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Literary fiction is sold as character-driven and realistic - and simply labeled “fiction” - while genre fiction is said to be driven by tropes, and sold in categories like sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, or romance. Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find a binary made by the publishing industry between literary and genre fiction.
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It’s a literary move attempted by a master of his craft. Creating multiple narrative threads in a video game and then retroactively piecing them all together was ingenious in 1994, and it remains ambitious today. So, basically, Live A Live is sandwiched in Tokita’s catalog between two of the greatest games of the ’90s - if not all time.
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Released in 1994, the original Live A Live was Takashi Tokita’s second game at Square (now Square Enix) after his work as a lead game designer on Final Fantasy 4 (released as Final Fantasy 2 in the U.S.) and before his work directing Chrono Trigger.
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