Live A Live’s characters can’t hold the weight of its time-hopping story

polygon.com:

When I studied theology in a past life, there was a lot of smoke blown over how society had an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” (Thank you, Jean-François Lyotard). Metanarratives, in which all of history fits into an overarching structure that imbues meaning to its individual parts, weren’t cool anymore, and were met with skepticism.

But if metanarratives are out of vogue, Live A Live didn’t seem to get the memo.

The multi-era, time-bending adventure follows eight characters through their individual epochs, from prehistoric to the distant future. Seven scenarios are immediately available to play from the outset, and their completion unlocks an eighth scenario set in the Middle Ages. After the eighth scenario is completed, the “final chapter” unlocks and integrates all of the characters into one momentous story of humanity’s struggle against an eternal evil.

Released in 1994, the original Live A Live was Takashi Tokita’s second game at Square (now Square Enix) after his work as a lead game designer on Final Fantasy 4 (released as Final Fantasy 2 in the U.S.) and before his work directing Chrono Trigger. So, basically, Live A Live is sandwiched in Tokita’s catalog between two of the greatest games of the ’90s — if not all time. And it reflects that milieu. Creating multiple narrative threads in a video game and then retroactively piecing them all together was ingenious in 1994, and it remains ambitious today. It’s a literary move attempted by a master of his craft.

Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find a binary made by the publishing industry between literary and genre fiction. Literary fiction is sold as character-driven and realistic — and simply labeled “fiction” — while genre fiction is said to be driven by