I was playing through LiveALive remastered shortly after trying out Octopath Traveler (and Triangle Strategy) and I was like: is Octopath Traveler a spiritual sequel that is just worse in most aspects? Like, you got the eight stories and those wonderful big sprites in the battle system and those field abilities and it all felt very similar. Except LiveALive has a much more interesting battle system because of the positioning. It’s not as involved as Triangle’s tactics, but there’s even different directions for your character to face and it costs time to turn around and abilities have all these different ranges and sometimes push you around and I just love how it feels like simple chess and how it all interacts in subtle ways. Makes it a lot more fun to me than the straight up Dragon Quest battles you get in Octopath. Which I guess is more inspired by Bravely Default, which is why it goes for “let’s not have any of this SRPG stuff and just make it more about managing your ability points” I think?
I don’t don’t know much about these games, I haven’t played a lot of JRPGs. I’m more of an SRPG boy. But I do miss the dungeon and world navigation aspect sometimes. So let me ask: what other titles do it like LiveALive and jam a little SRPG battle system into their JRPG frame.
Ones I can think of right now:
-Emerald Dragon
-Lunar Silver Star Story + Eternal Blue
-Popolocrois 1+2
Though tbf I found none of those quite as engaging as LiveALive.
I just watched some of Tim’s video explaining the Octopath battle system and the turn order management reminded me a bit of LiveALive as well. I mean, you don’t get ability points in LiveALive because abilities are free to use, but they may take time to execute. So in Octopath you may let one of your team mates “defend” to get ability points and advance their turn order for next turn, and in LiveALive you can do the opposite by “passing” so that your other party members’ turn orders are advanced and so that they come up without the enemy taking a turn, because attacking advances the enemy’s turn order, and it may just be better to let some of your other members who may be charging up a bigger attack or who may be in a better position get their hit in before the enemy. And you can always see all of the enemy’s action bars in LiveALive so choosing which one to attack first is just as important as in Octopath, which shows the turn order at the bottom. I actually prefer the visualization as bars though.
Oh boy, what did I even want to say? I really admire this remake of an old 1994 JRPG. So simple and elegant and clever. So ahead of its time. Still is?
Many have tried but this is almost impossible to do well because the added burden of handling movement and positioning does not go well with the rapid succession of random battles. In Koudelka for example movement adds almost no strategic depth but just slows battles down to a crawl. Most of these games have to do weird compromises; Live a Live has one character and one enemy act every turn and nobody else doing anything, it doesn’t feel great at all when you get more than one character. Koudelka has very few random battles as I recall to compensate for the slow pace.
Other games that try this:
Treasure Hunter G
Inindo
Robotrek
Ikenfell
Wild Arms 4/5
Valkyrie Profile 2
Arguably Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, Hybrid Heaven and Quest 64
Wild Arms 4 was the best implementation as I recall, it had a severely reduced grid (just 7 squares) which worked beautifully
Also! Games like Persona 1 and Chrono Trigger have positioning matter in battle but you can’t change your position. Works in CT, doesn’t work in P1
Radiant Historia kinda does this with a little 3x3 grid for battles, but in practice I found it contributed very little to gameplay.
EDIT: upon researching, the enemies are on a 3x3 grid, and you can push/pull them around for minor effects and for certain attacks to hit more of the enemies. I am not sure this counts.
Possibly building on this, I am Setsuna has skills that can bunch enemies together or push them away from you, which has has… some strategic value. (Can’t recall now whether Chrono Trigger had similar mechanics). Then Lost Sphear added player-controlled positioning on each turn.
I loved that system in 4/5. It’s roughly analogous to characters being front row/back row, but with added nuance where enemies can flank or group up in one tile, and your healer could be protected from the front lines, but has to run into an ally’s tile to heal them.
rhapsody: a musical adventure has srpg-style battles but to my recollection it just meant that you spent the first turn of every battle parking all your guys right in the enemies’ faces and you’d just play it as if there was no grid or movement at all from there. it had a rerelease on the ds that dropped the pretense and just gave it a normal turn-based battle system.