Live A Live dev on remake’s origins, why it’s HD-2D

Following the announcement of Live A Live’s HD-2D remake, Japanese magazine Famitsu sat down with original director Takashi Tokita, to talk about the game’s development.

The new Switch version served as the perfect opportunity to re-release the game, something the team tried to do many times over the years. Tokita dove into a number of other topics as well including why the team settled on the HD-2D art style.

Here’s our translation of the excerpt from Famitsu:

It has been about 28 years since the game was released on Super Famicom, and now that the highly anticipated HD-2D remake has been announced, could you start by explaining how you came to develop the remake?

Tokita: I’ve pushed internally for a remake or sequel a number of times, but the circumstances never quite worked and the idea was abandoned. One of the big reasons we were able to create the remake was because we joined up with Mr. Asano’s team, who was responsible for the HD-2D RPG Octopath Traveler from four years ago. When we were planning the project, we wondered if we could use HD-2D to create a Live A Live remake, and after discussing with them we made it a reality.

As an outside observer, Octopath Traveler left a big impact on me. It made me realize that sort of an approach would be possible. I think that a full 3D remake of the game would have changed the look of the game too much, but an HD-2D remake fuses the beauty of pixel art with the unique effects possible with 3D.

There are several plots from the get-go in Live A Live. The science fiction sections might be better suited to 3D, while hand drawn art can be used to highlight more important elements. HD-2D allows for a lot of variety, which is something we kept in mind from the very start of development.

Live A Live will launch for Switch on July 22, 2022. This marks the first time the RPG will be released outside of Japan.

Translation provided by Jarop on behalf of Nintendo Everything.