each move or action lets other units progress in their readiness, finally allowing them to perform their moves (there are no regular attacks here), either immediately, which can interrupt the player while moving their characters, or by waiting an allotted time for techniques requiring a charge period.

Live a Live’s simple but engaging positional element, different from both proper tactical JRPGs and titles mixing on-map tactical combat with traditional explorations, like Treasure Hunter G or Energy Breaker later on, because of its standardized, instanced and abstract 7x7 arenas with no distinct map layouts (aside from backdrops, obviously) or objectives, still makes for an unique experience due to the sheer amount of variety provided by the seven heroes, even when falling short in terms of character customization.

The original version was also able to provide quite a bit of challenge, both with the seven scenarios, often because of unpredictable or obscure elements, and even more so with the epilogue, which could get more than a bit grindy depending on which protagonist you choose, especially since many of them ended up completing their scenarios at a rather low level, initially requiring to carefully pick your own fight (or run, which in this game is an often very relevant secret option, whose narrative potential was already explored in the previous scenarios).

-IT TOOK AN AEON!

Despite, or possiblye due, to its highly experimental nature, Live a Live sold just 91k copies upon its Japanese debut, with a bit more than 270k as its LTD (life to date) result, a respectable performance that still fell short of Squaresoft’s own expectations, likely a bit too high given the kind of sales both Final Fantasy and Romancing SaGa had managed to achieve on Super Famicom until then. Its commercial performance, alongside its peculiar, fairly unintuitive setup, were likely the main reasons Live a Live was also skipped for a Western release (even if Tokita hinted at it being originally discussed, meaning Squaresoft didn’t rule out a translation beforehand), with an English version materializing only much later, in 2001, due to team AeonGenesis’ awesome fantranslation work, allowing those who had researched the game for long years to finally experience this uniquely multi-faceted adventure.

When I had a chance to tackle this version of the game a few years after the patch was available, despite already knowing some of the game’s twists by reading about them, I admit I was still amazed by its bold disregard for genre conventions, and for the way it really managed to offer a number of distinctive experiences, sometimes bordering on different genres altogether, while still being able to ultimately make them converge in a single narrative thread.

Ikushima’s art for Live a Live’s remake bridged its originally very different art directions into a single, cohesive one

-REMAKING HATE

Then again, while Live a Live kept existing as a niche oddity among JRPG connoisseurs, getting ported to WiiU and 3DS’s Japanese virtual console services, ultimately its own brand of experimental anthology-style JRPG never reappeared aside from Matsuno’s Crimson Shroud, which was admittedly in a very different situation given it was a stand alone JRPG in Level 5’s Guild 01, a multi-genre anthology featuring disconnected titles by different creators.

Still, against all odds, the endless fight between Love and Hate began anew when, around late 2019, with the success of Octopath Traveler looming large upon Square Enix’s plans, Tokita managed to convince the powers that be that Live a Live would be a good test project for a line of titles made using the HD2D engine, which had proved to be a hit between both nostalgic RPG fans and newcomers.

Due to Live a Live’s remake, the Near Future’s Steel Titan ended up being featured in Super Robot Taisen DD

Back then, Square Enix had tried to cater to the growing demand for traditional, or even retro, JRPG experiences by funding Tokyo RPG Factory’s efforts, ultimately disbanding that company after Oninaki’s release in July 2019 (interestingly, Tokita also contributed to that effort), and the HD2D aesthetic introduced by Team Asano seemed a much better fit for covering this kind of audience compared with the low budget 3D aesthetics of I Am Setsuna or Lost Sphear.

Then again, it’s also quite likely Square Enix higher ups were musing about this engine’s usefulness not just for original efforts, like Team Asano and Artdink’s Triangle Strategy, but also for remakes of older titles, a trend started by Live a Live itself that would later continue with Dragon Quest III and I&II’s remakes.

-A FAITHFUL HISTORIA

Rather than being developed by Team Asano, itself an outsourcing-heavy team, Live a Live’s remake was handled by Historia, a rather young company which had previously worked on the Caligula Effect franchise and Shenmue III, with the recently reorganized Business Division II of Square Enix to help them out and Tokita acting as an overseer.

While this remake, initially developed just for Nintendo Switch and later ported to almost every platform under the sun, sported a rather awesome visual update that managed to be different enough compared to Octopath to feel its own thing, it also ended up being very faithful to its Super Famicom source material contents-wise while still trying to be a bit less obscure, at least regarding the first seven scenarios and their unique systems, while still keeping the finale’s open-endedness, including fairly brutal bits like an optional boss only met after running away a hundred time from random fights.

Then again, its challenge was rather noticeably scaled down, especially in the early seven scenarios, leaving most of the challenge to the epilogue’s open-ended explorations and mostly optional dungeon crawling and boss fights, the only part of this remake where the combat system really managed to assert itself. Even then, a number of changes to how the Active Time Battle timing affected action economy ended up being geared to penalize enemies across the board.

-UNIFYING DESIGNS

Dubbed dialogues, remastered tunes, an auto-save feature and a number of other quality of life options (with its minimap marking the locations triggering story events being surely the most impactful) were also parts of this update, while the original’s ensemble art direction was subsumed by the work of Team Asano’s own resident character designer, the talented Yoshida-inspired Naoki Ikushima, which realized a number of key arts for all of Live a Live’s scenarios, trying to bridge their aesthetic gap instead of doubling down on their differences like the original did.

The remake’s localization, the first official one Live a Live received in thirty years, also did a good job at keeping the tone of its various segments different enough to make them feel distinct (the way Oersted’s scenario was localized could almost seem a nod do Alexander Smith’s works on Matsuno's titles) while still providing an underlying connection, albeit while taking quite a number of liberties compared to the original Japanese script.

Then again, I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention how I still felt the meaning of the final story event in the Prehistory scenario was conveyed in a more appropriate and genuine way by Aeon Genesis’ fantranslation, feeling like proper foreshadowing for the game’s own main conflict instead of a cheap joke, even if there are indeed arguments for and against both translation choices.

-THE IMPLIED NINTH

Compared with the wild experience provided by the fantranslated Super Famicom version, tackling the remake in late 2025, a few years after its release, felt a little more predictable simply by virtue of being a better known quantity while also being vastly less obscure due to the attempt to make it more accessible, but its uniqueness was still unquestionable despite its age, making Live A Live’s role as a landmark achievement in RPG history even more obvious thirty years after its original debut.

After Live A Live, Tokita’s own career took flight and cemented him as one of Squaresoft’s key creator during the company’s ‘90s golden age, acting as one of Chrono Trigger’s directors alongside Kitase and Matsui, an interesting case of omen nomen given how his own surname includes the kanji for “time”. Then, after assisting in Final Fantasy VII’s early production (with some Live a Live hardcore fans questioning a number of possible references to his previous works, like with Sephiroth’s story arc, even if I feel those connections aren’t documented enough to be more than conjectures), Tokita again showcased his talent for unique experiments with Parasite Eve, which mixed horror and JRPG elements in a way that greatly expanded on Live A Live’s own Far Future scenario, while one can see part of his trope-subversive streak in the influence he had on Hirotaka Inaba’s own bleak scenario for Oninaki, showcasing the way Live A Live ended up embodying the core stylistic traits pursued by him during his whole career as a JRPG creator.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that one of Ikushima’s artworks celebrating Live A Live’s remake ended up including Tokita himself alongside the game’s eight protagonists, almost as if his own life was an implicit ninth scenario informing all the others with his unique sensibility and creativity.

Tokita, featured among Live A Live’s protagonists, almost as if his own life was one of the game’s scenarios