The game has been remade in “HD-2D,” a kind of style template within Unreal Engine that Square Enix created, alongside developer Acquire, for 2018’s superb retro RPG Octopath Traveler.
Live A Live is also interesting because of the vehicle Square Enix chose for the remake. That, in addition to its previous inaccessibility to most Western players, makes it a very worthwhile release. It’s not always successful, but it’s clearly readable as a kind of eccentric, experimental rehearsal for director Takashi Tokita’s ensuing masterpiece, Chrono Trigger. It’s a fascinating curio that takes the format of 1990s Japanese RPGs to places those games didn’t usually go - not just in terms of the varied and colorfully cliched settings, but in terms of its loose, parallelized, nonlinear structure. Live A Live, which was previously never released outside Japan, is a sort of portmanteau game, a playable Cloud Atlas that spans a number of bite-size scenarios from prehistory to the far future, taking in Imperial China, the American Wild West, and Edo-period Japan along the way. Mostly, that’s due to the source material itself. Nintendo and Square Enix’s remake of the cult 1994 role-playing game Live A Live is one of the more interesting reissues of the last few years.
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