Headscratchers / Ever17

• Why doesn't the life sensor take Pipi into account?
  • because he's actually a robot dog, not a living one.
• Does time travel in Ever17 subscribe to single or alternate timelines? All the dialogue seems to point towards the latter, but then Blick Winkel seems to be so awfully pleased with himself having helped everyone live happily ever after in the True End — you know, as if it was somehow truer or more final than every other timeline in which Yubiseiharukana can only shrug her shoulders and go "Welp, looks like I didn't have the good fortune to live in the continuity in which BW shows up and makes everything peachy. Oh well, let's see if our kids are still alive down there."
  • There is only one timeline, BW just exists outside of it. He's omnipresent.
    • So — did I get this down correctly — the gist of the game is that the trick the characters played somehow forces BW to "redo" the two incidents (as separate playthroughs), essentially keeping the timeline in a flux, until he gets them "right"?
    • Weeeeell, no. It's been almost a year since I last played it, so details are blurry, but: BW told You to orchestrate the second incident to cause a small paradox/disturbance/whatever which brings BW into existence, then forbids her to rescue Coco and Co. before that, because it would cause a paradox and half the cast would die. So basically, that whole 2nd incident mess is just there so the timeline doesn't collapse. I hope I managed to answer your question.
    • What I'm hung up on is the notion that every playthrough of the game happened, at the very least as different iterations of some singular timeline. (Which I don't think is entirely unreasonable, considering the depths the game goes into many-worlds theory and temporal dimensions and the fact that BW!Hokuto starts remembering things that happened in earlier playthroughs in the Coco path.) If there's multiple timelines, I can understand how BW essentially "experiences" them all at the same time, being mind-breakingly transdimensional and whatnot, but then the happy end is just one of those timelines and BW thinking it some kind of accomplishment doesn't make sense. If there's just one timeline I can enjoy my happy ending, but that also means there has to be some kind of active time-traveling going on. What's making BW redo the game?
    • They could be going for a time of multiple-timelines where the timelines collapse on paradox, and BW managed to get rid of all the not-true ending timelines.
    • Jaabi: Would I be right in thinking that the entire plot is a deconstruction or Fridge Brilliance of being a video game player? Make a wrong choice? Start over. You know what's wrong and right because you transcend time to that video game's universe. You are it's 4th dimensional being. Now in terms of Ever17, the other timelines happened and didn't happen. To the player - aka Blick Winkel - they did. But as they/you redo things, that's what happens to the timeline. They get re-written completley.
    • You can say that non-True End "timelines" are What Could Have Been in BW/player's mind.
    • The one thing that needs to be remembered is that BW MUST go back in the time and save Takeshi and Coco for the second incident to occur, and by extension for BW to ever show up in the first place. BW set up his own Stable Time Loop. Any series of events that breaks this loop can't actually exist. The scene with BW experiencing the temporal paradox is important here, as it shows that BW can observe when these paradoxes occur and act based on this information. In essence, by talking to You and setting up the loop, he forced himself to "start over" until the loop was properly completed. We can ignore Sora's route in all this because no one cares about that anyway
• Jaabi: While Coco's route has answered a lot of things for me, and shed some light on things I completley missed, there are several things that bug me:
  • What was up with 2017!Kaburaki? Did he have amnesia as well? Did Blick Winkel influence both pcs because of knowledge of the other? (i.e, a self-sustaining paradox makes sure both Kids have amnesia). Or maybe 2017!Kaburaki had amnesia "naturally", and Hokuto became afflicted with it through BW's memories...?
  • Kaburaki was briefly possessed by BW, which, combined with some stress he was going through in his life, caused him to lose his memories. Hokuto lost his memories fully because of BW's possession.
  • Was 2034!Tsugumi aware that she was shoving her son into a stuffy costume? D:
    • Unlikely. If you pay close attention during the prologue, when it switches to the scene where the Kid is forced into the suit, it does not have that same "perspective shift" transition that every other transition in the prologue has. Therefore, it seems likely that that was when BW briefly possessed Kaburaki, and that Tsugumi got Hokuto in the suit was different (if you watch the scene again, you'll notice that how Tsugumi acts is out-of-character for 2034!Tsugumi, making it even more likely the scene took place in 2017.)
    • Additionally, Tsugumi doesn't know what her son looks like.
    • Actually, there's no inconsistency in the transitions there. The perspective shift effect takes place properly; it's just a little while before the scene in the changing room occurs. Also, while it makes sense Tsugumi wouldn't know what her children look like after about 15 years, and certainly she wouldn't realize it as early as that scene, while the park is full of people, she does sometimes act like she knows somehow. Like when Hokuto goes after her after she shows how antisocial she is, she says she can't believe he would be working with people like that (people she thinks are up to no good). And in the true route, it becomes more apparent. Which kind of makes sense, given that Yubiseiharukana told her that she could meet her son and daughter. She knew they would be 16, so a simple process of elimination would tell her the most likely people to be them, if anyone, would be the youngest boy and girl there. Especially the boy, since there are only two males there, and it's probably not this 20-looking guy pretending to be her dead lover. It is strangely coincidental, though, that the two people she stuffs into the suit in the two incidents both turn out to have important roles in the respective incidents, to the point that BW confuses them for one another.
  • Why the heck did Hokuto jump into the pool?! I'm assuming all viewpoints of "Takeshi" are in 2017, and all viewpoints of "Kid" are in 2034. Save for the obvious scenes. We can assume the events are the same at times, but the motives should be different.
    • It was probably a delusion of some sorts, as a combination of the heatstroke he suffered and his possession by BW. Therefore, Hokuto jumping into to pool was most likely symbolic in some way.
• I must be missing something, but, if the glass windows on the exterior of Erste Boden have shattered, allowing the water from the outside to come in... why, again, does Sora and everyone else shoot down the idea of escaping from LeMU by just swimming out? Presumably, Sora can override whatever mechanisms sealed off the flooded out Erste Boden (including the central elevator column that leads to the surface) and dump all that water into the lower levels, permitting more water to enter the complex and allow the water level to continue rising. As it rises in the central elevator column, our heroes - having donned floatation devices of some manner - can simply jump into the central elevator column and get pulled up alongside the rising water level until everything evens out at the top. That's it. Everyone survives, no convoluted plot required, no Blick Winkel required, no "instigate the same damn thing to happen again 17 years from now" required, they just float right up to the top and live happily ever after. And hell, even if you don't want to take the "float up" option, opening up Erste Boden long enough to trap everyone inside there and then sealing it off again will solve the problem of the rushing currents impeding your escape through the broken windows, at which point the hopelessly suicidal "swim up 51 meters" becomes a dangerous, but survivable and still less risky than staying put in the complex that is literally falling apart under your feet "swim up 17 meters".
  • Even if that was possible, there is still the fact that they are all already infected with TB, and will most likely die from it.
  • Maybe Sora didn't have the rights to override the seals - she is a guide, not an administrator, after all. Maybe the elevator shaft was damaged or otherwise unsuitable for that. And "our"/Blickwinkel's presence prohibits any solution that does not involve summoning him (you can interpret that as "if they didn't summon BW, then it (and us too) would not observe and there would be no game").
  • I think swimming around that depth is still dangerous but I'm no expert.
• One More: How does Kaburaki know his name in 2034? Did he get his memory back sometime between the accidents?
  • Near the end of Coco's route in 2017, doesn't he suddenly remember his name and tell it to Takeshi? Presumably, the rest of his memory returned to him soon after.
    • He does. Whether or not he remembers completely is up for debate.
• Is it ever explained how or why Hokuto has blonde hair when his parents have dark blue and black hair respectively?
  • Recessive Genes?
  • Anime Hair. Don't think too hard about it.
  • You're worried about how unrealistic it is for someone to have a completely different hair color from both his parents, while saying one of them is naturally blue?? Haha.
• From a watsonian standpoint, how does one explain the bad German all over the place?
  • Explained in Kid's route: LeMU is a joint German-Japanese facility as it's owned by Leiblich Pharmaceuticals. Why go put a bunch of Gratuitous German to a tourist attraction (whose demographic probably won't be able to read it) or risk exposing their identity is beyond me.
• A question about the "Blind Idiot" Translation. When the group tries to come up with a name for the Kid, Sora suggests "Melos" (which I assume was an Osamu Dazai reference) but then suddenly Takeshi said "Why are you calling him Nomemo?" or something like that. What is the line suppose to be?
  • That is supposed to be the line. It's a joke made by Takeshi, because "Melos" is supposed to be short for "Memory Loss" so Takeshi lampshades how bad of an idea that is by saying "Why don't you just call him Nomemo?" where "Nomemo" is short for "No memory" of course.
  • In the original Japanese—which you can actually hear in the voice acting—Sora calls him "Kiwaku-san". "Kiwaku" sounds like "kioku", which would be short for "kioku sōshitsu", meaning "amnesia".
• Who kicked the can? That is the only thing that was not resolved, really.
  • The accepted theory can be read here. (obligatory spoiler warning).
• Ok, here's the thing - LeMU was rebuilt after it was destroyed in 2017. How did the people building it(and, more importantly, Lebleich) not notice that IBF was still in one piece below the LeMU construction site, and that it was still taking power from the heat vents(which is also used to power the newly-built LeMU), Also, more importantly, how did Lebleich not notice that IBF was in one piece after LeMU was destroyed? One would think they would want to destroy it in order to erase the evidence of them creating, and causing the outbreak of TB. It was their main research facility for developing TB, one would think they would consider it's fate after the accident as an important thing, and not just forget about it.
  • My guess is because IBF still contained top secret information that they don't want to part with. Now my question is why didn't they go in when LeMu was rebuilt? It can't possibly because they're waiting for Tief Blau to die because viruses don't work that way.
  • After the Tief Blau pandemic, IBF's secrecy became even more vital to Leiblich (because now it's not just evidence of unethical operations, but proof that their negligence was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths). Basically everyone who already knew about IBF was either dead from Tief Blau (all the researchers, plus the rescue team) or otherwise not likely to spill the beans (Yubiseiharukana was working for Leiblich and Tsugumi was homeless), so the risk of leaving a paper trail by recovering or demolishing IBF (come on, who demolishes a wreck on the seafloor if they've got nothing to hide) wasn't worth the potential benefits. Better to pretend it's just a chunk of the (massive - LeMU's over a kilometre across) wreck of the original LeMU and sweep it under the rug.
• If Tsu is vulnerable to sunlight then how the f... did she take her kids on the beach?
  • Maybe it was a really cloudy day?? It's not all the light she's vulnerable to, just certain UV radiation, the same that is a problem for everyone but the body normally copes with through various means, but Curé disables. Thick clouds will block a lot of that radiation, though it can also scatter it and actually increase exposure if the cover is incomplete. But if the sky was thoroughly overcast, it probably would have been safer. Would it be safe enough? I don't know. A similar question arises in the last CG, where she's wearing the lemur costume for protection, but has taken the head off while looking at the sky, for some reason.
• How come Coco's carvings are still on the back of the statue in Kid's routes, when the original statues were destroyed in the implosion with the rest of Le MU?