In Nintendo's first face-to-face meeting of 2022 on the morning of February 10, in addition to the long-awaited Triangle Strategy, SE also announced that it would use an HD-2D engine to remake a 1994 JRPG "LIVE A LIVE".
"LIVE A LIVE" was born in the golden age of JRPG, launched by Square Company at the time on SFC, but compared to JRPG masterpieces such as "Legend of the Sacred Sword", "Romantic Saga", "Final Fantasy", "Wheel of Time", "LIVE A LIVE" is much less well-known in the minds of domestic players, and even a conventional Chinese translation name is not available.
But in fact, this JRPG has a lot of potential, look at its card division, the director is the main designer of "Final Fantasy 4" Takashi Tokida, the author of "Detective Conan" Tsuyoshi Aoyama, and the music is Yoko Shimomura. And its narrative style, like "The Traveler of the Eight Directions", is also composed of eight seemingly unrelated stories.
What's more, the game portrayed a female villain who was voted one of the "Square's Three Evil Girls" (actually four) by later players, and as to who this female character is, this article will not expand on it for spoiler reasons.
Such a game that now seems to have a good selling point, but the final sales are only 270,000 units, far lower than Square's other JRPGs in the same period, so there has been no sequel since then, nor has it been released overseas outside of Japan, so it is common sense that the popularity is not high.
The reason for this may be related to the team's experience: "LIVE A LIVE" is Takashi Tokida's first time as a director, and he is slightly inexperienced, and according to interview records at the time, he feels very unaccustomed to not being able to handle the graphic elements himself as he did when he made Final Fantasy 4.
In addition, the lack of length of the game has been criticized by players, and the imbalance in character design has also caused criticism, and in 1994, Tsuyoshi Aoyama had just begun to serialize "Detective Conan", which was not well-known, and these reasons made "LIVE A LIVE" not dazzling in that golden year of the JRPG.
LIVE A LIVE received a 29 out of 40 ratings in Fami-teen magazine that year, and Takashi Tokida later tried to make a sequel to the game for many years and pushed for a remake, but all failed. And the success of "The Eight Travelers" gave him hope again.
According to Famitong magazine, the remake of the game actually began in 2019, but due to the adjustment of the balance and the subsequent global pandemic of Covid-19, the development work was delayed. Since Tsuyoshi Aoyama is now a well-known manga artist, he did not participate in the remake, but was entrusted to Naoki Shima, the illustrator of "Eight Travelers".
In addition, the remake also added voices to the seven protagonists of the game, and also supported Chinese for the first time, and the game will be released on July 22, in addition to Switch, there will also be a Steam version. So if you love JRPG and go through its golden age, a remake of LIVE A LIVE will be a must-see.