Ever17 -out of infinity-

Ever17 -out of infinity-
Visual Novel - PC
Hard Drive - 40 save slots
1 Player

I've heard a lot about this game from a friend who absolutely adores it. I'm usually really big on gameplay, and the last visual novel I played (Kanon) turned me off to the genre. But Hirameki International translated the PC version for the English market, kept Japanese language intact, and was on sale so I took a chance.

I'll be honest. When I finished it, I wasn't impressed. It wasn't particularly special. The characters didn't stand out. The story moved at a snail's pace. It was... well, boring. But since it's one of those games that you only get a piece of the puzzle each playthrough, I resolved to understand why my friend loved it so much. So I played. And replayed. And replayed. And replayed. I became obsessed. I actually began writing down questions that came up - things that didn't make sense, things that were unexplained. I was shocked at the revelations and puzzled at new riddles. But after clearing the final ending, I was pretty amazed at how many loose ends were tied up.

E17 is quite subtle. It's a mystery, except you don't even know what the mystery is. In fact, you don't even know it's a mystery in the first place, at least until you've played it several times. You don't know why the characters are in the situation they're in. Only how they react. Slowly, as you play through each of the endings, only then will you be able to formulate the right questions. And finally when you clear the last scenario, they become answered.

While I don't really consider it much of a "game", I have a huge amount of respect for the way the story and pieces thereof, unfolded. I've never encountered anything like it, and aside from the first playthrough, I was glued to the game. Highly recommended with a caveat... the game can only be fully appreciated when all endings are cleared. So if you're not willing to invest the time to play it to death, you won't really "get" it at all. But if you're willing to put in the time, I'm sure you'll be thoroughly captivated like I was from start to end.

Unfortunately, the English version is not without its pitfalls. Some of the lines are adapted into very colloquial English expressions. While not a literal translation, they give the intended meaning of the Japanese lines, so care was taken there. However, you'll also encounter some broken English that detracts from the rest of the game. It's like they had multiple people doing the translation with various levels of English fluency. And even more than that, are some serious quality control issues. There are typos, incorrect spacings, and even undecipherable words that make me wonder if the script was proofread at all. Generally though, these errors, while annoying, are not game breaking and you can pretty much figure out what they're trying to say. However, there was one subtlety in the game that was completely lost in the conversion from Japanese to English which affects one of the revelations. Aside from that though, the poor English is little more than an annoyance, and not enough to detract from the overall storytelling experience.

Me loving a visual novel. Who would have thought?