Ever17

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.

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.

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.

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.

Neal Chandran at RPGFan called Ever 17 "a fantastic adventure game", and one of the best Japanese games in the genre that are available in English, describing it as a "must-play". He liked the game's writing, finding the conversations with other characters to be deep, philosophical, and intellectual, and said that each character was interesting. He found the conversations to reading "like conversation should", but also found the English localization to contain multiple flaws, including spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, such as the misuse of the words "your" and "you're". Jason Young at GameZone called the game an "all-age masterpiece [that] is nearly flawless in every regard", and said that it was the best visual novel that was available in English. He said that it was one of the video games with the best characterization in history, and called the game's plot twist "mind-blowing".

Writers for Famitsu thought that the combination of suspense and romance made for a strange feeling. They found the game system to be characteristic of KID, calling it user-friendly, and saying that it made repeated playthroughs pleasant. Chandran liked the game's graphics, saying that while they only consist on still 2D images on static backgrounds, the character designs were appealing and the backgrounds were bright and detailed. He called the game's sound "top notch", saying that the voice actors did an excellent job with their characters, and that the music was very good; he liked how it was varied, feeling that it represented the various scenarios and moods in the game well, and that it was a big improvement over the music in the previous game in the series.