A classic setting of wild west movies is a small, frontier town menaced by a large group of bloodthirsty bandits, with only a couple of hired guns defending them. In such a situation, you need to use every dirty trick in the book to tilt the odds in your favor. That’s exactly the situation you find yourself in Live A Live’s Wild West chapter. Here’s how to set traps in Live A Live.
How to Set Traps in Live A Live
In the Wild West chapter of Live A Live, after The Sundown Kid and Mad Dog snipe two members of the Crazy Bunch, the Sheriff warns that the rest of the gang will arrive at dawn to take revenge. This means you only have precious little time to set up some traps to whittle down their numbers and make the final battle a little easier on yourself. This is a bit of an intimidating segment, but it’s actually very simple if you know what you’re doing. That said, you should definitely save your game when the segment starts as Mad Dog suggests.
So here’s the plan: you need to check out the various buildings in the town of Success to source items that can be used to set up traps. You then need to give these items to the townsfolk in the Crystal Saloon so they can go get the traps ready. All of this is going down in real time, indicated by the bell meter in the top-right corner of the screen. You have about eight minutes to get all of the stuff you need and set up the traps, though the timer does pause during screen transitions and when you’re in dialogue.
The first thing you should do is check around the Saloon, as well as a few buildings in town, to get some materials, then return to the Saloon and talk to the Sheriff to get the traps going. Every townsperson takes a different amount of time to set up a trap; most of them are generally the same, though the slowest one is the green-haired guy, Cesar. Give him the first trap ASAP so he has time to finish it. Afterward, keep going out and checking buildings you haven’t been to yet (check for grey icons on the minimap) to get more materials and return to the Saloon.
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Most of the trap items you find will be pretty straightforward and can be assigned to anyone in the Saloon, with a few exceptions:
- Talk to the child, Billy, to get his Slingshot. Immediately assign that Slingshot back to him.
- Find the Frying Pan in the second building from the right of the bottom line of buildings and assign it to Annie, the blonde lady.
- Don’t assign anything to the mariachi with the maracas, Delos, as his completion time is completely random.
- In the Inn, second building from the left on the bottom line, there’s a door obscured by the staircase on the ground floor. Check inside it for a Rope.
- The Horse Poop trap can only be set up if someone else has already set up the Shovel trap.
- If you need more time, set up a trap with the Coal Tar, found in the first building from the left on the top line. It’ll give you two extra minutes of prep time.
Here’s the full list of traps you can have a townsperson set up:
- Dynamite
- Rope
- Shovel
- Carrot
- Bottled Fire (Mad Dog will make this for you whenever you have an Empty Bottle and Oil)
- Horse Poop
- Barkeeper’s Beloved Poster
You should have more than enough time to get every possible trap set up. When the eighth bell rings, the Crazy Bunch will ride into town, but if you manage to set up every trap, all of the soldiers should be completely wiped out, leaving their leader, O. Dio, all alone to take on The Sundown Kid and Mad Dog. In the event you miss a trap or run out of time, O. Dio will be joined by whatever soldiers survived in combat, making the encounter a little more difficult. Fair warning, if you don’t set any traps at all and all of O. Dio’s men join him, you’ll be in for one of the hardest encounters in the game. So, y’know, maybe don’t do that.
