a lazy rerelease based on the xbox 360 version

this isn't the original game that was released 25 years ago, but a completely rewritten (for the worse) version from 14 years ago.

if you want to play the actual ever17, you'll have to play the original.

at least ever 17 is in slightly better shape than never 7 cause the source assets were higher quality.

This is not a good port. This will likely never be a good port. And it's not the game Spike Chunsoft is advertising,

First and foremost, despite Spike Chunsoft's deliberate marketing to the contrary, this is NOT the original Ever 17. This is based on the 2011 Xbox 360 remake, not the 2002 original. The 360 remake was heavily rewritten - NOT by Uchikoshi or any of the original creative staff, but by someone still too embarrassed by it to come out from behind their pseudonym, even a decade and a half later. This version changes quite a bit of the plot and pacing, changing character backstories for little reason and openly revealing some of the twists far, far too early with no payoff for doing so. To be fair, MAGES announced from the beginning that this remaster would use the 360 script - why Spike Chunsoft has chosen to mislead English customers about it, I have no idea.

Now, in and of itself, if Spike Chunsoft had been honest about what they were publishing, I wouldn't automatically give it a thumbs-down just for being the worse version of the game - if it were handled well, I think the 360 version is at least an interesting new perspective for people familiar with the original story, even if it's not the way I'd recommend people experience Ever 17 for the first time. However, this was not well-handled - the English localization is as terrible as you'd expect from a MAGES product, save for the few occasions (Steins;Gate, Anonymous;Code) where they've let outside teams work on them. Here, the English translation feels stilted and awkward, overly literal rather than a natural-sounding narrative. Typos and grammar errors are quickly obvious. As early as the first two minutes of the game, characters names written in the dialogue start to differ from the names in their dialogue-box name tags. Some of the UI, like the text log, feels overly-crowded (at least in English), with too little spacing between lines and speakers, making it difficult to parse at a glance. Early reviews have pointed out that the script issues persist for the entire length of the game, along with more egregious errors like inserting editor's notes as dialogue. None of this was the result of a rush to get the game to market on time, because the finished build was uploaded to Steam three months before release, with seemingly none of the time since spent on even the most basic QA.

Of course, you can always hold out hope that a patch down the line might make it more presentable, but the thing is that MAGES rarely patches its work, and never fixes its localizations. Many of the same issues have plagued every release of Steins;Gate 0 since the Vita translation; similarly, the Robotics;Notes games had a lot of errors with tweets and tips that never got fixed. Robotics;Notes DaSH still has a character model completely broken on the Switch version. Chaos;Child can't be completed fully in English (at least on PC and Vita, maybe they pulled their heads out of their asses for the Switch port) without third-party patches because it expects players to navigate a map entirely in Japanese and penalizes them for getting it wrong. Chaos;Head Noah's localization was so loudly derided that MAGES was forced to outsource their Anonymous;Code localization to salvage their international reputation, but if you think that means they did literally anything to address C;HN's issues post-release, you clearly haven't been paying attention. The only reason that the original Steins;Gate was so well-recieved outside Japan - aside from an anime adaptation that did it justice - is because MAGES simply bought a fan translation, not that they didn't muck it up with poor font choices and a lack of decent wordwrap for text messages. In short: MAGES is absolutely NOT going to fix this game.

Track down a copy of the original game. Even if you have to learn Japanese to play it, or pay an arm and a leg for the 2005 localization, it'll still be a better use of your time and money than buying this.

Quite insulting charging more even though Mages. basically copied pasted the UI from Never7.

It also has the same problem with Never7 with weird translations. It's already plain to see with the writing in the opening trailer before the game.


Do Not Buy.