Live A Live review – a game’s worth of occasionally excellent, always intriguing JRPG side stories

The RPG is the genre in which side activities are always threatening to take centre stage. Many classic specimens are built around a more conscious antagonism between main and secondary content than you’ll find in, say, today’s open world games, where everything is available for consumption at any time. Think of how Tetra Master had you leaving the plot on hold for days in Final Fantasy VIII, or the dangerously more-ish Sokoban-style block puzzles in the older Wild Arms games. It’s in spaces like these that RPG designers sometimes conceal their best, or at least, strangest ideas, away from the stresses and constraints of the central production.

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