In accordance to the duality presented in the title:
"Live" opinion: A diverse soundtrack with a little something for everyone, whether it's Wild West-style whistles, traditional Japanese style instruments or heavy rock. Yeah!
"Evil" opinion: The soundtrack is like the characters from Street Fighter 2 (which Shimomura also worked on): filled with outdated and offensive stereotypes and tropes. Yikes!
As far as the origin of the name and what it means, I couldn't find anything so far. The history of the game basically began in a manga magazine where a manga artist drew a picture with the prehistorical ages as the subject. Then he invited game companies to make a game out of that and Squaresoft responded while also giving it a name (i.e. Live A Live). Several other artists also drew similar pictures (as shown in the soundtrack's booklet) and I guess they also got incorporated into the game.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenofan 29A
I think the name was supposed to be something like Live a Life, but the katakana are actually Live a Live, both rhyming with hive. But Japanese doesn't have the short i sound that English uses in live, so it's hard to tell.
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I know this was almost 10 years ago but I don't think that's quite true. There are plenty of words with the short i sound:
Guilty Gear ギルティギア
Tales of Destiny テイルズオブデスティニー
Indignation インディグネイション (spell from the intro of Tales of Phantasia)
Unless those "i" are fundamentally and linguistically different from the one in "live"? I'm not an English scholar so I dunno. You tell me.
"Give" seems to be a word in Japanese (ギブ). "Live" however doesn't seem to be recognised as katakana. But if it did, it would probably look like リィブ or リブ.
Or maybe this whole Live thing is just a case of Engrish and we're trying to make sense of something that doesn't inherently have any. I'm going with this option unless more information arises.