Yeah so I saw many people being like "oh you like the Zero Escape saga? You should try these games too, they're from the same author!" And then you have a story about some guys conducting a psychology experiment to detect some god-complex schizophrenia syndrome that makes you inmortal, cures all illness or allows you to warp reallity and time travel (I wish this was satire).
The best part is that the game takes the form of a romantic visual novel, so you have to time travel your way into romancing 4 different girls before unlocking the true "curé" ending (in which they explain all of this, because anyone would think that the time travel shenanigans is an excuse to allow the MC to kiss random anime girls and not a plot-relevant thing, but yeah after like 20 hours the game actually turns into sci-fi).
At the very least, someone made a complete diagram to unlock all different endings that ressembles an eldritch entity not because they did a sloppy job, but because the game has so many random flags that it is chaotic to follow all of them.
I want to cut the man some slack because it's the first game of this saga and come on, this was made in 2000, the OST is glitched and I had to play this on 600x600 sure, but how on Earth did this guy write all the shit that happens in VLR but before that he made this monstruosity of a visual novel? Who knows, but the next games in the saga have much higher scores so I guess I'll eventually play them after I recover from this one.

Never 7 is the first entry of Infinity Series, but is it good?
Yes and no, while it's enjoyable as a SoL with likeable characters the Sci-Fi part is lackluster both as a standalone game and as part of the Infinity series.

Is it a must? No
It adds something to the infinity series? No
Is it worth playing? Yup why not, it's enjoyable in my opinion, just do not expect a well-written sci-fi Visual novel, take it as a SoL/Romance.

Vote: 7
Time in vacation: 11H 21M

this being my second exposure to the writings of kotaro uchikoshi after his subsequent mainstream hit, 999, i'm beginning to notice some patterns in his writing style that i'm not exactly a fan of. for context, i actually loved 999 and plan to review it positively down the line, and the express purpose of playing never7 was so that i might play its sequels, ever17 and remember11. with that in mind, take my criticisms here simply as my return to this creator's early work, seeing where these patterns formed, and acknowledging that they at least saw improvement down the road.

let's start with some positives. the character designs bleed early-oughts slice-of-life in a really charming way that invokes the feeling of golden-era KEY titles (not the last time they'll come up here), and all of their seiyuus do a very solid job bringing these characters to life. the soundtrack while limited in the actual amount of tracks present is memorable and well composed. the backgrounds are fantastic with really wonderful color choices to suggest lighting across various times of day - very dreamy and warm in a way that perfectly reflects the beachside setting. i think once all was said and done, i feel mostly positively about yuka's route, haruka's route, and the true ending. the post-game arc from yuka's point of view is also solid. the concepts explored in never7 would be influential to visual novels down the line, and indeed - i think uchikoshi has a knack for finding or creating really interesting topics to discuss in his games and i think when never7 is focused, it hits moments where those things actually matter in a meaningful way.

with that said, i need to be upfront. never7's journey is maybe the biggest slog of any visual novel i've ever played. this game only took me about 18 hours to complete, but i had to do so over the course of nearly two months solely because i found the vast majority of the game so unbelievably boring to push through. as if uchikoshi's clearly unedited draft of a script wasn't already bulky and clumsy enough, due to the main gimmick of never7, you're experiencing 60-70% of the exact same events twice in a route before you reach an ending. almost word-for-word exactly the same, but since the game's text recognition system recognizes these instances as a new encounter, you can't even auto-skip them out of hear of potentially missing whatever crucial new information is hidden in those scenes.

not to mention, ultimately, only like 3 of the routes actually matter - yuka, kurumi and the true ending. haruka's story i liked decently enough because i found her character somewhat endearing, but saki was a complete waste of time, kurumi's route had some really gross overtones, and izumi's post-game route is basically just comedic fanservice based around romancing a character who didn't deserve the time of day and bullying the foil character because uchikoshi didn't think to actually develop him in any meaningful way prior. i mentioned patterns in uchikoshi's writing earlier - the largest of which is all over never7. he will take walls and walls and WALLS of text to explain a very simple concept or fact that could consume maybe two, three textboxes, and completely stop the flow of the storytelling to butt in with whatever concept he's currently interested in at the time regardless of whether or not it's actually going to pay off in his story. in all fairness, i actually think never7 is better about keeping its concepts story-relevant than 999, but that's mostly out of the fact that it's a much simpler game with a lot less moving parts. it feels like never7 is either stuck in the first two hours of every early KEY game or it's attempting to go balls-deep into psychology without concerning itself about the timing or the logical way it would come up and from which characters. also, i know it's not exclusive to uchikoshi, but jesus christ this guy does NOT know how to write women or put them in roles beyond 90s anime stereotypes and archetypical damsels in distress. uchikoshi's women serve as tools for his plots to advance, and for a goal in this case for his personality-barren, literally faceless protagonist.

the general consensus from what i gather is that ever17 and especially remember11 are far more daring, conceptually interesting, and better executed stories. i'm excited to eventually give them a try. never7 wasn't a complete waste of my time though i'd suggest newcomers not to be afraid of mostly skimming through the majority of its sleepier routes and mostly pay attention during the positively-discussed ones. a fumbled first attempt, but there's always hope for the future.

This game is so much of a meme of a romantic visual novel in so many ways with at the best functional or decent ideas. Saki especially is a standout in how much irony in a VN you can reasonably experience. Of course this sounds like a recipe for a 2 or 3 out of 10 right? Wellllll a certain route exists and it completely breaks your mind to an impressive extent, even more so than better VNs with better mindfucks. I'm not saying it's bad though, it is in fact very good and fascinating but the fact that this game exists and you can have such an insane reading is both amazing but also not exactly conducive to a wholly good story. It's hard to describe anything else, I'd say read it but I am not even sure you should do that. I don't remember the routes well enough to rate all of them but Saki route is a 1 or 10 depending on if you are applying irony or not.

It is better than ZTD.

Never 7 is not a great game. The writing isn't particularly good and the characters often act needlessly difficult despite being older than the average VN cast. The Cure Syndrome stuff is fairly interesting but makes up a small portion of the overall story while lacking a lot of the build-up present in Uchikoshi's other works. Despite all that, between the early 2000s atmosphere, great soundtrack and small-scale setting, there's a certain charm to the game and the surprisingly short length keeps it from really being a waste of time. It's not really a VN I would recommend to anyone unless they were also a big Uchikoshi fan interested in seeing his roots but I don't regret reading it.

Pacing-wise, the balance of "interesting sci-fi mystery" to "slice of life dating sim" is more evenly distributed than the infamously backloaded Ever 17, but on the whole there's a lot more focus on the latter than most of Uchikoshi's other work. From the perspective of "an Uchikoshi VN" it's mostly a curiosity, as the origin of some elements referenced in the other Infinity games - though it's certainly not without some interesting aspects. The Never 7 Eternal Edition fan remake is an amazing work of preservation though, lined up against a host of ports with inconsistent content and bugs galore.

E: OK, honestly, every time I think about this game I give it more credit for its interesting ideas. I need to do a replay with the intent of meeting it on its own terms.