 No, stop it Nintendo, nobody is going to pronounce it like that. So anyway, live alive. This game really surprised me. This is Square Enix's latest HD 2D style RPG and they managed to get it out the door before our Dragon Quest 3 remake, but that's okay because this is still a game that RPG fans need to play. I've personally never played this before this release, although I've heard about it for years. It's a Switch remake of a Super Famicom game by Square Soft that never got localized so very few people really got the chance to play it. But believe me when I tell you that this game isn't just some obscure RPG from the 90s that only nerds know about. This game is a masterpiece. Square Enix has been hiding this game from us for years, not letting us play it for whatever reason. They've been remaking all of the games from their classic library lately, but this might be one of the finest RPGs to come out of it. This game, first of all, is turn based and it's me, so of course I was going to be interested in playing it, but I was not expecting it to be this good. Let me explain what Live Alive is in a way that people who follow this channel can understand. This game is Dragon Quest 4 meets Chrono Trigger and it is as amazing as it sounds. It's a game where you follow 8 different heroes each with their own chapter taking place in a unique era of history and towards the end, everything gradually starts to intertwine. The time periods are very clearly based on different genres of film and there's just so much film inspiration in the dialogue and setting, so you can play any of the chapters in any order and individual chapters are relatively short lasting at most 3 hours. The shortest one was easily the present day chapter which took a little over half an hour to beat, while the near future took the longest for me at around 3 hours. So it's not a very long game. Overall it could take a little over 20 hours to beat depending on if you decide to look for all the little secrets and complete some of the optional content in the game. It's just the right length for an RPG to me. It's very similar to Chrono Trigger in this regard in that it's very well paced, delivers a great story and doesn't feel like it's overstaying its welcome. And it really shouldn't be surprising to know that after this game came out and originally a lot of people who worked on it would go on to make Chrono Trigger. In a way the game feels like the prototype for Chrono Trigger almost, so if you're a fan of that game you will absolutely love this one. So this game is very Hollywood inspired. I actually started off by playing the western segments starring the Sundown kid, you know because I like westerns, and it really felt like an actual western film. The dialogue, the environments, it really had that authentic feel. And this goes for all the chapters, they just nailed the feeling of their respective film genre. The distant future where you control a cute little robot cube on a starship in space didn't have much in terms of combat, rather it was more about story and exploration. And it really felt like something Ridley Scott would have directed. It actually scared the shit out of me at some points. It had the horror atmosphere, the great soundtrack, just everything. There is so much to love for film in this game. If you're a movie buff you will really appreciate what they've done here. There's so many references and little easter eggs to find. There's references to Stanley Kubrick, The Old Spaghetti Westerns, Chinese martial arts films, Kaiju movies, there's a lot of film inspiration here. So I should also mention that this game is very fun to play. The combat is turn-based and I like turn-based games, but only if they're done right. And Live Alive has one of the most unique turn-based battle mechanics I've ever seen. In each chapter you fight enemies on a grid where you can freely move around and each character has an array of moves to choose from, each with different effectiveness, range and power. And it's just a very good system, it's very fast and strategic and it's fun adjusting your playstyle depending on the character and their strengths and weaknesses. Each chapter is really unique with its own style of storytelling and gameplay. It really feels like 8 games in a one because of how different they all are. The Twilight of Ido Japan has you play as a ninja infiltrating a fortress and it's all about stealth and infiltration as the fort is massive and very complex with just a ton of secret areas to discover and treasure to find. There are so many various paths you can take and it's just overwhelming how large this area is. I haven't even explored the whole level myself yet, it just shows how big and complicated levels in this game can get. The present day sequence is really fun because it's all about fighting these different bosses in a street fighter inspired tournament complete with all the little fighting game references and there's no overworld in this chapter just you fighting bosses for a menu in any order which makes it different than the others. The main character here is unique because you can learn his enemies moves when he gets attacked adding them to his arsenal so you have to sort of bait each other's bosses to exhaust all their special moves before beating them so you can learn them all. The near future was like one of those giant robot movies taking place in a futuristic town where he plays a psychic and you can actually read the minds of any NPC in the game which works as a gameplay mechanic. The writing of this chapter as well as many others is just plain excellent. There is so much character growth experience in his very short chapters and it is not easy introducing a character for such a short amount of time and getting you attached to them but they managed to make you feel like you've known these characters forever with their exceptional writing. The writing of this game is easily one of its strongest points and it is a really great story that I think everyone should experience. Then you have the prehistoric era where you play as a caveman and there's literally no dialogue at all. Everyone just speaks in charades. And that kind of checks out. It always made no sense to me how the prehistoric people in Chrono Trigger could somehow speak English. I mean really they would be talking like Uggs and Uggs if it was realistic and in this chapter you hunt animals and fight dinosaurs and rival tribesmen to impress an alluring cave lady with a gorilla companion who can throw his own poop at the enemies as an attack. I'm pretty sure I lost a lot of brain cells playing this chapter but it was still a lot of fun actually and it was very funny. It even has a unique crafting system that the other chapters don't have. These chapters all have a certain level of nonlinearity. Kind of like Chrono Trigger you make little choices in the game that seem unimportant at first but end up affecting the story in a big way later on. Many objectives can be tackled in any order and there's a lot of optional content to be found so you might want to even replay some of the chapters to get different results which is why the short playtime is really great. This game is just overall an amazing experience that I was very surprised by. The presentation is top notch, the graphics are really nice and I like them a lot and I think more games should look like this. The sprites in the 3D world don't clash at all. They just work together so well with their colors and the way everything in the world just blends together. It's really an exceptionally good looking game. The cutscenes are also fully voice acted and the voices really add to the emotion of the scenes. The music is phenomenal. Each soundtrack just feels like a blong in that time period and the boss theme is so good. The music gave me chills at times, it's a really underrated soundtrack they have here. It might be one of the best I've ever heard. The game will surprise you in many ways. I don't want to give things away but I was very invested in the story which was simple on the surface and starts to get really complex towards the end. There are moments where I was actually shocked like genuinely. The individual chapters start to intertwine in the very Dragon Quest 4 kind of way that will blow your mind. The game does such a good job with the story and characters that I was just very impressed. I feel like this game's concept is so unique and if they did the same thing on a larger scale with more elements interconnecting the various stories, maybe some references to characters and events between the chapters, it would feel a little more complete especially since you're dealing with a time travel story and there's a lot of cool things you can do with that kind of setup. There's not a lot of bad things I can say about this game. The short play time might worry some people but it really is just the right length since the devs clearly want you to replay it and make different choices the next time. I really can't believe Scranix never brought this masterpiece over to the West till now. It's a crime that such a good game has gone unnoticed for years because this is absolutely one of the best Jairapidees I've ever played. It really is one of the greats. If you like Jairapidees you need to pick this one up.