Got Live a eviL(Live a Live?) remake for my birthday so I decided to go through it since it's pretty short. Tackling the stories one by one in the order I feel like doing them. I played the SNES version a LONG time ago on an emulator so I kinda know how this all goes down but I'm enjoying going through it again with the updated visuals and added Voice Acting. I guess there's some Quality of Life improvements too but honestly I don't remember enough of the original game to compare.
Far Future chapter: Basically a blend of Alien and 2001: A Space Oddity, played from the POV of a cute little robot on a spaceship coming back to earth with a dangerous creature and then shit starts going wrong almost immediately. So I like this chapter for it's pure "You're stuck on a spacecraft and everything is falling apart around you" vibe and also the lack of combat, but the main character doesn't really drive much of the action. You're just told to go from one place to another for about 60-90 minutes until the end and everyone else is driving the story, and as cool as the ship is, there's little to do on it other then go to the next plot point. The other issue is that despite only being 90 min long, it feels like shit happens way too fast. There's very little time to really get to know anyone on the crew and it's almost all frontloaded and after that it's just one problem after another in a cascading fashion with little room to breathe and it feels like it could have benefited from being like 30 minutes longer and have stuff more spaced out.
Western chapter: Bandits are going to invade a small town, you've been asked to help the townspeople fight the bandits. Everyone has seen this plot like 10 million times by now. With that said, it's nicely done and well paced and has a cool gimmick where instead of risking the townspeople directly, you have until dawn(about 8 minutes of real time) to search the town for useful supplies and then give them to people for them to set traps to thin out the invaders, so there's a puzzle element involved and if you pull it off, you only fight the boss instead of the boss and his entire gang(and it's quite amusing to watch the entire invasion fall flat from all your booby traps). This chapter feels a bit light hearted much of the time, with some the booby traps feeling comical, such as a setting a nudie poster to distract one of the bandits and a slingshot because....why not? There's a wierd twist near the end of the chapter too that I remember really well because of how WTF it comes across.
Marital Arts chapter: Set in Imperial China(not sure when that is), you're a martial arts master living on top of a mountain who decides to train some students to pass on his skills before he gets too old to do so. This chapter has a whole 3 act structure, where you go out and find 3 students, train them up and finally confront the nearby gang at their imposing fortress nearby to deal with them once and for all. Interestingly, the way you train your students is by fighting them, which makes them stronger, both via stats and experience, with each fight. However, there's no way to train them all equally and only one of them can be your student at the end, the one you paid the most attention too, so really it makes the most sense to pick one and spend all the training sessions beating them up over and over again to give them to maximum stat and level gains for the finale. And while after a while they do feel like they're getting tougher and more of a threat, it also feels like you're basically picking on them.
