Ever17

again, this is a post about an old game. you know why i keep posting old things? because i have been dragging too much in having this random blog. so there are a lot of accumulated things i want to post. no, i'm not talking about my personal life and how dramatic my life is.

Follow up:

ever 17: the out of infinity, is a visual novel developed by KID in 2002. it is part of the infinity series, the other 2 being 'never 7: the end of infinity' and 'remember 11: the age of infinity'. as far as i could tell, ever17 is by far the most popular series. the reason is simple: ever17 is the only visual novel out of all the 3 to get translated into english.

before i forget, if you don't know what a visual novel is, go to the post titled 'planetarian'. i explained that in that post.

as far as the stories go, compared to the other 2, i have no idea which is better. the reason is because i have never played the other 2 yet. playing a visual novel of that length requires a lot of time, adding to the fact that i am a very slow reader.

of course, for never7 and remember11, although i don't know japanese, or rather should i say my japanese is not proficient enough to read it smoothly, i can still play it. because these 2 games were translated into chinese, which i am proficient at.

back on track, ever17 has every feature that a visual novel can have: voice acting, nice (and i mean nice) graphics, background music and a good plot. the only thing not-so-good but still acceptable is that the english translation is a bit off. if you know some basic japanese you can still tell the difference, since the voice acting is done in japanese.

the story, well i shall not spoil for you much. but it is about a group of people trapped in an underwater facility. and that they have to get out within a certain period of time or face the consequences of sinking into the sea together with the structure they were in. the story went in exploring the background and character of each and every person and the process by which they formed bonds, as well as how they tried to get out to freedom. during their period in the sea, they discovered a plot, which of course had to be a bad and evil plan of an immoral company.

as typical of most visual novels, there are quite a few routes, one for each heroine. by finishing the route of a heroine and getting a piece of the whole story, another route will be unlocked and you play the route of the second heroine and so forth. when you finished playing the paths of 4 heroines, the last and final path will be unlocked. that last path will be the path that pieces all the stories you got from the last 4 routes, and adding to it its own plot, completes the whole story like a puzzle.

of course, each heroine, except for the last, has a good ending and a bad ending. it is only after getting the good ending that the path to the other will be unlocked. but of course, if you only go after the good ending and not the bad ending, then you will miss out an emotional part of a great story, right? one thing i like about visual novels is that i can explore the routes which lead to a different story. i will always aim to complete all routes, even if it leads to death, so that i can get the true and complete story. somehow, it doesn't feel right if i complete the game but left out 1 or 2 paths, because that path may be important. i did that for tsukihime though, i left out 2 paths, and never got around to read that. awww... now the game is not in my computer and i don't want to reinstall it. it had been so long too, i would have forgotten most of the plot. aww.

anyway, as is the same for most visual novels, ever17 will add pictures to your game album which you can later access it if you go by a certain path. for example if path A has tsugumi (my favorite character in the game) sinking in the water, then if you go path A, you will get the picture of her sinking in the water. i guess that is somehow an encouragement for people to complete all the small paths instead of just the main route, if one is truly a collector of these fantastic pictures. of course, you can do a direct extraction of the game file straight from the source, but that would not be interesting right? i myself completed all the paths to get all the pictures... that last picture took me the most time and trouble, since i had no idea then which path out of the 100 over paths i did not complete. but you know, that last picture is one of my favorite. it is certainly worth it.

for music, well it had 20 over music pieces, i guess. it is well done too, but for me, i personally only like 1 piano piece. i mean, all the music pieces fit into the story and the mood well when you are playing it, but if you want a music that can be your phone's ringtone or just listen it in windows media player, i like only 1 piano piece. and that piece happens to be the most popular piece too. up till today, even though 7 years had gone by, it is still one of the favorite pieces among those who played the game years ago.

as for graphics, it had nice 2d graphics. well do a search and you can easily find many.

voice acting... yea japanese seiyuu are really professional. unlike voice actors/actresses from other countries, they really dared to act it out. imagine screaming and acting paranoid in a room when they were doing the recording. i always get the feeling that voice actors/actresses from other places tend to be a little embarrassed and not act it out as they should, hence there are always mismatches between the mood of the story and their voice. not that i can do a better job than them though. japanese seiyuu do not seem to have this problem. their voice acting really give life to the characters and the story.

anyway, if you indeed played 'planetarian' as i recommended in my recent post and would like to play another visual novel, try ever17. let me tell you though, if you take 4 hours to complete planetarian, you would take much much much longer to complete ever17. tens of hours, or i think maybe nearly 100 hours of gameplay. maybe i am just a slow reader, since i always wait for every seiyuu to say finish their lines before i click to the next line, so i can know the exact meaning of what they say, to make up for the translation errors here and there. i mean, generally the translation mean the same thing, but at the same time not. like i said before, if a person says, 'i want to sleep,' the translation may get translated to, 'i want to rest.' so, although the general idea is the same, the actual meaning is lost.

so try ever17 if you can. it had been a few years since i played that, but i still like it. yea, i had used its music as my ringtone and now i had switched it to the alarm tone that wakes me up nearly every morning.

below is the promotional poster (i assume) of ever17.