A year ago a game showed up in Nintendo’s February 9 Direct presentation that took me by such surprise I couldn’t quite figure out where and how and to whom to express my elation to. Was there anyone in my circle of friends and coworkers similarly passionate about this forgotten gem of an RPG? You see, I thought Live A Live – brought back to life on Switch this past July – was gone; forgotten. Never to be seen again. Pining for the fjords. A victim of franchise love and loyalty that demands more Final Fantasies and more Dragon Quests from Square Enix. A casualty of that pesky reality at any company that employs creative dreamers: that their creations have to make more than just the money needed to bring their ideas to life. Way more money.
And Live A Live didn’t do that. But the story isn’t as simple as Square (which didn’t merge with competitor Enix until 2003) gambling on a new roleplaying game brand and falling flat. Though it’s impossible to find verified sales information on the game today, Live A Live is commonly cited as having sold 270,000 Super Famicom/SNES carts. But while Square’s games surely weren’t cheap to make, they also commanded a high price. A new copy of Live A Live sold for 9,900 Yen. That’s $100 in 1994 and a whopping $200 in today’s dollars. Final Fantasy VI, which had come out just a few months earlier, was priced at an even steeper 11,400 Yen ($114).
I remember it well because I stood in line to buy both games in Akihabara, Tokyo, on their respective release days. As a student living in an expensive city, these were significant investments. Live A Live was the equivalent of 50 Tonkatsu sando lunches, or more than 100 McDonald’s hamburgers. But it was money well-spent on both of those games. And if the 270k sales figures are true, it was money well-earned too. While the creative talent behind Live A Live is extensive, it likely wasn’t expensive – the game started active development just a year before release and was headlined by first-time director Takashi Tokita. Tokita, lead designer of Final Fantasy IV, would later become the head of Square’s Product Development Division 7, tasked with getting more value out of their ’90s classics by re-releasing Final Fantasy games on GBA and extending the FFIV’s story with The After Years.
Live A Live received plenty of media coverage in Japanese magazines leading up to its release. One of the things that first attracted me to the game – apart from the visual similarities to Final Fantasy and the fact I was a JRPG-devouring machine who considered sleep optional – was the developer’s unique approach to the creative process. I remember reading in Famitsu (Japan’s popular weekly gaming magazine) that Live A Live was constructed more like a collection of short stories from different authors than a classic Square RPG. While composer Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter II, Breath of Fire, later: Kingdom Hearts) flexed her musical muscle by imbuing each chapter with a matching – and distinct – soundtrack of its own, the seven initial scenarios each had their own art director. Under the supervision of Tokita and lead designer Nobuyuki Inoue, this group of manga artists left their own signatures on the disparate parts of the whole. The artists were largely unknown at the time, though Gosho Aoyama, who oversaw the Edo Japan chapter, started to turn heads with a new manga called Detective Conan a few months into development.
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Which brings us back to the fact that Live A Live certainly was profitable. Created in about a year’s time on a smaller budget, it didn’t come close to Final Fantasy’s multi-million unit sales. But it released to positive reviews by the Japanese press, and I can attest to the lines of gamers waiting for their copy on launch day despite the relatively muted advertising. Final Fantasy VI was everywhere in Tokyo in 1994. You couldn’t ride the subway or turn on the TV without seeing or hearing about FFVI. Live A Live, not so much.
As a Square RPG fan, I didn’t care. I played it and loved it, though I do remember my disappointment that Live A Live didn’t quite live up to the visual bar set by the Final Fantasy Super Famicom outings. But the music, the variety of settings and gameplay systems – the many homages to my favorite movies – made it such a memorable experience that I held on to my copy of the game and dragged it with me from Japan to Germany and eventually to the US.
My Super Famicom copy of Live A Live survived the move from Japan to Germany and then to the US.
Since then, I’ve brought up Live A Live in conversations with friends and coworkers – frequently surprised how few people outside of Japan even know about the game’s existence. Whenever someone tells their story about falling in love with RPGs, I mention Live A Live in the same breath as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
The fact that it didn’t make it out of Japan is no doubt a result of many factors. Square wasn’t exactly known for taking chances with its RPG portfolio – and Live A Live certainly wasn’t the first or the last higher-profile game to be denied localization. Here’s a quick playlist, if you’re curious:
But more importantly, Square went public in August 1994 and perhaps the company became even less risk averse in light of the additional scrutiny and the impending Super NES market decline in 1995. Remember, releasing cartridge games carried significant production and inventory cost – a miscalculation could have serious financial consequences. And the bigger the cartridge size, the higher the risk. In some cases, the developers used every byte available to them, which left little wriggle room for localization (English language text takes up more space than Japan’s kana and kanji). The latter played a role in Seiken Densetsu 3 (now available as Trials of Mana) never getting localized – and perhaps even Live A Live’s 16-bit (4MB) cart size was too much hassle and too expensive of a bet for an unproven series. No matter the reasons, things got quiet around Live A Live and the game all but faded into obscurity.
And that was it. I thought. I should’ve guessed that there were plenty of positive memories and adoration for Live A Live within Square’s own development teams. Octopath Traveller was basically a throwback to Live A Live’s eight-scenario setup – minus the Dark Tower-esque coming-together from multiple dimensions and time zones. And perhaps I should’ve seen the Trials of Mana remake as another harbinger, proof that this decade’s celebration of (/obsession with?) the past and pursuit of (/reliance on?) nostalgia could bring back some obscure delights.
In this case, I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. In July 2022, Live A Live returned with some significant visual upgrades, orchestrated music and voice acting, some content tweaks, and some new surprises. Not everyone may be able to get lost in its 16-bit trappings and enjoy it – it’s very much a product of its time – but it’s wonderful to see such a unique creative endeavor get a second chance at life. A gem – but with sales already outpacing the original, not a forgotten one anymore.
That’s what this column is about. Every month, I’ll unearth a buried treasure. A forgotten gem of a game that may not have risen above obscurity. games that showed sparks of greatness but never got a sequel or saw wider release. Or a once-beloved series that faded as the tastes of time – or its creators – turned elsewhere.
Until then!