Karifean's Blog of Visual Novels

Now there's a visual novel that gets endless praise for its great story. And for now I can at least say the setting is very intruiging.

Ever17 is set in the subaquatic amusement park "LeMU". In the beginning the perspective switches between two male characters as they simply wander around the park. Not long thereafter an accident occurs, flooding the topmost floor of the park and trapping six people in the floors below. The elevators and communication lines don't work and it is presumed that in no less than five days the park will probably implode, killing the survivors.

Naturally the two male characters from the beginning are among the survivors as well as four (or maybe five) girls that we also saw in the introduction.

The main character suffers from some sort of memory loss as he cannot remember anything past the few hours that led up to this event. He seems to have mysterious premonitions about what happens every now and then, almost like a sixth sense. He is also rather confused at the existence of an apparent seventh survivor which he swears he saw but disappeared in front of his eyes, and no one else ever witnessed them. Everyone else thinks he's just seeing things.

Being able to speak German hurts.

The computer can't seem to make up its mind about the number of vitally important reactions. It fluctuates between 5, 6 and 7. Now I already have a pretty good theory on what this means and why the number fluctuates but I won't spoil anything for now.

As for other characters, besides the main character we also have these three:

This girl, who makes sure to maintain a distance to everyone else:

and finally this girl:

Please learn to introduce yourself in a way that doesn't freak people out.

It seems there is more to this accident than meets the eye. You has already theorized that they were trapped intentionally given the incredibly convenience of it all, as if it was set up.

The biggest mysteries for now are definitely the main protagonist and Tsugumi. I mentioned before how the protagonist sometimes has a premonition of what is about to happen? Well Tsugumi is much the same way except she doesn't suffer from memory loss. In other words... she is sure all of this has already happened and is obviously confused and defensive about the fact that nobody besides her seems to be in any way distraught by this. However it does look as if things didn't work out quite that well last time...

Overall I can say that so far I am stoked to find out what's going on. The story seems to be quite anti-fantasy so far and I have my doubts there's any time travel going on, but that leaves many open questions. Some characters feel like they have way more relevance and importance than they let on for now (Takeshi especially, the game's opening makes it seem as if he and the protagonist are the same person somehow). I hope to find many satisfactory answers.

So far I've made most of the You-centric choices. I don't know how this visual novel is laid out but if it's anything like many I know I'll probably be entering her route soon. I might not make a blog post on every route this time and instead just one big reflection post when I'm done.

Ah one last note; getting this thing to run was a pain. One particular piece of code in the exe is apparently rather incompatible with Windows 8.1 and unless you fix it manually (thankfully it's pretty easy to do so once you know how) you won't be able to start the game. It is nice once again playing something with an official localization though.