.htaccess mod_rewrite cannot remove page name - .htaccess

Question

Having trouble figuring out the mod rewrite for .htaccess I want the url http://www.example.com/archive.php?title=about_me which is a dynamic url to be rewritten to http://www.example.com/about_me. I am using php and here is my current .htaccess code, however it only rewrites to http://www.example.com/archive/about_me want the archive to be removed.
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
rewriteengine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/archive\.php\?title=([^&\ ]+)
RewriteRule ^ /archive/%1? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^/?archive/(.*)$ /archive?title=$1 [L]
## Hide .php extension
## To externally redirect /dir/foo.php to /dir/foo
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s([^.]+)\.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R,L,NC]
I did get it to rewrite correctly with this code
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/archive\.php\?title=([^&\ ]+)
RewriteRule ^ /%1? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /archive?title=$1 [L]
However it then returns a page cannot be found error

Answer 1

I you want the /archive/ to be removed, you'll have to ensure that any URI that's in the form of /something must absolutely be routed to the archive.php script. Because there's simply no way to tell whether /my_blog is actually a request for /my_blog or whether it needs to be sent to the archive.php script with "my_blog" as the value of title in the query string. The best you can do is check that it's not a request for an existing resource via the -f and -d conditions:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/archive\.php\?title=([^&\ ]+)
RewriteRule ^ /%1? [L,R=301]
# no /archive/ ^
# condition checks
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /archive?title=$1 [L]

Answer 2

Something like this should do the trick:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^title=(.*)
RewriteRule ^archive.php /%1?
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /archive?title=$1 [L]
EDIT: Added the final RewriteRule as noted in my comments on the original question. Per the comment I believe you are trying to do the following two things:
Redirect any user-entered "real" URLs to the "friendly" URL: http://www.example.com/archive.php?title=about_me to http://www.example.com/about_me as stated in the question.
Rewrite the "friendly" URL to the "real" URL: http://www.example.com/about_me to http://www.example.com/archive.php?title=about_me, which was not clear as stated.