Karifean's Blog of Visual Novels

(Original Post on the Forums)

#8
Ever17 - The Out of Infinity
Developer: KID
Availability: Localized, but out of print
Adult Content: None
Length: Long (~40 Hours)

When you close your eyes, I disappear.

Ever17 is one of those visual novels that gets a ton of praise for its storyline. It's written by the same guy who made 999 and the two supposedly share a number of similarities with each other.

Such a great opening movie.

Ever17 takes place in the underwater theme park LeMU. Through what seems to be chance, six unrelated people end up in the park when an alarm strikes and the first underground floor of the park gets flooded. All visitors besides those six were successfully evacuated, but the six people in question are stuck. To make things worse, if they aren't rescued within approximately seven days, LeMU is going to implode, killing them all.

The atmosphere surrounding the incident is pretty intimidating. It keeps you wondering whether the accident really was an accident or actually plotted, especially the more you get into all the characters' backstories... and who knows if they're really the only ones in LeMU?

One of the things I love about Ever17 is the fact that it has two POV characters. In the early parts of the story it constantly switches between the two, until a particular choice soon enough determines which will be your POV for the rest of the playthrough. The routes you can access are naturally different for both POV characters, and you need to complete all four to unlock the final, true route.

My personal favorites of the first four routes were Tsugumi's and Sara's, but the final route easily blows all others out of the water (no pun intended). It's where everything is resolved and it all ends up making way more sense than I'd ever expected it to. It makes extraordinary good use of the visual novel medium's unique form of presentation and I couldn't imagine Ever17 ever being adapted to an anime or anything like that.

The only problem with Ever17 is that it's damn hard to get a hold of. It did get an official localization many years back, but it's out of print and if you want a copy now you're looking at quite ridiculous prices. But if you do manage to find a way to read it, Ever17 is definitely worth your time.