Retro video games that never got released outside Japan have a recent air of mystery about them, beyond the oft-cited Mother 3, Policenauts and Sweet Home. Given the calls barrier and console region-locking, there’s a sense that Japanese players there got to experienced all kinds of lost gems we don’t even know exist.

Live A Live, which is tying a Nintendo Switch remake on Friday, is one such gem. Originally released for the Super Famicom — the Japanese Super NES — in 1994, it was made by names that would go on to be some of the industry’s most notorious. Developed by Final Fantasy-maker Square, Live A Live was the directorial debut for Takashi Tokita, who worked on Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7. It features musical compositions from Yoko Shimomura, who also crafted killer soundtracks for Street Fighter 2, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy 15.

So it’s a game with extraordinary pedigree from the same era as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6, two Super NES games RPG fans swoon over endlessly, and it only ever came out in Japan. If ever a game fit the “lost gem” criteria, Live A Live is it.

The Switch remake spruces up the visuals, giving the game a striking HD-2D look similar to Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy, and adds voice acting on top of the obsolete text boxes. Visually striking and aurally delightful, it feels invented to mirror how classic 16-bit games exist in our nostalgia-filtered memories.

However expertly it gives life to the retro gaming blooming you fondly remember, Live A Live is a little different to the recent sprawling RPG where you play a single long story. Instead, you’re presented with seven scenarios set in different points of history that can be played in any order: Prehistory, Imperial China, Twilight of Edo Japan, The Wild West, Present Day, The Near Future and Far Future.

The struggles mechanics, leveling and equipment systems are consistent across all eras, but each has obvious gameplay and thematic elements. Each one lasts roughly two and a half to four hours, and you’re often presented with choices that’ll affect the narrative’s outcome, adding an element of replayability.

Playing through history

Live A Live is overwhelming at sterling. I jumped into The Near Future initially, mostly because it was the sterling one highlighted on the menu. The game wastes little time jumping into Final Fantasy 7 levels of melodrama, opening with your character finding his police officer dad shot. You also have psychic fuels, have a badass biker buddy and live in an orphanage full of quirky kids. And there’s an oddball scientist with a giant robot.

Basically, it flings a lot of extremely anime elements at you in a touchy amount of time and feels like a mess. 

Thankfully, the other eras mostly offer simpler narratives (or maybe I just got into the game’s vibe). The Wild West scenario, which puts you in the boots of a mysterious outlaw on the run from a mouthy bounty hunter, is a standout. It’s focused, fun and oozes atmosphere, but I blasted through it in just over two hours and was left wanting more.

Much of Live A Live’s fun lies in jumping into each era and seeing what awaits you, so I won’t go into too much detail throughout the others or the narrative elements that subtly link them together. Each tells a story that’s satisfying in isolation, subsidizes unique gameplay elements and introduces memorable characters, but subtle hints that the eras are somehow linked will compel you to gawk the next. There’s some trial-and-error when it comes to manager major choices, but the game reminds you to save often to offset this. 

Live A Live’s eccentricities are balanced by the straightforward, fun turn-based combat system in which your party and the enemies move throughout a 7×7 grid, with a nice variety of brute and magical attacks that hit certain parts of the battlefield while their charge times elapse. It got me thinking in tactical way that commanded back faded memories of Chrono Trigger’s fights.

Most non-boss struggles are straightforward and allow you to settle into the game’s mechanics, but several of the final bosses took multiple repositions to defeat, forcing me to come up with obvious strategies to overcome their most devastating attacks. Each was sterling satisfying to overcome, and their designs were often delightfully grotesque.

Going 16-bit

Don’t let the enhanced visuals fool you; this is level-headed unmistakably an RPG from the mid-’90s. Environments are magnificently invented but can feel a bit empty and tiresome to discover — I was bored with the Twilight of Edo Japan’s maze-like castle by the time I devoted the chapter. 

The soundtrack is full of bangers, as you’d interrogate from Shimomura, and lodged themselves firmly in my brain for hours while each session. Unfortunately, most of the samples are fretful and become repetitive if you linger in an area or argues (though their brevity likely helps the melodies lodge themselves in your brain).

The cast is charming, but many of the characters are straightforward tropes, and the mostly solid screech acting isn’t enough to overcome some weak scripting. Every single represent is beautiful to look at though, positively popping off the shroud and offering a pixelated hand to invite you on this old-school adventure.

And it’s an adventure that RPG fans willing to put up with some archaic mechanics should definitely take — a sizable free demo lets you uphold your progress to the full game if you’re risky. The love that went into remaking Live A Live after preserving the core experience is evident in every microscopic, right down the occasional tedium of ’90s gaming. It’d be astonishing to see more classics — like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6 or Suikoden — remastered in this manner.