There’s a Wild West tale, a kung fu story, a murder mystery in space - and each relies on the archetypes of its respective genre to describe the protagonists, instead of portraying unique people in their own right. But the impact of that revelation is weakened because the characters haven’t made an impression along the way. The literary ambition is only clear at the end of the game, when a lightbulb comes on and all the characters and their scenarios are threaded together as one story. Live A Live is full of literary ambition, but it relies too heavily on genre tropes. But it helps explain where this remake falls short. This binary, like most, can’t cleanly describe works of art, and probably shouldn’t exist.
Literary fiction is sold as character-driven and realistic - and simply labeled “fiction” - while genre fiction is said to be driven by tropes, and sold in categories like sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, or romance. Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find a binary made by the publishing industry between literary and genre fiction. It’s a literary move attempted by a master of his craft. Creating multiple narrative threads in a video game and then retroactively piecing them all together was ingenious in 1994, and it remains ambitious today. So, basically, Live A Live is sandwiched in Tokita’s catalog between two of the greatest games of the ’90s - if not all time.
Released in 1994, the original Live A Live was Takashi Tokita’s second game at Square (now Square Enix) after his work as a lead game designer on Final Fantasy 4 (released as Final Fantasy 2 in the U.S.) and before his work directing Chrono Trigger.
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