“Good Games You Haven’t Played – And Why” provides gamers with insight to games that are rarely played gems among the many. This article’s game is Live-A-Live, a turn-based RPG for the SNES. These games are chosen from personal experience, and feedback would be much appreciated.

Live-A-Live

Live-A-Live is a game created by Squaresoft for the SNES in 1994. It was only released in Japan, due to several anatomical jokes that I’m sure if I mentioned would make the editor throw my article into the trash, let alone get past censors. It was a strange game with an odd sense of humor and a battle system unseen before.

Instead of the standard ‘everyone on opposite sides’ RPG battle that Squaresoft usually offered, the game presents a grid where your characters can freely move around and attack and cast spells. Position as compared to the enemy is ridiculously important, as some attacks only hit certain squares- Say, two spots to your left and right. This adds a degree of tactics to the battles- One boss, for instance, can be defeated by remaining horizontal or vertical from him. It’s an excellent tactic to let people who simply don’t want to grind progress through the story. Overall, the atmosphere is an amusing one, gameplay is stellar, and it should entertain most RPG fans.

The game is presented not as a singular path, but as several chapters you can pick and choose to play at any time- And each one is extremely interesting and unique, as each one has it’s own unique style and tricks to them. The chapters are, in no particular order: Caveman, Robot, Psychic, Kung-Fu Master, Ninja, Wrestler, Cowboy. After you complete them, there is one more chapter, Knight, and then the final chapter, which ties them all together fairly well.  Plot is decent, characters are pretty well developed, and it’s great fun. It is almost silly how exaggerated the amount of awesome the game offers – It’s as if the game follows the Rule of Cool. One downside to the multi-chapter gameplay and the gimmick-per-chapter setup is if you don’t enjoy a chapter, you must bear through it if you want to complete the game.

The music is great at times (Go! Go! Buriki-Daioh! comes to mind, where – SPOILER! – While you’re flying a giant mecha around a town the song plays and lyrics appear at the bottom of the screen, as if it was karaoke.)  but at other times it gets repetitive and bad. The graphics are decent for SNES era gaming, but they aren’t anything to write home about- Think above FF4 but below FF6.

You can still play it if you somehow managed to legally acquire a copy of the ROM – There’s a fan translation patch on the internet which does a great job of making it into simple, understandable English.

If you’re a fan of RPGs and want to pick up something fun, Live-A-Live is the way to go.

You can download a copy of the Live-A-Live translation patch here.

All images are copyright Nintendo and respective owners.