[Live-A-Live] Murder and Mercy

A friend of mine is playing Live-A-Live for the first time, and experiencing it vicariously is allowing me to think even more about what makes this game strong and why I love it.

The ninja chapter wasn't my favourite back when I played LAL, mostly because of the length and difficulty. It wasn't bad, nor did it have to be lengthy, but it came out that way because of the manner that I chose to play it in.

The ninja chapter gives you four options: you can storm the grounds and murder every person you see, spare everyone and hide from sight so as to not stir up trouble, to traverse the map normally and only kill those that impede your way, or to deny your duty and leave in dishonour.

The first element of this that I find quite intriguing is how there's only two endings to this. They don't differ based on whether you do or don't kill anyone. They only vary depending on whether you accept or deny your mission -- if you accept your mission and kill everyone, you receive the same ending as someone that spares the lives of everyone in the castle. The only difference is the reward, and you only get specially rewarded with specific items for beating the chapter in either of those two ways -- you're not rewarded for only killing those necessary but sparing everyone else. It's all or nothing.

But there is one other ending, and that's if, from the start, you decline your orders and abandon your mission by running away before the level begins. In doing so, you receive a game over, regardless of whether or not you beat the enemies you face while retreating.

That's just the start. The premise of the level itself forces you to make a decision and to commit yourself to either stick to it or stray from your path. What I like about it is how there's no preachy morality pontificating or any shit like that. You effectively have two choices (that is, if you want to finish and be rewarded with more than just a chapter clear), and you are not shamed for choosing to avoid battle or for opting to massacre a small village's worth of people. There's no cutscene telling you that you're a coward for not fighting or a murderer for killing. If you're thinking either of those things, it's because you came to that conclusion from your own actions.

You could say "it's not that deep," but Live-A-Live is a game with so much love put into it that I don't think it's possible to read too far. Even the running gags of some chapters have emotional weight in others (I'm thinking about the various untimely fates of Watanabe), so to think the ninja chapter accidentally stumbled upon a great exploration of morality in video games is silly to me.

What got me thinking was the one particular scene where there's an assassin surrounded by four men. If you do nothing, the assassin will sequentially kill each man until all of them have fallen. This becomes a problem depending on your approach to the chapter. If your goal is to kill everyone, then you've suddenly got competition: in the story so far, it's just been Oboro vs. all the people that are either trying to rid of the intruder or trying to protect themselves. As of this scene, it's Oboro vs. another man that is rapidly making corpses that are meant to fall by your blade.

It's an agitating scene because of how fast the assassin is. He's so quick that by the time you get in the room and kill one man, another of your targets has already been murdered, forcing you to either give up your entire kill streak (which, remember, is the only way to be rewarded if you've made it this far killing people), or to restart from your last save. It's not too much of a penalty -- at least if you save reasonably often -- but it's enough to be frustrating. What really struck me, though, was the timing of this scene and how it really made me feel.

By this point, if you're on a kill route, you're probably desensitized to the murder. Each sprite you face is just that -- some pixels, and later a number that you count on your quest to get a special item. Victims are people you seek out in order to raise your tally and become stronger.

With that scene, though, something changes without anything being explicitly stated. It's not you vs. your victims anymore. It's you versus someone just as capable as you -- if not more so -- in a race to defeat four people that might as well be pawns in your game.

Were it easy to beat the assassin to the kills, this wouldn't really be that big a deal, but it's the forced repetition of this scene -- a result of how difficult it is and how hard it is to complete on the first try, especially without a guide to let you know what's going down -- that made me look at what the game was having me do. Or, I could say that, but it was my choice to go for a complete kill run. I could let the assassin kill them and then kill the assassin if I weren't trying to take 100 lives before the end of the final boss fight, but because I had to reach that kill count, I had to kill all four of those men before the assassin did. And it was hard. It took many restarts, and it frustrated me whenever I'd kill one man only for the battle to end and only see two left standing.

It's because I had become so desensitised to the murder in this chapter that this really hit me with a sobering slap. I was getting frustrated at not being able to kill everyone. I got mad at someone else because he took those bodies that were meant to be mine. I would quit, restart, quit, restart, and repeat until I'd beaten all of them before killing the assassin myself. And that's fucked.

It's fucked because that groundhog day-like reiteration made me realise how determined I was to have Oboro end these lives. I couldn't let myself continue the chapter without taking out every last person in the castle. Even when it became more of a challenge to kill than to spare, I felt as if I had no choice and needed to continue on my path. The game had me killing men of varying degrees of criminality up until now -- hell, none of them were even criminals like Oboro, they were just doing their job to protect the grounds. The morality is what varied in the victims, I guess. Some were totally innocent and some were assholes. As of that scene against the assassin, I realised just how blurred the line had become between the blameless and the deserving. It didn't matter if I was killing someone who deserved it or not. What mattered is that my body count reach 100.

It's the frustration that scene instills in the player that forces them to sit back and think about what they're doing and if it's worth the agitation the game is causing. It's not a character saying, "Oh, you horrible person! You've killed so many people! Why would you do that, you fiend, you reprehensible cur?!" No, it's you looking at the position the game has put you in and questioning your motives that you probably started the chapter very firmly with.

I love that about Live-A-Live. It doesn't tell you how to feel. It doesn't tell you that you're horrible for killing a bunch of people. What it does is give every single person in the castle -- all 100 -- unique names. It gives them sprites that convey their readiness and willingness for battle. When you fight the elderly or the women, you do so seeing them cowering, with their attacks often amounting to throwing money at you in an attempt to buy your mercy. That's what hurts. It's not the game saying "murder is bad!" It's you still choosing to kill the people in the castle even when faced with the very slight human characteristics they all share. It's the clench in your stomach upon realising that these are depictions of fear, and those people fear you, the hero. It made me feel guilty without telling me to feel bad. That, I think, is what makes Live-A-Live an excellent game.

Between the possible endings (see: either you win or you lose, and both murder and mercy end in wins) and the battles themselves along with certain scenes like that with the assassin, I think the ninja chapter of Live-A-Live does a fantastic job of pushing the player to their limit and using gameplay, not story, to evoke a discussion of morality with the player. It doesn't infantilise you or command you to feel a certain way, but it still challenges you personally from the beginning to the end of the chapter using its mechanics and the limits of your patience.

I just think it's neat