All Live a Live chapter timelines, ranked

4) Present Day

The Present Day was thought up by manga legend Ryōji Minagawa who did the long-running ARMS series as well as served as a character designer for many of the later Tekken games. I was hoping to get a fighting-based story and this did not disappoint.

Now, a thing that works against the Present Day is that it’s short. In fact, depending on how you do, you could be done in less than an hour, easily.

The Present Day follows Masaru Takahara. A martial artist with black hair, red gloves, a long red headband, and a need to find different fighters from around the world and fight them in the streets. If that sounds familiar to Ryu…I mean you, then you’re going to be really familiar with the next step.

Upon learning about your character, the real game starts. Instead of a map, or rooms to walk around in, you’re given a screen where you get to choose your opponent. You have to fight all six but you can tackle them in any order. One of the cool things you can do is you can coax each of the fighters into doing their special move. When that happens, you’ll learn it. There are two you can learn from each.

In the end you fight the final boss of the fighting game who happens to have the WORST of all of Odio’s various names. “Odio O’Bright”.

There really isn’t much more to it than this. Your character defeats the final boss, laments about the experience a bit, and as it fades to black someone challenges you to suggest that his journey continues.

Its shortness and lack of story kept it out of the top three, but it got as high as it did because it’s such an interesting change of pace with really fun takes on fighting game staples.