YMMV / Ever17

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yuubiseiharukana is an actual name; the writers said they just found it in a name dictionary.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening is really catchy yet at the same time creates the mysterious mood for this VN.
  • "Karma," a song that plays in the most emotional parts of the VN and the title screen really complements these moments a lot.
  • "Drittes Auge Nehmen"^note Very roughly, "Take the Third Eye" does an excellent job of simultaneously conveying the tone of both mindblowing revelations and unhinged, unsettling creepiness.
  • "Tief Blau." That is all.
• Broken Base: The Xbox 360 remake is either a fun alternative to the original with interesting changes, or an utter piece of garbage that disgraces the original.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Sora's route sometimes gets this treatment, as players almost universally agree on it being the worst part of the game.
• Faux Symbolism: Nearly twenty years after release, Uchikoshi has confessed that the reason 17 is the arc number is because his birthday is on the 17th. Even Nakazawa was surprised to learn this.
• Genius Bonus: Tsugumi's associated ride is the Jellyfish Gondola. There's a certain species of jellyfish that is biologically immortal due to the ability to continually transition between its larval and adult forms, effectively giving it eternal youth. This is similar to Tsugumi's own circumstances as The Ageless. Uchikoshi has come out and said that this was a case of Accidentally-Correct Writing.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This game is more popular in foreign markets than it is in Japan, since it's one of the few commercial Visual Novel releases in their countries.
  • To be more specific, while it's still very popular in Japan, it's just one out of many different Visual Novels, and so has pretty much found its own niche. In other countries, where very few Visual Novels are translated, it's considered a classic and one of the greatest Visual Novels of all time.
  • Has lessened over the years, as the West has received more Visual Novels in English combined with the fact that it's an older game now with a minimal initial English print and no digital rerelease, with newer fans being attracted to these more recent games.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Many interactions between Tsugumi, Sara and Kid, especially the argument in the infirmary, are put in much harsher light when you know that Tsugumi is their mother.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When everyone is down after learning the time limit until the implosion in Kid's Routes, You tries to cheer everyone up, saying "It's not like we're on a snowy mountain in the winter!"
  • There's also You's fortune telling to Takeshi, where she predicts a variety of things about Takeshi's future. By the end of the game, at least half of her prediction comes true.
  • One of Kid's arguments to You why he doesn't need to know his name is that dolphins are intelligent yet don't have names for each other. Actually...
  • This line: "WHOOOO BANANA BANAAAAANAAAAAAA", helps that 5pb./MAGES. developed both Steins;Gate and the Xbox 360 remake of this novel.
• Ho Yay: You and Sara have a pretty close relationship. A little too close at times. Most evident in Kid/Coco's route, when refusing to smile or laugh in front of You (in response to getting over his amnesia) results in her picking Mayo's nose in order to get Kid to lighten up. Cue Sara sensually reacting to You's finger being inserted into her nostril, followed by the words "And at that moment, Senpai and I became one." Everyone laughs it off afterwards, though Sara isn't quite as amused as the others.
  • Also apparent when Kid walks in on You and Sara cuddled together sleeping, and You being particularly possessive of Sara's body in their half-asleep state. Slightly subverted in that Kid contemplates on squeezing in between the two, if only he was sleepy.
  • And again in You's route, while not quite obvious; Sara realizes Kid and You's relationship and tells Kid she's jealous, but because it's him, she'll let it go.
  • In the remake, this becomes a Running Gag: Sara and You frequently act out dialogue similar to cliché lesbians at a boarding school (speaking to each other very tenderly, mind you) in order to tease Kid, and at the end, just when it looks like they're going to take it to the next level, they break off and laugh, usually leaving Kid blushing.
• Inferred Holocaust: Sora's ending seems to imply that everyone except Tsugumi would die of Tief Blau, since no one was injected with the vaccine. They would probably infect everyone in the rescuing party as well, leading to the epidemy being that bit worse. Tsugumi herself would probably end up in the hands of Leiblich, and so she and her children would be in for endless torture and experimentation, without even death to spare them. But it's still supposedly a "good" ending.
• Jerkass Woobie: Tsugumi, once you know her full story. As a kid she was infected with a rare virus and spent a significant part of her childhood being a lab rat, with Chami as pretty much her only friend. After she got traped in LeMU the first time, she fell in love only to lose said love after just a few days. She then spent years on the run from Leiblich Pharmaceutical. When she gave birth to the kids she found happiness for a while, but then was forced by circumstances to give them up. When she finally meets them again she's tricked into reliving the same incident that made her lose Takeshi in the first place with some random guy pretending to BE Takeshi and everyone else acting like nothing ever happened. She may be a bitch but her life certainly wasn't easy.
• Memetic Mutation: "Why is she in a washing machine?", referring to Tsugumi in the submarine.
  • "I shat bricks in Coco's Route."
  • "Get Tief Blau and die!"
• Moe: Sara and Coco. You is older than average but she certainly doesn't lack cuteness.
• Narm: Some of the intended Tear Jerker moments may be a bit over-the-top or cliche for some. Sora's route, Tsugumi, and You'haru angsting about how cloning themselves was an unforgivable sin are all particularly bad offenders.
  • None of those compare to how they portray Hollywood Hacking. It involves duplicates of Sora battling each other with one Sora trying to buy time for the protagonists.
  • Hokuto somehow projecting himself into the past, resurrecting Takeshi through The Power of Love, and then gushing over him and repeatedly calling him "dad" throughout the entire rest of the ending can easily fall under Narm or Narm Charm depending on the player.
• Once Original, Now Common: At the time of its release, the game was one of the first plot twist heavy visual novels that used the conventions of the medium to its advantage to stand out amongst visual novels, which at-the-time were known almost entirely for romance titles, earning much praise from audiences. However, nowadays, where plot and twist-heavy visual novels are much more commonplace, and with many of its twists and story elements being replicated in many other visual novels, the game is considered by modern audiences to be a dull, slow-paced visual novel with twists that are far less innovative nowadays.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: While not exactly a Scrappy, Kaburaki was fairly unremarkable in the original game. The remake fixes this up by giving him a lot more Character Development and personality, an actual backstory, and a much closer relationship with Takeshi.
• Robo Ship: Takeshi x Sora
• Squick:
  • That one scene in Sora's route. Takeshi is strangled, gets blood spat in his mouth during a Forceful Kiss, and raped (except not really), all while Tsugumi rambles about the meaninglessness of existence and how she wants to kill them both. It all happens on an amusement park attraction, too. Could also count as Nightmare Fuel.
  • In the true ending, Coco simultaneously declares you, the player, as both her adoptive older brother and her boyfriend. Nope nope nope.
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page. This game isn't an Utsuge for nothing.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The X360 remake divided fans with the way it changed certain elements of the story, using a completely new scenario writer that wasn't involved in any of the other Infinity series projects nor in the Science Adventure series. Lack of fan support, along with the bankruptcy of Cyberfront, one of the two companies involved in its development, killed any chances of the game getting ported to any more platforms.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Some of the technology used in the game. Some prominent examples include:
  • Takeshi making a backup of Sora's data with a compact disc; in 2017, the year the first part of the game takes place, he likely would have used a flash drive or uploaded her to the cloud.^note In the game, he uploads her to a terabyte disc; the largest flash drives available in 2002 had less than a gigabyte of storage capacity.
  • Takeshi's use of a PDA, whose usage peaked during the late 90s-early 2000s before the advent of the iPhone and other smartphones.
• The Woobie: Almost all of the characters count, but especially Tsugumi and Yubiseiharukana.
• Woolseyism: In the Japanese version, there's a part of the game where the characters discuss the story of Urashima Taro. Since most Westerners don't know this story, the English version has them talking about Rip Van Winkle instead, which is not only very well known, but is pretty much the same story as Urashima Taro.
  • Also, when choosing what character to play as in the Japanese version, the choice to decide was "Ore wa..." and "Boku wa..." (Takeshi uses "Ore", while the Kid uses "Boku"). This wouldn't have worked in English, obviously, so the translators instead replaced the choices with the two character's respective situations: "I've got to find my friends" (Takeshi) and "Who am I?" (Kid).
  • The Cultural Translation isn't entirely perfect as You describes Rip Van Winkle drinking a liquid that advances his aging, which was an artifact of the Urashima Taro story. Rip van Winkle drank a liquor that put him to sleep for several decades. It also loses the Lemurian connection as Urashima Taro involved a castle under the ocean.

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