Hello! It's been a while. I have no idea if anyone would even pay attention to this space anymore, but I needed a nice place to write about all this, so here I am! Feel free to read or not.
I don't play too many visual novels. Probably the closest is stuff like the Ace Attorney and Professor Layton games, which probably aren't classified as "true" visual novels because they involve so much other stuff. I don't care much about that. However, the games I played that are probably closest to the "real" visual novel experience are the two (so far) in writer Kōtarō Uchikoshi's Zero Escape series, 999 and Virtue's Last Reward. They have their issues, but I like them a lot.
Recently I got the itch to replay those games; instead, I turned to a game Uchikoshi wrote that is his most well known other than those two, Ever 17: The Out of Infinity.
Ever 17 takes place in 2017 at an underwater marine theme park, LeMU. A choice near the beginning determines which point of view the player assumes: college student Takeshi or the teenage amnesiac referred to as "Kid." While at LeMU, an accident occurs that traps Takeshi, Kid and four others at LeMU, where they spend their days attempting to escape before the theme park collapses and kills them all. But, of course, there is far more to this than meets the eye.
Long before I played Ever 17 and while playing it, there was one common refrain I heard from people: The ending is totally worth it, but the path to get there is an utter slog. That is not inaccurate. There are four main routes before the final route, two for each POV character. My estimate is that the first route I completed took somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-14 hours. Ever 17, much like 999 and VLR, has a mechanic where you can skip interactions you've already seen when you replay the game, so subsequent routes took less time -- the second about 10 hours and the other two about 3-4 hours each.
It's necessary, because good lord there is a lot of boring shit in this game. The main conflict initially reveals itself as a fight not only for survival, but to keep sanity. Each day drags on with rescue seeming a more remote possibility. This should be interesting; however, the characters mostly keep a tenuous hold on their sanity via lame anime antics. There are games of pretend and tag, and lame comedy bits aplenty. One common element of Uchikoshi's games -- the comedy is almost all awful. I don't think I've ever laughed at something that was supposed to be funny, though I concede that some things may be lost in translation.
Another common Uchikoshi quirk reveals itself as the days drag on: Characters often like to discuss scientific concepts that may or may not become relevant to the plot. Well, in the case of Ever 17, it all becomes relevant eventually. There aren't any red herrings like in 999 and VLR; if something is mentioned, then, even if it's hours and hours later, it will make itself known in some way. This oddity works when it makes sense that the characters would talk about what they do, when it truly fits their stories for reasons other than a need to foreshadow stuff. It doesn't when the only reason for mentioning convoluted scientific concepts is, "I dunno. *shrug*" (Note: This is a common occurrence in the game's most boring route.)
Let me put it this way: Even during what I consider the most interesting route other than the finale, I was intrigued probably half the time and bored silly the other half. Ever 17 isn't set up to be quite as consistently harrowing as 999 or VLR. The characters have nothing to fear from each other; even the most outwardly disagreeable, Tsugumi, doesn't wish to hurt the people with whom she is trapped. Some good drama normally comes up at the midpoint and end of each route. But in between all that are long stretches of time where I could feel myself falling asleep at the keyboard.
Why did I keep with it? Part of that is faith in Uchikoshi. The man has his flaws, but he knows how to spin a crazy tale and how to do it while taking advantage of the unique quirks of this medium. Part of what I love about Uchikoshi is that he'll take every opportunity available to really fuck with the player. My favorite twist in the game is the reveal of what Takeshi actually looks like, which is of course set up by the point of view the player takes. What really makes me love it so much, though, is that it's first set up by the reveal of what 2034!Kid looks like -- it works as both a warning to not trust the point of view (so that the Takeshi reveal doesn't come out of nowhere), and also as a feint to distract the player from wondering whether there's anything wrong with the 2017 scenario. It's fantastically executed.
The other part of Ever 17 that appeals to me is both its biggest strength and weakness: its subtlety. For the most part, the mysteries lurk in the background, unanswered, festering until they hit hardest. They're left to wriggle around in the back of the player's mind. I would often see things that didn't add up but wouldn't be addressed immediately in the storyline for reasons that would become clear later. One detail I love is that the game actually shows you what 2034!Kid looks like during You's ending. He's clearly different from 2017!Kid, but he's shown at such an angle that you don't get a perfect look at him. There's enough there to spark disquieting thoughts. It bugged me, but I didn't think it through enough until the beginning of the final route.
Ever 17 holds back for a long time to an astonishing degree. For the most part, the game grants the player the time to put the pieces together -- looking back, it's actually possible to call a lot of the big twists before they happen if you think about it hard enough and open your mind to crazy possibilities. I wouldn't say it's predictable so much that the story is clear about its intentions without outright stating them. (As discussed earlier, though, Ever 17 is not always such a paragon of subtlety, since it freely doles out plot-relevant concepts throughout the story.) I think, however, that the game holds back too much at times, and in doing so, it relies far too much on dumb, boring antics to carry the parts where crazy stuff isn't happening.
The same is true for the characters. When the rug is pulled out from under them, they're quite interesting and sympathetic. When they're playing tag and eating chicken sandwiches all day, they're boring. In my experience, Uchikoshi can usually make a few actually fascinating characters per story, and the others are either boring or interesting when the plot itself puts them in harrowing places. Mileage will vary, of course, but for me, Tsugumi and part-time LeMU worker You are by far the best characters, and the others range from irritating to good when the plot does bad things to them.
So, yeah, Ever 17 can be a rough experience. I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone who isn't either an experienced VN player, tremendously patient and/or a huge fan of Uchikoshi. For me, even though I was bored silly a lot of the time, it's ultimately worth it because Uchikoshi's stories deliver an experience that isn't totally possible in other mediums. It's unrefined, to say the least, but it's a special experience.
Also, it involves one of the most anime things I've ever seen: the all-seeing, all-knowing entity falls in love with the little anime girl. OF COURSE.
