Game Review – Ever17 – the out of infinity

Author: nova

Ever been lost in a theme park with no idea where in the crowd your friends are, your cellphone is out of power and get punched in the stomach by the mascot of the park when asking for help? Now assume that this said park is submerged in the ocean and due to an accident most of the park has flooded and all access and connection to outside world has been cut – and you along with six other people you’ve never met before are the only ones left in the place. This is basically what a visual novel named Ever17 – the out of infinity, produced by KID and translated to English by Hirameki, is all about. But before I continue, I’d like to make one thing clear from the start:

Ever17 does not contain any adult material and is rated T.

Visual novels are a rather unique branch of the gaming entertainment – in fact it can be disputed whether they can be considered as games at all. Simply put visual novel is a very strongly story-driven semi-interactive game in which most of the time is spent by just reading/listening to the dialogue. Every now and then the player is presented with certain options with which he can steer the storyline towards different scenes and endings. While some visual novels offer rather limited diversity, others can contain dozens of different endings depending on the decisions made by the player in key scenes. The visual presentation is best described as simplistic; mostly slideshow-ish bitmaps on each other, although there are exceptions such as infamous School Days which is fully animated.

Hysterical? No, I’m cool. It’s not like I’m trapped under the mfking ocean or anything.

Ever17 is rather conventional in its genre – flat static bitmap graphics with spoken dialogue backed up by subtitles and occasional key scenes in which player is presented options from which to choose from to determine the course of the storyline. The story revolves around the circumstances of seven people trapped in an underwater theme park but turns out to be much more complex than what it initially sounds, involving deadly virus experiments, multiverse theories, human-like AI’s, mysterious diseases and the sort. Of course, this also involves developing love interest between the characters and as such the game introduces as cast of five females the player can go for – positive genki-girl You, calm and polite Sora, somewhat eccentric schoolgirl Sara, cold and distant tsundere-queen Tsugumi and (for you lolicon bastards) a young energetic girl Coco. The game has two protagonists from whose perspective it can be played – mysterious amnesiastic boy Kid [shounen] and rather typical 20yo fellow Takeshi.

I had no previous experience in visual novels when I first picked up Ever17 – the game attracted my attention after reading a related thread posted on 4chan. Initially I started playing due to pure scientific curiosity, with little idea how seriously I could take a game with flat static graphics and barely any interaction from the player at all. In fact I was quite sure it’d just turn out to be a drag – and boy how wrong I was. As a long-term science fiction fan the story immediately lit some kind of fire within me and despite having to wake up every morning at 05:00 to get to work I found myself skimming through the game like there was no tomorrow, with the well-known “just one more plot twist…just one more and then I’ll sleep, I swear…“-phrase repeating in my mind.

Before I knew it, I was completely absorbed in the game and it was pretty much all I was thinking about while cleaning the air filters at the cardboard mill from 07:00 to 15:30 day after another. And not only fascinated by the plot, I was also drawn to the characters; rarely if ever before I have felt genuinely guilty about a game character getting hurt because of my mistakes, and not to mention the crushing feeling when I stumbled my way to the first BAD END and the bittersweet aftertaste of the good ending when I finally managed to reach it.

Tsun tsun Tsugumi.

Ever17 has a tremendous replay value thanks to diverse storyline, as playing through just one arc only reveals a part of the whole picture. Although the game doesn’t place any limitations on which storyarc to go for first, I recommend strongly playing through Kid’s arcs first and then proceeding to Takeshi – and whatever you do, save Tsugumi (best) for the last. The game rewards finishing a storyarc with unlockable goodies such as CG-packs. The game also has system voice-packs and screensavers of all the characters readily unlocked so you can have Tsugumi informing you of incoming mail or SMS-message (Meiru ga todokimashita). The game soundtrack can be played with an in-game player but the songs cannot be unlocked as playable media-files unless you feel like grabbing a container file extractor and doing it the brutal way, which is a pity since the OST songs are very nicely done and generally fit the mood of the scenes well. The OP-song, LeMU -Haruka na Lemuira Tairiku- by KAORI is an excellent piece of music and goes along great with the opening movie.

Takeshi is teh playah.

Hirameki’s translation of the game is so-so and does its job for most of the time, but typos and other mistakes surface at times. Since the game is aimed for the US-market, the metric units used in Japanese dialogue have been changed to American system (feet, inches and fahrenheit) which doesn’t really appeal to me, being from outside the US. However for those with some knowledge in the Moonspeak this isn’t really a problem, since the metric units are still there in the Japanese voice dialogue. Some Americanization has been done in the content of the dialogue, most notably in names which have been changed from Japanese last name-firstname-order to English first name-last name. Also all honorifics have been removed and often times the name displayed in the subtitles is different from what the character says in the voice dialogue in attempt to gain somewhat similar meaning in English, but in my most honest and humble opinion this doesn’t work at all and only manages to confuse poor players.

As Ever17 was my first experience in this genre of games, I can’t really give an accurate analysis in comparison to other titles – you could call it the first love. Having rather limited knowledge in the genre I can’t really say anything to the VN-veterans out there, but for beginners I can recommend Ever17 without hesitation. Official English translations of visual novels aren’t every day’s occurrences, so Ever17 is definitely one of the better ways to use $20.

Nah, there’s no way I’m hitting a bad endOHSHI-DO NOT WANT… ;_;

Hold your horses cowboy. She’s awesome but best things come to those who wait.