Never 7 – The End of Infinity PC review — For whom the bell tolls

Getting official translations of the first two games in the Infinity series was certainly not on my bingo card for this year, but the first two visual novels in the series have not only gotten remasters, but are officially in English for the first time. The first game, Never 7 – The End of Infinity, was originally just called “Infinity” until its performance justified it becoming the start of its own series. The visual novel itself is very clearly conflicted in its ends, as its writer, Koutarou Uchikoshi, wanted to lean into his (now usual) mind-blowing sci-fi, but the publisher wanted a somewhat typical romance visual novel. The result is still a very good read, albeit with lots of fluff and some boredom, while sifting through the generic romance to get to the crazy stuff.

The story concerns Makoto Ishihara, a third year psychology student who has travelled to an island with three of his classmates for a training seminar. Upon waking up on April 1st from a strange dream about a dead girl holding a bell, the seminar’s team leader bursts into his room in a state of utter confusion. Never 7 features five main routes (plus a joke route and an unvoiced bonus route from the perspectives of one of the heroines.) As a semi-romance visual novel, the plot mostly focuses on Makoto interacting with the game’s five heroines, who all get their own romance routes.

While I am actually quite fond of romance stories, I feel the opposite about these kinds of visual novels. The whole “everyone falls in love with the protagonist solely for existing” thing is cheap and insults the intelligence of everyone who reads them. It doesn’t help that most of the characters in these are mostly generic archetypes. I wouldn’t necessarily go that far in regard to Never 7, but there is a bit of it. Yuka, for instance, is very much a standard early 00s “main girl” (although this is a bit of a trope inversion in-and-of itself.) She’s kind, energetic, and usually incredibly annoying. “Yuka got drunk again and is saying a bunch of generic drunk person stuff” is a “joke” the game goes back to relentlessly.

Then you’ve got Haruka, who is the mostly emotionless girl that always pops up in these. The worst is Kurumi, who’s a few years younger than the rest of the cast but sounds and acts like a child for some reason. Her high-pitched voice and annoying behaviour grated on me kind of fiercely. Of course, she calls the protagonist “onii-chan,” which never failed to make my skin crawl. I never expected to see this kind of stuff in an Uchikoshi story, but I understand he was strong-armed into following the trends of the time. It doesn’t help that the story’s central gimmick focuses so strongly on additional repetition.

Every route has a point where the heroine dies (often in baffling ways,) which sends Makoto back in time to April 1st. This means that, in every main route, you have to read about Makoto going through the events of the loop again. It starts getting old the second time, as you might expect. Time loop stories are, by now, incredibly old hat, but this is Uchikoshi we’re talking about, so he’s able to at least keep things interesting. Even though I’ve done all the above griping, a lot of the fluff and typical hallmarks are kind of a misdirection. Obviously, I’m not going to spoil it, but Never 7 is worth it in the end, albeit just not as much as Uchikoshi’s later work.

Keeping spoilers to a minimum, the way it works is that you need to complete the initial four routes (all with good and bad endings) to unlock the fifth route, which is longer and far more thought-provoking than the others. That’s not to say there isn’t any good stuff in the other four. Uchikoshi set up mystery boxes for every route, some of which are connected and tie into or hint toward overarching mysteries for the game’s narrative. There are some very nice, “ohhhhh, so that’s why that happened” moments.

The fifth route, however, is where things really come to a head. When Never 7 spends half an hour carefully explaining the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment, followed by an infodump on why that’s philosophically relevant to the game’s events, you know you’re reading an Uchikoshi story. It was honestly a great surprise, as I was quite worried at times that I was just slogging through a generic visual novel, but rest assured it still fits solidly within the author’s canon. The story offers no easy answers and some threads remain dangling.

Unlike most of Uchikoshi’s other works, Never 7 isn’t as easy to recommend due to the very nature of its existence. It’s very much worth reading, but if you’re like me, there will be a lot of boring or irritating parts that can make that quite a tall order. Still, it’s awesome to see where one of my favourite authors came into his own and, despite a surprising amount of typos and awkward syntax here and there, this remaster offers a perfectly readable script in a very functional package (as long as you don’t mind it maxing out at 1080p, anyway.)

Check out our previous review:

Ninja Gaiden II Black PC review — Grab a glass because there’s going to be a flood |