Live again

Hello! And welcome to Live Again!
This is a short (30 minutes) rpgmaker game by manolo24 interestingly made with RPG Maker VX but using the typical assets used in Rpgmaker2003 like First Seed Material.

By the way the game starts with a nice screen depicting a mountain, whose meaning will be clear during the ending. And then the story of our young protagonist and alter ego, that you can name as you prefer, starts with him being recently dead. He arrives to the afterlife and meets his guardian angel, that gives him an interesting possibility: to live again some meaningful parts of his unfortunately short life. The interesting thing is that while this won't change his future, he will be able to act in different ways.


The game includes some little task you have to complete, nothing difficult, mind this!

The game includes three acts before the ending, each is about some moments of one period of the protagonist's life, and you have the possibility to save between them. The game is a sort of short visual novel with little and simple choices and interactions. I chose what I felt it was appropriate for me, and in the end I noticed the protagonist saying "I did everything like I did in the past, since it was perfect". I do not know if behaving differently may have different results, but I guess so.

Even if short, I enjoyed the story because it's also complemented by some mini-quests, tasks and also quick time events, nothing too difficult, but that's obvious since the main focus of the game is the narrative, and that's pretty good, the ending part is extremely emotional and personal.
Graphics are used pretty well, while there are just about 9-10 maps and only few of them are explorable these were competently made, I also liked the light special effect and the music, that consist in piano music, but this is natural since the piano is an important part of the story and is present in more than one scene.

My only complaint is the lack of names, except for our protagonist: I know that the game is short and there is too little time to ger invested with the characters, still a name like Fred the Father or Marion the Mother would have made those characters more... "characters", more alive, I mean feeling less "generic npcs". But ok, I understand that the idea was to deliver a message to everyone, so that each player can immedesimate a bit more.


There are also some quick time events! But do not worry, these aren't difficult and if you fail many times you can choose to skip them!

Final Verdict
This is a very emotional game, considering that's also inspired by a real story (and it's also an understandable homage to that person, the real protagonist of this game).
Live Again is simple, short but despite this I admit that it made me think, it emotioned me, and it was beautiful in its simplicity. All of this happened in thirty minutes, and yes, they were pretty much perfect.