Live A Live - Gameplay

Gameplay

Live A Live contains the basic elements of a role-playing video game. The characters explore dungeons, towns, or similar areas, fight enemies, and gain experience points to level up. However, the game does some things that are unusual for the genre, such as eschewing magic points and money, and automatically restoring the characters' health between battles.

The game's turn-based tactics-like battles take place on a 7x7 square grid, in which the character and enemies may move freely and use typical RPG commands. Certain attacks can change the grid's tiles into elemental areas, which damage those not resistant to them. As in roguelikes, enemies receive a turn after the player moves or completes an action - however, some actions take longer to execute than others. Each character and enemy has unique abilities with different strengths, range, and charge time. While there is no limit to the use of a specific skill, a more powerful skill may have a greater charge time, allowing the enemy multiple turns to attack. Using multiple characters allows for a wide variety of strategies to be employed. Characters can be inflicted with status ailments, and certain items, attacks, and skills can raise or lower a character or enemy's stats while in battle. When a character's hit points reach zero, they collapse and are unable to move, but can be revived by using a healing item or spell. However, if they are hit when in the knocked-out state, they permanently disappear from battle. Certain enemies may be linked to a single leader; when the leader is destroyed, they will "break down".

Each chapter contains some variations on the standard formula. Contact, the prehistoric chapter, is told without a single line of dialogue, as the cavemen had not yet developed language. Items are created by combining raw materials such as sticks and rocks. Pogo, the protagonist of the chapter, has a strong sense of smell and uses it to track monsters and solve other puzzles. Inheritance, the kung-fu chapter, allows the player to choose between three different pupils, all with different abilities, and train them. The chosen pupil fights alongside the master at the end of the chapter and takes his place in the final chapter. Secret Orders, the ninja chapter, employs stealth game elements. The chapter is open-ended, allowing the player to complete it in a variety of ways. The player can strive to kill all one hundred humans in the chapter, or avoid killing any of them. Wandering, the cowboy chapter, involves the player gathering supplies, using them to make traps, and assigning them to the different townsfolk to set up. For every trap set, the difficulty of the final battle decreases. The modern day chapter, The Strongest, resembles a fighting game, consisting only of bouts against martial arts masters. The player can fight the masters in any order and learn their abilities by being hit with them. In Flow, the near-future chapter, the protagonist is able to read minds, which opens up more dialogue and is sometimes needed to progress through the plot. The player can upgrade items to make new, often better ones. Mechanical Heart, the sci-fi chapter, is purely story-driven, with no battles other than the final boss and an optional arcade game.

King of Demons, the hidden medieval fantasy chapter, plays the most like a traditional RPG, being the first chapter to employ random battles. The final chapter is the most open-ended, allowing the player to choose any combination of protagonists and search for weapons and items to prepare for the final battle.