Ever17 (visual novel)/Review by o


 * Opinion: very good

Prior to Ever17, the only Japanese products I had experienced were the Bemani line of music games and some bad hentai (for humor purposes). In a Bemani-related IRC channel I frequent, people (many of whom are anime fans) were talking about this game. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it looked somewhat interesting but I wasn't sure. About a week later, I was bored and decided to try it out. I played the English PC version.

Ever17 tells the story of seven people trapped in an underwater theme park. They soon realize that no one is coming to rescue them, and must escape on their own. They (and the reader) also find out more about their relationship to each other and why they are trapped.

Ever17 shares some characteristics with a dating sim: you play as one of the two male characters and reach a bad ending if you do not get close enough to one of the females. I found these aspects, especially on Sora's path, somewhat annoying and cheesy. However, even from the beginning, it was more than that; it was obvious that strange things were happening, and I was drawn into the characters' plight.

I also found some of the other scenes to be annoying and badly written, especially the game of kick the can and the hacking scene ("Division by zero will be initiated according to application formatting." - !?). There were also some flaws in the translation, most notably (other than grammar errors) an overzealous replacement of Youth to Kid when the translation team decided to change Kid's name ("Do Kidink they're playing hide-and-seek?"), and the use of a second person pronoun in one place where the original Japanese indicated that the speaker already knew someone's name (presumably Japanese uses pronouns less often).

But the overall story was very good and believable; I only had issues with minor stuff that didn't affect the overall story. (For instance, the difference between the Tsugumi and Sora good and bad endings didn't make sense.) Everything major fit together perfectly, and I didn't mind one of the major plot points being a supernatural element, which usually makes me uneasy. The many plot twists - with some real doozies in there - kept me thinking about the game, sometimes pausing to try to figure it out or going over it in my mind in bed. The timeline in the ending video was a nice touch, though it scrolled by annoyingly quickly. (It can however be viewed by playing MOV_END.e17 in a media player.) I just got very involved in the game, to the point that I got bored and even somewhat depressed when it was over, as if I was coming down off a high.

Game design was generally good, like watching a subtitled movie, though hitting enter to view the next screen got a bit annoying. It was nice to be able to scroll past parts I had already read. After the first run-through, in which I reached a bad end, I used a walkthrough, so I don't know how hard it is to get a good ending. (Of course there are numerous save slots to backtrack to if you realize you could have made a better choice.) The music was rather generic synthesizer music, but didn't get annoying; the voice acting, though in Japanese, probably helped me get into the story.

I would recommend Ever17 to someone that wants good science fiction, no matter what the format, and is willing to deal with minor annoyances on the way to completing the great plot. I would also reccomend it to anyone that regularly plays visual novels; if I, someone who doesn't regularly play that style of game, and probably wouldn't enjoy most, found it excellent, someone that likes the elements I found annoying has a good chance of loving it.