Live-A-Live

We got a chance to watch a lot of Live-A-Live (recent remake) played by one Suikapann in the last little bit. Now, LAL for the Super Famicom, the original release with the fan translation patch, is simply one of our favorite games of all time. Favorite Square games, favorite RPGs, favorite game soundtracks, it's at least top 5 of pretty much all of these. Simply a masterpiece. But we haven't gotten our paws on the remake yet because it happened to get announced pretty much right after we did a replay and the time hasn't been right to get back to the thing yet. Besides that, for as nice as it is to see it discovered by a lot more folks in the anglosphere, we're always very leery of these remakes that try to "modernize" everything. We don't even like it when there's voice acting in a game very often.

Watching it, though, it's clear that we didn't need to be worried about it. The heart and soul of LAL has always been in the movies. When we talk about games being 'cinematic' its usually referring to them having long cutscenes or whatever, but LAL instead takes its primary inspiration from genre films that are loud and melodramatic, and it takes broad swings with their ideas. We've been saying games have a lot in common with theatre, and I think this kind of thing is closely related to that.

The chapter of the game that seems to benefit most from this is the Medieval Chapter. It forms the lynchpin of the games overarching plot, leading into an excuse for a bunch of characters from wildly different settings to come together for a finale, but it was never a favorite before. Now, it actually might be one of our top picks after seeing the remake's treatment. We don't know enough about the original script to say how much of this is the remake as a base, or how much is just the localization having so much more in the way of resources to work with than the old fan translation. Don't get us wrong, that fan patch was a labor of love, but there's all kinds of difficulties in hacking something into the SNES. It even makes some really cool decisions which aren't present in the remake! And besides that, we've changed over the last few years. Our view on the work is very different now, too. But still, the localization has impressed the hell out of us, although we still have one big complaint. The recurring villain of LAL is the concept of hatred, and in seeing the new version of the story it becomes more clear than ever that on some level the themes of the stories center the conclusion that hatred is something which makes you childish and selfish. Of course, the whole 'human spirit overcoming our weaknesses etc etc' thing is extremely common in media, and certainly media from Japan aimed at 13-year-olds, but it tends to work pretty well, and we think it works well here, too.

This review will just be about the Medieval Chapter.

If you'd have asked us to note the inspirations of the chapter beforehand, we would have said classic JRPGs in general. Obviously, Square was no stranger to that stuff. But actually, it's clear now that the story being told is a classic tragedy. Suikapann and ourselves both independently compared it to Romeo and Juliet, which is obviously an extremely easy-to-reach example of a tragedy, but its also about ill-fated romance and impulsive teens. Plus, the localization team chose to write the entire chapter in iambic pentameter. That's really not a "JRPG" decision. It's a "Shakespeare" decision. They knew what they were dealing with, and it was once again da theatre. Big and loud.

A quick summary of the plot: We're introduced to our protagonist, Oersted (you get to name him but that's the default) and his friend Streighbough (again, game is not big on subtlety so we get character names that are extremely on-the-nose for his eventual role) engaged in a tournament to decide who gets to marry the princess Alethea. Oersted wins extremely easily because he's a close-range fighter and Streighbough is an offensive spellcaster. Scissors vs paper. Unfortunately, that night the princess is kidnapped by a demon claiming to be the Dark Lord who was beaten 20 years prior. Everyone is, of course, depending on Oersted to save the princess, and Streighbough joins up too. They go find Uranus, a priest, and Hasshe, an even fightier fighting man, because those two beat the Dark Lord last time. Thus having formed a balanced Final Fantasy party, the whole gang goes and beats the demon in its lair. However, the princess is nowhere to be found and Hasshe says the demon they just killed is definitely not strong enough to be a real Dark Lord, and then he dies from overexertion. A sudden cave-in also kills Streighbough, so the remaining two go back home to regroup. During the night, Oersted gets tricked into killing what he thinks is a demon, but is actually the king. Everyone immediately turns on our guy, but Uranus endures torture and gives up his life to help Oersted to escape, telling him to keep believing in people and to rescue the princess back in the demon's lair. When he gets there, though, it turns out Streighbough actually discovered how to get demon power written on a statue right after their big fight, faked his death, and set up the events that followed to get revenge on the king and Oersted for their roles in him not getting to marry Alethea, who he loves. Even when Oersted kills Streighbough, the princess stabs herself, sympathizing more with the mage. Oersted decides to become The Joker about this and turns into the new Dark Lord so that we can have our final chapter, which is out the scope of this piece.

Our finale, then, is a big scene consisting of three "fuck you" speeches from Streighbough, Alethea, and Oersted respectively. Streighbough's whole thing is our first signal to start considering Orstedd as a character outside of the perspective we've had on him so far. He's been a silent protagonist that we 'project ourselves onto' until this point, but his former friend is pretty clear that in all the years of their friendship, he's been unyieldingly competitive and kind of a jerk! Obviously, this isn't an unbiased perspective, but it fits with everything else we end up seeing. On some level, Stray (his name is too long to type we're calling him Stray now) has some understandable and justified complaints. One thing which is not exactly clear here but I think might be implied is that he and the Princess were already a thing on the down low. Her later response to things doesn't indicate his love of her was one-sided, and Orstedd knew that but refused to back down in the tournament. We can relate to this on some level: we've had friends who were just consistently better than us at things. Jealousy is natural, and nobody is immune to it. Obviously, Stray's response is wildly out of pocket here, but it doesn't seem to have really come into being until he discovered that he could. That is to say, I don't think he joined up to save the princess on false pretenses. After all, he was in love with her, so naturally he'd want to save her from danger. This is more of a "going mad with power" sort of thing. Until recently, he still thought of Orstedd as a friend, just one with maybe a flawed personality in some ways. The tournament thing would have been the first time that Orstedd really blocked him from obtaining what should have been major happiness in his life, and that specific injury is what leads us to the tragedy. To be clear he was willing to kill a bunch of unrelated people over this. He didn't exactly do it himself but he would know that it would happen. Major dickhead behavior. A couple of adults could have resolved this better.

Orstedd also has some pretty legitimate grievances here. What really makes him our villainous figure in the immediate future, and sells his whole "kill everyone ever" plan, is how he frames it. His deal is, essentially, "I did everything everybody told me to do but I didn't get rewarded for it." He resents that people weren't nice to him. We've read the tragedy here in the past as "he has nobody left who believes in him" and that's true. He's right to note that everyone turned on him immediately without any attempt to investigate or hear his side of the story or give him the benefit of the doubt. It's the same kind of attitude that made Hasshe withdraw from society. Since all the people he considered friends are dead, it's those common people he is ultimately turning his wrath on.

Right at the start of Moon, the Love-de-Lic classic from 1997, you do a brief segment where you, a child, are playing a Dragon Quest parody where everyone is deeply, absurdly deferential to the hero. Everyone wants him, and gives him their stuff, and worships him, and when you get sucked into the game it turns out he's an imposing, silent, violent monster and for as much as everyone thinks they have to depend on him, they don't like him. He's been taking stuff from their houses and treasure chests and beating up their pets! Moon is great and that bit is really fun, and so it took an embarrassing amount of time for us to realize that LAL was doing something similar a few years prior to that. When Orstedd leaves the town on his quest, there's a guy who gives you the clothes off his back. It's not even useful to have them. It's a joke, of course. So's the woman who just rambles on with a half-remembered rumor about where you might need to go next that's not actually useful. But the joke has a purpose. Those interactions were devoid of warmth. Everyone loves Orstedd, but they don't know him. He's apart from them. In real life, people like that end up stunted as hell.

It's telling that Orstedd has nothing to say in his villain speech about Stray. If your friend of many years reveals how murderously angry they were with you, I think most people would have some feelings about it. Neither of these men actually say a single word about how Alethea feels or felt. We're not even sure if she and Stray actually had a thing going on, just assuming it, but we'll get to that in a moment. Neither of them has anything to say about Uranus, who was absolutely the moral and emotional center of their team, suffered and died for Oersted, and never had anything to do with the Stray's grievance with either his friend of the king. Hasshe gets a mention, but only for Stray to taunt and accuse Oersted of abandoning his corpse, which is not an especially compelling accusation. Anyway, Hasshe died on his own terms before everything started, so he doesn't count as one of Stray's victims in this. The thing that made both of these guys villains is that their feelings are only ever looking inward. They're only looking at the world in terms of things they think they're owed by everyone, especially a specific woman.

But of course, just like them, we've talked around Alethea. She's actually the most interesting one in the room but she's also the subject of our main complaint. For as much as we're leery about voice work and direction in a lot of games, Nicolette Chin really did a fantastic job with her, and that, plus the lines as written, really sold an aspect of the character that we never thought much about previously. That aspect is this: She really doesn't want to be here. I think anybody reading this will recognize that being essentially put up as a prize to whoever swings a sword good sucks, and also makes very little sense unless everyone involved is maybe part of a noble house, but things like this aren't always presented as a negative thing in fiction. You know, noble knights jousting to win the heart of the fair maiden, the stuff that happens at the end of The Odyssey, that kind of thing. It's very obvious that Alethea is spending her brief amount of screentime in the chapter's opening trying to convince herself to go along with things because it makes her dad happy and she's being naturally pressured into it. When she says she loves Orstedd and is going to stay by his side because no other man matters she very obviously doesn't want that shit, and if our guy can't figure that out it speaks poorly of his ability to read a room. Ultimately, her death is the one thing in the story she gets to exercise agency over. One of the downsides to the format of LAL is that it takes its ideas about women from its source materials, and that means they just aren't present most of the time, or relegated to extremely minor roles other than a few exceptions. But Alethea is the first time that feels like it has the potential to be very deliberate. The way she's minimized by the people around her and treated as a prize is extremely gendered!

So it's a bit disappointing that it doesn't amount to much. All she does before dying is restate Streighboughs opinions regarding Oersted. She doesn't turn villainous like Stray or Orstedd, but she has her own reasons to be spiteful, and she actions can still be considered extreme. It's not hard to imagine why she'd support the guy who killed her dad but that connection needs to be made here. She needs to have her own reasons for this shit instead of just her boyfriend's, right? Firstly, because please write a damn woman in this game, but secondly because this is THE moment. If she was cool with Oersted, he still could have gone back to his life, been the king, and had a great time only being down one cool wizard friend. Her rejection is important, and its worse for just treating her as an extension of Stray, like she really is just a thing they're fighting over. The pieces are all there. Make her similar to the guys, except she reacts differently than them. Not different as in healthy, just different in terms of the result.

Ultimately, tragedy works best when you can see and understand all the decisions and motivations that lead to it, and that includes the tragic flaws. This particular story continues past its chapter, and the themes of the game are realized more fully in the ending, but nothing about the story here was hurt for us by more fully understanding the tragic hero's mistakes and weaknesses. Quite the opposite! We have a way better appreciation for the games themes and ideas now! They aren't even especially complex and they can still be enhanced! We've only come to love stupid melodrama more as we get older. It's great. Christ, this is 2500 words long.