To anyone who liked the old Squaresoft RPG's in the 90's for the SNES, I discovered a game by Square a few weeks ago called Live A Live. I thought I had heard of all of their games from that era, but I had never heard of that one. It was never released outside of Japan.

I just beat it a few days ago. It's a really fun game, and I would put it up there with some of their best work of the time.

You start by playing 7 chapters, with each chapter occupying a different time period. There is a prehistoric chapter, an ancient China kung fu chapter, a feudal Japan ninja chapter, an Old West cowboy chapter, a present day wrestler chapter that spoofs Street Fighter, a near future psychic chapter that heavily borrows from the film Akira, and then a sci-fi chapter that borrows heavily from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each chapter plays differently, and the battle system is completely unique to any of their other games on the SNES. You fight in a grid of squares, with each attack affecting certain squares on the grid, and there is no penalty in using your moves. The game also has a pretty steep challenge and there are some very well hidden secrets. It seems like a lot of ideas that surfaced in other Square games started here.

To anyone interested, I definitely recommend checking it out. The link to download is here:

http://www.romnation.net/srv/roms/41518/snes/Live-a-Live-J.html

and the link for the English patch is here:

http://www.fantasyanime.com/legacy2/live_downloads.htm

6/5/2011 11:12:13 PM