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| I can't let you do that, Nanmo. |
Huh? What in the fuck is this? This is an odd pick at first glance, I know. What in the world does it have to do with the spooky season? We'll get to that, but I first need to explain what this even is. Live A Live is a Japan-only Squaresoft RPG for the Super Nintendo, a somewhat little obscure gem buried back there. Behind your Final Fantasies and Chrono Triggers are a whole bunch of weird and wild Squaresoft games, and this is one of them. Live A Live's unique conceit is that it's split into a bunch of smaller chapters that you choose from in any order, each with their own protagonist and genre setting. There's a prehistoric setting with cave people in the Stone Age, a Wild West setting with cowboys and bandits, a ninja setting with lots of stealthy options, and so forth. After you clear the initial seven, you unlock some extra ones and the true plot of the game is revealed. Without spoiling anything, it's full of a lot of shocking twists that really surprised me back when I played it. It's absolutely worth a look. As to our purposes? Well, a single chapter of this can be blown through in about an hour or two. I fired Live A Live back up and ran through the very first chapter I played back on that first playthrough; the Science Fiction Chapter. As a microcosm out of context, it has a lot of subtle terrors going for it. Let's do the time warp again and fling ourselves forward into the future.
Aboard the starship Cogito Ergosum (HEH CUTE), a small round helper robot is activated to assist the crew. The robot's default name is Cube (HEH IRONY), but I opted to name it Nanmo this time because at this point I wear Dirty Pair on my goddamned sleeves. The influence of Alien is fairly obvious: there's a crew coming out of hypersleep and they actually have a real dangerous alien specimen kept in the cargo bay. The Behemoth looks and sounds quite terrifying, but it's all locked up, promise. When the comm antenna goes awry, your maker Kato and the ship's pilot, Kirk (who keeps talking about warp speed D'YA GET IT) go out on a space walk to fix things, and Kirk is killed. His girlfriend Rachel gets overcome with grief and actually drags his body into her room and pretends nothing is wrong. Yikes. More bad shit happens and the Behemoth gets loose, killing another crew member and injuring Rachel. The Science Fiction Chapter is not playing around, and it's so light on battles that they may as well not exist. You can play a computer game called Captain Square in the break room that's quite challenging (unless you find Kirk's memory card to allow for checkpoints), and the only other fight in this scenario is with the final boss. More on that in a bit, but as for the Behemoth? It roams the ship semi-randomly, and contact with it leads to instant death. We're in survival horror territory in space. The Cogito Ergosum itself doesn't have a lot to it, with only three floors between you and space. Hell, there's a bad ending where you can fling yourself out of the airlock and drift in space. Yikes. There's very little music as well, but when bad shit happens? The music takes its own foreboding turns.
Eventually you find a military message for your liason, Corporal Darth (OKAY I GET IT) that's basically the same goddamn MO as the Company with the Xenomorph in Alien. Blah blah get specimen blah blah crew expendable blah blah. Difference is, Darth isn't the one behind all the fucked up shit happened. No, it's just that your Mother Computer has gone haywire and is trying to kill you. It even says "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" at you, which makes me wonder if this was a cute reference added by the fan translation or if Square are a bunch of Star Trek nerds. Either way, our brave little robot hacks into the Captain Square time and has itself a boss fight with the computer. This boss fight sucks. All the computer does is outheal you, and I spent a good goddamn 10 minutes fighting and healing and fighting and healing before I figured out that you could get right next to it. That triggers your counterattack, and that plus attacking does enough damage to outpace the healing and let you win. With Mother Computer 0D-10's logic circuits fizzled, everything is fine and the two surviving crew members can head back to Earth. Darth even killed the Behemoth for us, so that's kind of a fun subversion; he wanted to live and didn't give a shit about company orders. The Sci-Fi Chapter of Live A Live is a neat little diversion into RPG horror, and it's strange to see such a focus on exploration rather than battling in a Square RPG. It's welcome though, as the mood this chapter sets is great all on its own. Definitely give the game a go, though. The rest is solid. Not spooky, but solid. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
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