When Live A Live was first announced to be getting a 2.5 HD remake for the Nintendo Switch, a lot of people hadn’t heard of the original game. That was because it was a title for the original Super Famicom, and it was so ahead of its time that it couldn’t really be what it wanted to be in terms of looks and sound. After all, the game had eight different stories in eight different time periods featuring eight different heroes. That’s a lot of stuff to try and cram into one title during the early 1990s. So a Switch remake was very well deserved in its own right.
The question was, would it be able to do well in the modern day compared to the earlier days of gaming? The answer to that appears to be a resounding ‘yes,’ because as noted on Twitter, a producer for Live A Live has revealed that the game has shipped 500K units worldwide. Plus, there is the digital sales element which would be added to that.
Now, there are some who would say “but it didn’t cross the million mark! Isn’t that the standard for a successful video game?” The answer to that depends on the context of the title itself. In the case of Live A Live, it wasn’t meant to be the “next great RPG title” like other ones of the 2.5 HD subgenre. This was merely a chance for an older game to get its due in a time when it could be appreciated more. Again, the game never left Japan before and was very much ahead of its time in terms of RPG mechanics and what you could do in it.
For example, in the Imperial China arc, you play as a martial arts master who must choose their successor. How you choose that successor is not only dependent on how you train the students, but the other two students don’t exactly meet the best of fates. Or in the story that features a ninja, you have two paths you can take. You can either kill everyone in a castle that you’re tasked with infiltrating, or, you can try and do a no-kill run. Either option is valid, but the option of such a stealth run was basically unheard of at the time.
This doesn’t even touch upon the “endgame” section of the title where you’ll have to connect with all the characters you’ve met and bring them together to fight a great evil that has spanned their timelines. These were grand concepts that could not be fully understood back then because of graphical limitations.
Clearly, the sales show that there were people ready to appreciate it now.
Source: Twitter
