This Isn’t My First Odio (original) (raw)

I’ve finished Live a Live with two different endings. There are a few others, but I think I’m done with it for the time being. There are SPOILERS for the game in what follows. I wrote about the first four chapters before, and as I mentioned, the Present Day one is a fighting game in turn-based style. You play as Masaru Takahara, who aspires to be the greatest fighter in the world. You have to fight six opponents in any order: a luchador, a sumo, Japanese and Thai martial artists, a former Soviet special forces member, and an American wrestler. When they use their special moves on you and survive them, you’re able to use them, sort of like a Blue Mage in Final Fantasy. Your final opponent is Odie O’Bright, who kills all of your former opponents.

In the near future, you play as Akira Tadokoro, a psychic teenager whose father, a riot police chief, was killed by a gang called the Crusaders when he was young. He and his sister Kaori live at an orphanage, and he’s friends with a taiyaki merchant named Kenichi Matsu, nicknamed Lawless, who was the leader of the Crusaders before Akira’s dad died.

There’s a lot of weird stuff in this chapter. Akira can read people’s minds, which is a separate option from talking to them. When Kaori’s turtle is dying, he asks local antiques dealer Doc Tobei for help, and the doctor is able to liquefy the reptile and transfer his consciousness into a robot, who then accompanies Akira on his journeys around the city and fights with the Crusaders.

There are various upgrades and items you can use to build up the robot turtle Taroimo’s strength and abilities; he doesn’t level up from experience. This is the only time period with a zoomed-out overworld, in this case the city streets, where you can see enemies approaching. You eventually find out that the gang is working for a scientist who wants to use the same technique the Doc used on Taroimo, liquefying a whole bunch of people in order to revive the dark god Odeo.

For the final battle, Akira uses the Steel Titan, an ancient Babylonian giant robot the Doc had been keeping in his shop.

The far future is another weird one, where there are no enemies to fight except the final boss, except in the context of a meta-game called Captain Square. Instead, it’s sort of 2001 combined with Alien, with a spaceship crew transporting a monster, called a Behemoth, to Earth for study.
The engineer Yoshiyuki Kato builds a cute spherical robot he calls Cube, and it’s this robot that you control. In order to advance the story, you have to constantly move around the ship, the Cogito Ergo Sum, to find people or information.

There is an indication on the map of where you have to go, but I believe it only shows up if you’re on the correct floor. You also have to avoid the alien monster after it escapes, and make sure you don’t get sucked into space.

The story involves the crew members’ relationships with each other and attempts to fix problems on the ship. Several of the characters are given names that fit the theme, including Hor Bishop, Kirk Wells, and Corporal Darthe. It turns out that the issues are being caused by the rogue AI OD-10, and the only way to fight it is for Cube to interface with the Captain Square game. At the end, Cube finally befriends Darthe, who hates robots.

You can play these chapters in any order. I did them chronologically, but it’s not a requirement. After you’ve finished all seven, you can access the Middle Ages chapter, which is set in a fantasy version of medieval Europe where the people are pagan instead of Catholic, as there are references to multiple gods.

In many ways, it’s a miniature version of a typical sword-and-sorcery RPG. Set in the Kingdom of Lucerne, you play as Oersted, a warrior who wins the hand of the Princess Alathea in marriage in a tournament. When she’s kidnapped, he sets out with the magician Streibough, one of his opponents in the tournament, to rescue her. You later recruit Hasshe, the hero who had previously defeated the Lord of Dark, and his old companion, the priest Uranus.

I think this is the first time in the game you get to control a party of four, and they all have their own specialties.

A lot of the enemies in this chapter are named after fears or other mental conditions. After you defeat the Lord, however, Hasshe dies and Streibough betrays Oersted, claiming that he was truly in love with the Princess. You don’t learn that until after he tricks Oersted into killing the King and becoming a fugitive, however. You then have to fight through the villain’s lair again with just one person. After defeating Streibough, Oersted decides that he has nowhere else to go and has gotten no reward for his heroism, so he turns to evil, either becoming or merging with Odio.

The final chapter also takes place in Lucerne, but a later one that’s run down and abandoned after Oersted’s turn to villainy. The main heroes of the first seven chapters are all transported there from their own times and places. You choose which one you want to be the leader, then track down the others. You can only have four party members, but you can switch out any of them except the leader. Enemies from the earlier chapters will show up, so you’ll be fighting both robots and woolly mammoths. It’s annoying that there are a few monsters who are resistant to any attack you can use, although you can always flee if you need to. Each hero has a dungeon where they can find their ultimate weapon. I used Lei Kugo as my leader, and the first time I took on Odio, I used the first three others I found, Oboromaru, Akira, and Pogo.

The caveman has some very hard-hitting attacks once you level him up enough. After that, I found out from a walkthrough that you need to have found each hero and put them in your party at least once in order to get the best ending, so I did that. Masaru and the Sundown Kid were both at quite low levels, as it’s impossible to build up the former due to the lack of enemies, and it’s not necessary for the latter in his chapter. Cube doesn’t level up, but can use the same upgrades that Taroimo did. It was nice of Kato to make him backwards compatible like that. The kingdom feels a little cramped, as it only has a few locations, but has to work in all of the bonus dungeons. You’re going to be visiting Hero’s Rest a lot. The second time I took on Odio, it was with Sundown instead of Akira.

After that, you have to redo all the final battles from the first seven chapters, although they’re generally easier due to the higher levels, and O. Dio from the Old West no longer has any gang members accompanying him.

The final battle has all of the characters not in your active party showing up to help, and Oersted eventually having to strike the final blow himself. The Odio battles are long and involved, but I didn’t find them that difficult. The fights I remember having the most trouble with were O. Dio the first time (since I didn’t know how to get rid of his henchmen before the battle) and Streibough. You can also choose to play this chapter as Oersted, and it consists of redoing the boss battles from the opposite side, as the various forms of Odio. I never finished this, though, as Odeo the bird god was way outmatched by the Steel Titan. It might be worth trying again later, but I have a lot of other games to work on.