Well frick, I got Live A Live yesterday and despite it being short, it made me want some pretty unique ways for companies to handle a jrpg. Take a page from the prehistoric era, and you can manage a pretty solid 30-40 rpg where characters only grunt and your equipment is all crafted, surviving on the land while overcoming some arc of a looming evil. Take a page out of present day and a lengthier kickass street fighter rpg where you become the best fighter in the world (or beyond) sounds like a shit ton of fun. Live A Live has some solid ideas, but they’re all too short in this game. I get it though, it’s a faithful remake of something from the snes days. Question is, why aren’t they pulling the timelines to become games in their own rites?
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I like Live A Live because it's a lot of cool concepts with little bloat. Chapters being 20 min to 2.5 hours long means that the pacing is always great.
Just because a concept is cool doesn't mean I want to play a 70 hour game about it; it needs to be able to pace itself well. On paper that sounds fine but most devs aren't able to sustain that kind of pacing interest. Don't get me wrong I've finished 100+ hour RPGs before but more quantity is not always good if it starts to drag
Agreed, but Square’s pulled it off well enough when they add in “hard mode” to certain RPGs. Chocobo’s Dungeon Everybuddy for example. Sure it’s a quick breeze on normal difficulty, but on hard mode it’s a challenge that adds more time but doesn’t feel bloated at the same time too. Live A Live has some unique concepts that could prove to be fun if implemented more often. I really felt like I was playing a new game each chapter and being disappointed whenever I saw the ending credits. Heck, balance it with some simulation stuff to engage me more idk.
Yeah. This idea of stretching things out as suggested by OP is a real negative in many modern games for me. I like the urgency and lack of bloat in old games.
I fear we'd see something like FF7R which is one of the best examples of a nice game being extended until it's just bloated.
Honestly I've really started to feel the same way. I like a beefy long game too but chrit frick do some of these new ones just drag on. It feels like bloat. You look at something like Cold Steel, which I do like but most of it just repeating dialogue, extraneous fluff and just an overall pointlessly slow pace. A lot of older games still managed to feel more epic despite being way shorter because the pace was just snappier and you were more focused on actual important shit than.... nothing.
Well if I am paying the 50 dollar price tag, I would want my money’s worth. Live A Live has great gameplay that is unseen mostly everywhere else still. Being able to finish the game in one weekend doesn’t make me feel satisfied though, especially considering I paid full price on something with little replay value.
>especially considering I paid full price on something with little replay value.
There's a couple of things for replayability, though, that hinges on how much you value said things. For example, there's the superboss hunts, going with different approaches for Oboro's chapter based on kill count, choosing the different successors from the Shifu's, fighting O. Dio's gang at full force in Sundown's, Captain Square in Cube's if you didn't beat that. Smaller things but if you're someone who enjoys replaying games, there's definitely some options
>I would want my money’s worth.
Define "money's worth" though. Honestly tell me what's more valuable in the long run. A game that's long that you'll play once or a game that's short but you can play over and over because it's just fun. A game that's loaded with side quests and shit does sound good on paper but it can also run the problem of just being too padded. Pacing is as important as anything else and if the larger game is just a slog filled with grinding and collection is it really better than a game that while shorter and with only a handful of more memorable quests that never wears out it's welcome that you get the urge to replay every so often? My favorite game, Phantasy Star 4 can be beaten under 20 hours with maybe a 100 percent play taking 25 ish but I've beaten it more times than I can remember. At the same time, much longer games I've barely ever even looked at again. A game doesn't have to be different every round either. Some times things can just be simple and fun. This is the problem with so many Ubisoft style games. It's all just the illusion of content but it's all fat no filling.
Money's worth is not simply time. LAL is short (it's like at best a 15-20 hour game if you 100% it, a little less than what it takes to beat Chrono Trigger), but as others have said it never wears out its welcome because it moves from point to point at too brisk a pace to be able to.
It's increasingly less meaningful when 50 dollars is half a McDonalds shift these days.
>especially considering I paid full price on something with little replay value.
See I think it's the opposite, the fact that Live A Live is so damn short means it's real easy for me to say "I feel like doing a Live A Live playthrough" at any time and I know I won't be devoting a significant chunk of my month/year to the prospect.
More to point you can always play or play to the part you like with little trouble. Like if you wake up and feel like doing Caveman you can just pop in and go. If you want to beat the whole game that's also doable. I can't tell you how many times I've thought a game I like and wanted to replay a certain part only to remember, frick that's like 35 hours in.
This mentality is why obnoxiously long RPGs are the norm. Time you have to spend on a videogame to complete it does not correlate with the quality of the game. While I do like long rpgs and am tolerant of the fluff they often have, short RPGs like Live A Live have their charm too since their short length and quick pacing gives them a more unique experience.
You should stop being alive.
Wrong board
>why aren’t they pulling the timelines to become games in their own rites?
Some concepts are a bit too specific to be too adaptable I feel. Wrestler, for example, well not much you can do with a fighting game RPG unless you give it a more bloated roster, some way to make it multiplayer with LAL's combat could be pretty neat now that I think about it... As for Ninja, well, Undertale. Mecha could probably be expanded fairly easily, add in more monsters of the week once the main story is over and have you travel to other places of Japan on the robot.
You can absolutely extend these concepts, but it's not what Live A Live should be.
Live A Live works specifically because it introduces a new idea, gets to the point, and then moves on to another idea before the last one wore out it's welcome. Slowing it down to focus on one thing for a long time would ruin it.
I just finished the near future chapter today. What a weird fricking fever dream of a chapter.
I appreciate the Mazinger Z reference
Akira even has the same voice as Koji did in Shin
Will just pirate out of spite and never play
I don't support butchered translations made by woke homosexuals
Live A Live isn't meant to be long at all, Tokita himself doesn't like long games, all of his stuff is on the short side, LaL at its core is a product of all of its different parts, more than other games.
Arguably the fact that the chapters are all pretty short enforces this further, since effectively they're all pretty gimmicky but none of the chapters' gimmick feels drawn out, it's one thing to play as Pogo for an hour or two, but fourty hours of that? Not sure most people would like it, same with 40 hours of puzzles with Sundown Kid or 40 hours of Masaru waiting for the boss of the day to use the move you want to learn.
LaL works because it's concise, every chapter has a different idea and goes straight to the point with zero padding or filler, you don't have the time to grow tired of those ideas, it's a well executed pastiche, although the remake kinds of fails to fully convey this due to the uniformed artstyle, having different artists for each chapter was a really strong point of the original, especially since they had artists like Aoyama and Shimamoto which were all thematic to their chapters, so there's also that kind of metanarrative to it that is unfortunately lost in the remake, even though there's some neat voice acting that does the trick in some cases.
>although the remake kinds of fails to fully convey this due to the uniformed artstyle, having different artists for each chapter was a really strong point of the original
Being fair, in-game the remake does keep the different "styles" per chapter, just compare how the park in Mecha looks opposed to the hill in Kung Fu, the game itself is about as uniform as the original was between chapters, but yeah the actual artwork being more standardized is a bit of a loss.