Live A Live director says HD-2D remake came about after Nintendo’s push for its return on the Virtual Console, more

According to Live A Live director Takashi Tokita, a big reason the HD-2D remake of Live A Live came to be was due to Nintendo’s interest in having it return on the Wii U Virtual Console for its 20th anniversary in 2015. Apparently the RPG had a number of supporters within the company.

Tokita shared the news during a recent live stream. He indicated that the remake wouldn’t have happened if Square Enix didn’t go out of its way to initially bring back Live A Live for its Virtual Console appearance. 

Tokita ended up sharing a number of other noteworthy tidbits during that same live stream. You can find the rundown of highlights below, courtesy of Jubern:

– First game he directed: he’s very attached to it, but as a producer he recognizes it was a commercial failure and never thought it’d come up for a remake
– The impulse came from Nintendo who asked them to put the game on Virtual Console for the 20th anniversary – some people over there really liked the game. There would never have been a remake without them unearthing LAL to begin with
– Game is (obviously) a melting pot of influences, he wanted people to experience all kind of situations and to be a showing of what games could bring to the table as a medium
– The game’s script was purposefully wrote to be impactful in a very manga/anime way (leading to stuff like the “Sodaro- Matsu!” in the post just before me). It was always wrote as if it would be voiced. Tokita himself wanted to be a voice actor before entering the game industry and is very knowledgeable about Japanese VO culture
– The way they selected voice actors is super simple: it’s mostly the actors Tokita had in his mind back in the day writing the characters or younger actors who played the game as kids and are passionate about it. I suppose the latter references directly people like Sugita Tomokazu (appears in all time periods) or Nakamura Yuichi (Oersted), while the former is about the older cast like Otsuka Akio, Inoue Kazuhiko, Ishimaru Hiroya.
– They took extra care in the remake to try and enhance the way the script works, by breaking down some dialog differently (some stuff that was one text box becomes two, so a catchphrase even more exposure) and timing music changes (such as Megalovania kicking in) to button presses advancing the text
– DraQue is the game that geared him towards the industry
– He candidly says that the game’s structure is 100% lifted from DQ4
– Asano’s team HD2D engine reveal was a “You did it motherfu**er!” moment for Tokita
– The development went very smoothly generally speaking
– Music was a very important undertaking, they didn’t want to denature the soundtrack and spent some time deciding what track should have live instruments, etc

The HD-2D remake of Live A Live is available on Switch.