Live A Live Review (PS5) | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

Last year saw the remake of Live A Live launch on Nintendo Switch, some 27 years after its original 1994 launch on the Super Famicom. This marks the first time the title has been made available outside of Japan, and now that it's coming to PS5 and PS4, we're happy to report that Live A Live is still a unique and ground-breaking experience.

Straightaway, the game presents you with a choice of seven characters to play as, each spanning a different time period. There’s Pogo of the prehistoric era, Masaru Takahara of the present day, Cube of the distant future, and others in between. Choosing one of these characters won’t lock you into playing the whole game as them, instead simply offering a starting point. Each of these seven characters has a small chapter, easily completed in a maximum of three hours, which forms the wider game — and there’s no set order you need to play them in.

You might expect each of these chapters to be the same thing, repackaged to fit a new time period — but that isn’t the case at all. Each of the characters has their own individual personalities and oftentimes abilities. Prehistoric Pogo has no verbal skills, communicating with his peers in a series of grunts, but he has an impeccable sense of smell which can be used to track enemies. Akira of the near future can read minds, and Oboromaru of Edo Japan can turn invisible using his Shroud of Shadows. Each chapter has a different storyline, with a hint of a connection that will make itself apparent in the final chapter of Live A Live. Some chapters feel like a completely different genre, most notably Present Day where the entire thing is set up as a Street Fighter-esque fighting game. It makes for a really interesting experience, allowing each