The History of Live A Live

Production began in December 1993 in Square's Development Division 5, after roughly a year and a half of planning, on a 16-megabit cartridge. The concept was Tokita's answer to Final Fantasy: instead of small stories serving one grand arc, several complete stories at once, each sized to be finishable in about a day, made feasible by the Super Famicom's growing cartridge capacity. The Middle Ages chapter was created first and shaped both the hidden narrative and the battle design.

The signature production choice was the art. Each of the seven main chapters was designed by a different manga artist: Yoshihide Fujiwara (Imperial China), Yoshinori Kobayashi (Prehistory), Osamu Ishiwata (the Wild West), Yumi Tamura (the Distant Future), Ryoji Minagawa (Present Day), Gosho Aoyama (Edo Japan), and Kazuhiko Shimamoto (the Near Future), an arrangement made possible by Square's publishing ties with Shogakukan. Having one artist per world was not the original plan; it emerged to serve the omnibus structure, and it was a break from Square's single-designer practice.

All seven chapters share a turn-based battle system on a 7 by 7 grid, which Tokita described through its designer Nobuyuki Inoue as real-time shogi. Everything else varies by design: the Edo chapter is a stealth infiltration that can be finished without killing anyone; the Prehistory chapter has no dialogue at all and runs on crafting and smell; the Present Day chapter is a sequence of boss fights where techniques are learned by being hit with them; the Distant Future chapter has almost no battles and plays as a horror story on a spaceship. Tokita abandoned a planned difficulty gradient so any chapter can be played in any order.

Each hero faces an enemy whose name carries Odio: Odo the dinosaur god, Ou Di Wan Lee, Ode Iou, O. Dio, Odie O'Bright, Odeo the idol, OD-10 the ship's computer. Finishing all seven unlocks the eighth chapter, the Middle Ages, which reveals where Odio comes from, and a final chapter that gathers the heroes. Tokita has said the script emulated anime and manga style and drew its structure in part from Dragon Quest IV; the chapter inspirations he documented range from Shane and classic Westerns to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien.

Yoko Shimomura joined Square from Capcom in 1993 wanting to write for RPGs; Live A Live was her first large-scale project there, her only prior RPG work being minor contributions to Breath of Fire. She wrote era-specific music around a recurring main theme, gave Odio a pipe organ motif, and folded it into the frenetic boss theme Megalomania. The Middle Ages music was the hardest to write, until the themes Overlord Overture and Dignified Battle landed, with an offer of help from Nobuo Uematsu along the way. For the remake, the original MIDI files had been lost, and the score had to be copied by ear from the game itself.

Between those editions sits the unofficial one: the fan translation by Aeon Genesis, for years the only way to play the game in English. Square localization veteran Ted Woolsey said on record at the time that an overseas release was unlikely because of the game's low graphical quality compared to popular titles of the day. The full story is on this shelf's question page, Why did Live A Live take 28 years to reach the West?

The dissent has a long pedigree. Game Criticism magazine lauded the omnibus attempt and the famous manga artists in 1994, then judged the game short on substance and heavily criticized the final chapters and the imbalance between its mature narrative and low difficulty. Retro Gamer likewise loved the structure and called it too short. Nintendo World Report's remake review found the design archaic enough to hurt the experience, and several remake reviewers noted mechanics that had aged poorly beneath the new presentation.

Tokita carried the multi-protagonist structure into his later work, and Square Enix's HD-2D line, Octopath Traveler above all, made Live A Live's 1994 experiment legible to a modern audience, which is precisely how the remake came to exist: Tokita, working on Octopath Traveler, saw the style that could resurrect his own game. A commercial failure that never left Japan became, three decades on, a 500,000-selling worldwide release and the proof of concept for reviving the era's stranded games rather than only its hits.