Ever 17

''Ever 17: The Out of Infinity'' is a visual novel video game developed by KID. It is the second entry in the ''Infinity'' series; it is preceded by '' Never 7: The End of Infinity'', and followed by '' Remember 11: The Age of Infinity'', the spin-off '' 12Riven: The Psi-Climinal of Integral'', and the reboot '. It was originally released in Japan on August 29, 2002, for the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast, and was later ported to Microsoft Windows, PlayStation Portable, Android, and iOS. A localization of the Microsoft Windows version was released by Hirameki International in North America in 2005.

The game follows Takeshi Kuranari and a boy with amnesia who is referred to as "the Kid", who are trapped inside an underwater theme park together with a group of other people after a leak has flooded parts of the park; they cannot contact people on the surface, and due to high water pressure, the park is estimated to implode after 119 hours. The gameplay consists of the player reading the game's story, at certain points making choices that affect its direction, leading to one of several possible endings.

The development team included director Takumi Nakazawa, writer and planner Kotaro Uchikoshi, character designer Yuu Takigawa, and composer Takeshi Abo. Because the science fiction aspects of ''Never 7'' had been positively received, ''Ever 17'' was made with a larger focus on science fiction. The game has been positively received, with reviewers calling it one of the best in its genre, citing its story, characters, music, and graphics.

A remake, simply titled ''Ever 17'', was developed by 5pb. and Cyberfront for Xbox 360 in 2011. It features various changes to the story and the characters, additional illustrations by Takigawa, and new music arrangements by Abo. The original visual novel's 2D sprites were replaced by 3D models; this change was done as 3D models were seen as being easier to animate.

Gameplay

''Ever 17'' is a visual novel in which the player reads the game's story. At certain points, they get to make a choice, which affects the direction of the story, leading to eleven possible different endings. The whole plot is not revealed in just one ending; instead, the player has to play through the game multiple times, with each playthrough revealing new information. After playing through the game once, the player is able to fast-forward past text to decision points; they can also choose to start from a point further into the game, so that they do not have to go back to the beginning of the game for each playthrough.

The game has two player characters: Takeshi Kuranari and the Kid. Depending on the character the player plays as, they get to build relationships with different characters: for instance, the player can become close to Tsugumi Komachi when playing as Takeshi, who just is a supporting character when playing as the Kid. The player character is not chosen directly; instead, a decision the player makes during a blackout in the beginning of the game determines who they will play as.

Plot

Setting and characters

''Ever 17'' is set in Japan, in the underwater marine theme park LeMU, 51 meters below the surface of the artificial island Insel Null. After an incident, almost half of LeMU is flooded, and the path to the surface and the communication lines are cut off, trapping the game's characters inside. In addition, LeMU is under large water pressure, limiting time to find a means of escape to 119 hours.

The player takes the roles of two characters, and sees the story from their respective perspectives: Takeshi Kuranari, a student who visited the park with his friends but got separated from them; and an amnesiac boy who does not remember his own name, and is simply called "the Kid". Among other characters are You Tanaka, a part-time employee at LeMU; Tsugumi Komachi, a woman who is distrustful of the others; Sora Akanegasaki, an artificial intelligence and the computer engineer of LeMU, who is only seen through a projection onto the other characters' eyes; Sara Matsunaga, a second-year student and a hacker; and Coco Yagami, a girl who is stranded on LeMU with her dog Pipi.

Story

The game opens on May 1, 2017, when a blackout occurs in LeMU, its communications system go down, and the park springs a leak; portions of it get flooded, blocking the exit and trapping the characters. Due to water pressure, the park is estimated to implode after 119 hours. The pressure also prevents escape by swimming, as it would crush one's lungs.

If the player plays as Takeshi, he builds a relationship with Tsugumi, who reveals that she and her pet hamster Chami are carriers of the Cure virus, which has rewritten their genetic code and halted their biological aging. She and Takeshi have sex, and she becomes pregnant. Later, Coco becomes sick. It is revealed that LeMU was created by the Leiblich Pharmaceutical company as a cover for IBF, a research facility underneath the park. IBF developed the deadly virus Tief Blau, and the LeMU disaster was caused when IBF lost containment of it. Coco was exposed to the virus while visiting her father, an IBF researcher.

The group goes to IBF in search for a cure, but starts showing signs of Tief Blau. An exception is Tsugumi, as the Cure virus has made her immune; the group injects themselves with her antibodies. They get contact with the surface, and a rescue pod is sent down, but is only able to stay for a short time. Tsugumi leaves to find Chami, who has gone missing; Takeshi chases after her, and saves Sora's data onto a disk to save her memories. Returning to IBF, they have missed the rescue vessel. They find a submarine and escape, but its batteries die; Takeshi exits it, giving it enough buoyancy to save Tsugumi, while he drowns on the ocean floor. Coco dies in IBF, as she had been looking for Pipi, and the rescue team could not find her.

If the player plays as the Kid, Sara is trapped in LeMU instead of Coco; the Kid frequently has visions of Coco, but no one else sees her. The group manages to contact the surface, and open and close doors to rooms in LeMU to move the water around, allowing them to escape.

After having played the game as both Takeshi and the Kid, the player accesses the final route, where it is revealed that although the events Takeshi experienced took place in 2017, those the Kid experienced were a recreation, and took place in a rebuilt LeMU in 2034. The You of 2017, whose full first name is Yubiseiharukana, had artificially impregnated herself and given birth to Yubiseiakikana, who took the role of You during the recreation. Pipi had escaped LeMU in 2017, carrying with it the disk with Sora's memories and footage of Coco being trapped in IBF. Sara and the Kid are revealed to be Tsugumi and Takeshi's children, and the Kid's real name turns out to be Hokuto. The Kid of 2017, whose name is Ryogo Kaburaki, played the role of Takeshi during the recreation, having stopped aging due to the Cure virus.

The recreation was done to line up two points in the fourth dimension, time, to get the attention of the person playing ''Ever 17''; the characters see the player as a 4th-dimensional being, "Blick Winkel", who can move through time; Blick Winkel appearing was what caused Hokuto's amnesia. Yubiseiharukana tells Blick Winkel that they had told her to perform the recreation to save Takeshi and Coco. Blick Winkel travels to 2017, and wakes up Takeshi on the seafloor, forcing him to swim to IBF; inside, he injects Coco with Tsugumi's antibodies. Blick Winkel warns Yubiseiharukana in 2017 to not save Takeshi and Coco immediately, to avoid a time paradox; instead, Blick Winkel has Takeshi and Coco enter cryogenic suspension in IBF. They wake up in 2034, saved. Sora, who now has a robotic body, is given back her memories from the disk, and Yubiseiharukana leaks information about Leiblich, exposing them as the ones behind the Tief Blau outbreak.

Development

The game was developed by KID, with direction by Takumi Nakazawa, planning and scenario writing by Kotaro Uchikoshi, character design by Yuu Takigawa, and music by Takeshi Abo. Nakazawa and Uchikoshi were appointed to their respective positions as they had worked on the previous game in the ''Infinity'' series, '' Never 7: The End of Infinity'', which had been well received. As ''Ever 17'' was to be released on consoles, it was required to be finished two months before the planned August release, meaning that after the scenario's completion in May, there was only time for debugging until late June. Uchikoshi and Nakazawa described this as a tight development schedule, and said that the game was only possible through the staff working very hard, and a lot of things being worked on at the same time.

Writing

Uchikoshi, who was freelancing at the time, came up with the original concept and pitch for the game after having started to research material in August 2001, including the Russian mathematician P. D. Ouspensky's book ''Tertium Organum''. A month later, he took a trip to Bali, from which he got a lot of inspiration for the story. As he was getting ready to return to Japan, he saw live news coverage of the September 11 attacks; because the game's plot was conceived during this time, Uchikoshi said that the story was influenced by the "spirit of the time" following the attacks. He wrote it from September until February the next year, after which the story was divided among the scenario writers, who wrote the script over the course of three months, from March to May 2002.

The writing team included Nakazawa, who wrote You's route and the Kid's common route; Nakazawa's assistant Kitaro Sasanari, who wrote Tsugumi and Sora's routes; Nobuaki Umeda, who wrote Sara's route; and Uchikoshi, who wrote Coco's route. The writing process for all routes were supervised by Uchikoshi, in an effort to eliminate inconsistencies in the setting or characters, and plot holes between the different parts of the story. Because he was running out of time at the end, he had to rush the writing of the end of Coco's route, which he described as possibly his only regret with the game. Nakazawa wrote his parts in between his directorial work, such as writing specification documents, supervising the production, and doing quality control work; due to the lack of time, he ended up having to stay overnight at KID everyday and work through the night, something he said was only possible because of how young he was at the time. Nakazawa described himself as working particularly hard on the game because he felt bitter that ''Never 7'' had not sold particularly well.

When writing the story, Uchikoshi made use of what he calls the "inductive composition method", where a setting is created first, after which one thinks about a core to the story that can be used to make the setting work. He did not recommend this way of writing, as he saw it as gamble that might not have resulted in an interesting story. This is in contrast to the deductive composition method, where a core story is thought of first, after which a setting is "deduced", that matches the core. As an example of inductive composition used, Uchikoshi did not initially think up the story's "main trick", and instead created two protagonists only because he thought it was getting stale with single-protagonist stories in visual novels, after which he thought about how to make two protagonists interesting. The writers only put little effort into hiding the 17-year gap between the Kid's and Takeshi's routes, writing each day of the story casually without a particular plan in mind. Rather, it took special effort to make it seem convincing when the game's secrets were revealed, with hints toward the truth added throughout the story, such as Tsugumi acting more suspicious when playing as the Kid due to having already experienced the events of Takeshi's route, or slight differences between the Kid's and Takeshi's routes due to the characters not being able to perfectly recreate events. While Coco was planned from the beginning as the character who knew the truth, Uchikoshi did not come up with the idea of leaving her on the bottom of the ocean until during the writing of the script.

Another example of the inductive composition method was the creation of the game's title, which was only decided on after the story was completed. It was meant to reflect how the game's story connects the future and the past, with the word "ever" intended to be read with two meanings: "once before" and "someday", but the number "17" was initially simply chosen as Uchikoshi liked the number due to being born on the 17th, and because he liked the transition to "17" from the "7" in ''Never 7''; upon checking the calendar for year spans where dates and days of the week would line up, he found that one such occurrence was the seventeen years between 2017 and 2034; other spans included eleven years, which was too short, and twenty-eight, which was too long. When Uchikoshi considered how to bring characters over from 2017 to 2034, some worked out naturally: Tsugumi was immortal due to being infected with the Curé Virus, You had a clone in 2034, and Sora was an artificial intelligence. He could not come up with a way to make Coco and Sara appear in both 2017 and 2034, but thought that the player probably would not figure it out just from this discrepancy. The one character left was Kaburaki, who would be a teenager in 2017 but in his 30s in 2034; Uchikoshi solved this by infecting him with the Curé Virus, which then led to him making the rest of the 2017 cast infected as well.

The character routes were divided between Takeshi and the Kid according to what made sense for the plot, rather than in an effort to pair up the player characters with specific female characters. Although the routes were given a recommended playing order, this did not occur until around the time the scenario was finished. According to Nakazawa, bad endings were painful to write, but were included both as foils to the good ending to increase the sense of accomplishment in reaching the good ending, and as "what if?" events that give the story variety, showing what would have happened had events played out differently. The game's epilogue was not originally planned, but was written by Uchikoshi in three days after being advised by Nakazawa. When a PlayStation Portable version was developed, Nakazawa was asked to create new content for it; as it would have been hard to expand the story or add new event computer graphics artwork (CGs), it was decided to create an in-game dictionary explaining terms used to allow players to enjoy the game on a deeper level.

Themes and influences

Uchikoshi described the game's theme as "thinking of concepts and themes". With ''Ever 17'', the series saw the start of a shift from ''Never 7'' focus on romance with only light use of science fiction themes to a more balanced use of the two, a shift that would continue in the entirely science fiction-based third game in the series, '' Remember 11: The Age of Infinity''. Although Uchikoshi planned ''Ever 17'' as part of the same series, it was initially proposed as a game "following the tradition" of ''Never 7'' rather than as a direct sequel to it. ''Never 7'' had been planned as a stand-alone game, but during ''Ever 17'' development it was decided to connect the two games' worlds, when Uchikoshi wrote details of the plot and used keywords relating to ''Never 7''. Intending to make ''Ever 17'' similar to but distinct from ''Never 7'', the developers referenced series where different entries were of different genres, such as Koji Suzuki's novels '' Ring'', ''Spiral

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