so a few years back on a different, now dead, blog i wrote about live-a-live, released in 1994 for the super famicom, exclusively in japan. back then i wrote about it in contrast to octopath traveler, the team asano rpg released in 2018 for nintendo switch. i have some regrets. it was probably one of the reasons i stopped blogging back then lmao, it was not very well written and i tried to do like a magazine style numerical score? terrible idea.
that's what i knew then but the regrets pile up: it wasn't very well researched for one, i had no real idea about the absoultely pivotal role takashi tokita had in bringing team asano to the world. i also shamefully wiped to what i assumed was the final boss and upon seeing the credits roll accepted this as "a canonical ending" like some kind of any% speedrunner douchebag. to be totally fair this is the exact point at which i quit with octopath traveler, but i was so incredibly ready to see the credits for that game, whereas i really really enjoyed live-a-live.
it was a bad faith logic allowing me to "compare apples to apples" quitting at that point in the game, speedrunner culture is a poison to your enjoyment of media. do not give it any quarter.
anywho, live-a-live got one of those fancy "hd-2d" remakes in the years following my blogpost. having declared octopath traveler inferior in every way except for graphics it was kinda vindicating, like yeah, imagine if octopath was good, that's live-a-live. i set it aside for [checks watch] 4 YEARS?? i was skeptical on its value over just emulating the aeon genesis fan translation, and wasn't in any hurry. but then i played another game that really got me thinking.
readers that game was the dragon quest iii hd-2d remake (2024). i've never played a dragon quest before, but i've heard that dq iii is one of the more beloved ones. i'd usually play such an influential game from the original release but early dq games had this horrible english localisation where they'd use "thee" and "thou" and other gagworthy ye olde englishisms. there are some hacks out there to "delocalise" some of the early dq games, but they all have bugs. in general it seems that the romhacking community around dq is pretty weak. classic games like dragon quest v for the super famicom have very poor reviews about the quality of their fan translations, and the original hd-2d remake, dragon quest iv (psx, 2001) has never seen even that level of attention. the consensus is "why bother, we got official localisations later" but the tiny dual screen nintendo ds versions are not what i'm looking for, and i really really can't vibe with the art style of the games that ended up getting switch ports - they're ugly as sin! i'd way prefer to grind my clit to dust on an old famicom game with spritework that someone cared about than suffer under that mess! seriously, y'know the delisted final fantasy iv, v & vi games that got pulled from steam and app stores when the pixel remasters came out? you know how ugly they are? that's the art style for dragon quest on the switch.
whatever, i'm picky, but the dq iii hd-2d remake promised to fix that! a decent localisation, on one screen, and that screen is not handheld, and it's using that gorgeous diorama lookin art style i really liked from octopath. remakes and remasters chafe my ass lately, i want new games if i'm paying real money, it always stings to spend money on a game i know i can emulate for free, but this dq iii remake seemed like one i could justify.
long story short, i don't think i like dragon quest.
both of these remakes were team asano projects. i can't remember where i heard this, so take it with a grain of salt but supposedly the dq iii remake was entrusted to some third party studio or other, and things were going badly, which is when the asano crew got called in to fix the game. maybe that's true, maybe it's not. but the theory i'm brewing up is that team asano needs someone like takashi tokita with a sense of drama to make good work. we'll see how my theory holds up in future posts (lmao).
so who is takashi tokita? well he got his big break on final fantasy iv, before directing the original live-a-live, and parasite eve. he was also one of many people with directing credits on chrono trigger. later he'd work with tomoya asano on the 2007 3d remake of final fantasy iv for the nintendo ds which led to the 2009 final fantasy gaiden: 4 heroes of light, also for the ds, which in turn would find a spiritual successor in team asano's bravely default (2012).
see the thing is between these two remakes one clearly has a high level of care, and polish, and a sense of cinema. not clichéd "cinematic" like uncharted or the last of us or whatever, it cares about the viewers' experience of the story. and that's the game with takashi tokita working on it. but this could be unfair, maybe dragon quest iii's (alleged) early development woes are to blame, maybe it's just inevitable with the nature of dq iii being a very vanilla rpg and live-a-live being an anthology spanning a huge cast and eight distinct settings and eras.
take for example the voice acting, in dq iii i tried keeping it on, but it made the cutscenes so unbearably long and boring! dragon quest dialogue is not improved by adding voices, dragon quest iii is not a game that cares at all about being relatable or giving characters personal motivations. hell your party members can be hired and fired at will. "there is a bad guy, you must stop him", is all you get, i don't know what bad stuff he does, but yeah let's go i spose. it feels like they had to do voice acting because "full voice acting" is just a mandatory selling point. "i wanna play a game, not read a book!" etc. fucking swine, read, use your imagination, go at your own pace. you'll get smarter and enjoy the game more once you remember how to read.
when i booted up live-a-live i expected to have to do the same thing, this game wasn't designed with voice acting in mind after all! it's a 1994 super famicom rpg!! but gamers? the voice acting was good as hell? and drew me in to the characters? and rarely felt like it was dragging out scenes unnecessarily? the aeon genesis fan translation of the original game had these cute custom fonts for each scenario, and i loved that, and i missed that little touch in the remake. so having voice actors putting a bit of individuality behind the characters really made up for that. in particular i loved lei kugo, the female disciple in the imperial china scenario. her brash delivery made me all doki-doki, so fucken good.
another big upgrade for live-a-live was the rearranged yoko shimomura score. honestly this ost is such a banger, just hit after hit. the near future scenario theme is probably my favourite, along with its gundam anthem for the era's saviour, buriki daiō. in the original game i found the far future scenario genuinely thrilling, and the suspense is heightened here with the new arrangements, shimomura-sensei's dissonant electronic pieces really shine in this scenario's remake treatment. i read somewhere that the midi from the original was lost, so shimomura-sensei had to basically rescore the whole game. calling it a rearrangement is a bit of an insult to her hard work honestly. and speaking of insults, there's 5 trillion different chrono trigger scores and rearrangements etc that you can buy, because nobuo uematsu wrote a couple of those songs, but the only version square has released of the live-a-live ost is from the original super famicom soundchip, with super short loops that do not give these incredible tracks the time they need to set their incredible moods.
justice for shimomura!
the only tracks i think weren't substantially improved were the more orchestral numbers. yes they arguably sound more like what shimomura-sensei would have done if the super famicom could play cd-quality audio and square let her hire an orchestra. but i think what she was forced to do under the limitations of the day sound far more interesting than the generic timbre of the orchestra we've been forced to accept for centuries at this point. i really bristle at orchestral soundtracks, don't get me started.
so i really fucking hated the dq iii music lmao. it's all orchestral and severely generic, but also feels kinda manic? like when they play christmas carols in the shopping centre. i'm here trying to Get Stuff Done but i'm being stalked by the spirits of toxic positivity past, present and future. stressful! i feel like the 8-bit famicom rendition probably wouldn't improve things a whole lot, this also seems to be just the nature of dragon quest iii.
graphics wise live-a-live is once again the clear winner. it helps that eight popular mangaka were hired to make concept art for each of their scenarios in the original game, so things were bound to look good. but y'know who did character design for dragon quest? AKIRA FUCKING TORIYAMA. so it's by no means an unfair advantage. having multiple artists does provide a certain sense of variety, but also i had never heard of most of the live-a-live mangaka and akira toriyama wrote fucking dragon ball so i'm willing to call it a wash. the boss sprites in live-a-live in particular are a highlight, delivering the same sense of "awwwh fuck here's a huge dude" that the octopath games did so well.
in general i kind of didn't like the dq iii sprites, particularly for the party, once i got to the part of the game where you could pay to rename and restyle your non-erdrick party members i came to some kind of peace with things, but in general the human sprites just look a bit fucked to me. big head but not chibi, everone has normal proportioned limbs and torso and everything, their heads are just too big. nasty. the allure of the hd-2d thing is that you can do the charming parts of pixel art, while including the niceties of 3d lighting and particle effects and scenery etc. superdeform your human sprites you heathens!
but the 3d parts of the dq iii remake i have some real issues with as well, namely south facing doors. i really struggled to find them a lot of the time, because the 3d building models would occlude my character's sprite with a big chunk of wall. i was worried this would be an issue in live-a-live, but that game which released two years before the dq iii remake simply makes southern walls go transparent when your sprite gets close??
also live-a-live uses some really interesting low angles in some cutscenes, really bringing you into the little video diorama, doing honest to god cinematography. i think dq iii used a non-default camera angle like once? and from memory it was basically the same bird's eye kinda thing but looking at the town from the north rather than the south.
it's things like this that made dq iii feel cheap as hell and phoned in. and yeah, maybe it was, asano was just executive-producer, i feel like loads of it was just left to contractors, and no one from the original game, certainly not anyone like yuji horii, was involved with it. whereas tokita was clearly very hands on with the live-a-live remake, and working with his protege, someone he went back with for fifteen years. not to fail to mention again the love and care yoko shimomura put into her score.
but also, maybe, just maybe, tomoya asano is very competent but lacks artistic vision? i worry about this in general with square enix, who is going to replace the people who made square what it was in the 20th century? i don't feel positive in the slightest!
you'll notice that i didn't write about gameplay at all, and that's because i do feel like that's a very unfair comparison between these two games. i'll leave it for later when i write about parasite eve i think, because tokita does really interesting stuff with his use of space in his battle systems.
all in all i was very surprised that the game that i thought would benefit from a remake was such a dud, and the game i was skeptical about really impressed me. if you haven't done it i'd highly recommend playing the live-a-live hd-2d remake. it's a great localisation, done with care, that brings a fairly obscure game (at least to baka gaijin like us in the west), to the forefront. its prestige is nowhere near that of dragon quest, or even of titles like chrono trigger, and that's a tragedy. this game should be recognised as an all-timer. go play that shit!
was dq iii bad because asano didn't have a strong creative presence like tokita in the room? or was it just a sloppy outsourcing job? all i know is octopath traveler ii is another game i cannot be bothered to finish, and maybe i just don't like dragon quest
in fact, maybe i just don't like fantasy in general. we'll come back to that idea some other time though, i promise