Never7 and visual novel ludonarrative
Major spoilers for the Infinity trilogy.
Video games in general have the ability to pull off sensual, textured experiences through becoming a melting pot of different established genre conventions. That's something that allows them to stand out -- it's a genre aligning itself with the rapid growth of technical advancement towards the end of the 20th century, a pastiche of film, music, books, and even the sprawling software industry. Games found a rise in popularity alongside a quickly defined subculture, and the Internet as a whole found itself inseparable from that zeitgeist.
Those gaming subcultures became smaller bubbles. The allure of the PC-88 in Japan allowed for a rebellious formation of adventure games, experiences structured around heavy dialogue and point and click engagement. One thing led to another and after a certain point it became obvious the lack of scrutiny given to the budding PC game space allowed for aggressively erotic, adult writing. Voluptuous figures handcrafted in pixel art shamelessly. One of my favorite ADV games from this early era is Hideo Kojima's Snatcher -- a game that would define a pattern of his bullheaded homage towards American movies. Snatcher is a Blade Runner-esque experience centered around detective work with a healthy dose of that aforementioned raunchiness.
There's another big hitter from back then that's really fucking important. YU-NO is a visual novel centered around parallel world traversal. It's the birth of the branch of sci-fi visual novels I wanna focus on. You can trace a very clear lineage from YU-NO to modern experiences like Zero Escape and Science Adventure.
YU-NO is bound by the typical "galge" dynamic in early visual novels, where there's an inevitable and inseparable romantic aspect to the gameplay loop. You're expected to bond and engage with each of the girls and complete them in a traditional route structure to reach the "True end". Ultimately, as the entire genre at that point was completely drowned out by porn, stuff like YU-NO stood out by having a decently-sized science fiction storyline driving it forward.
Infinity and the "woke" visual novel
Young writer Kotarou Uchikoshi had pumped out a well-received romance VN called Memories Off, and while putting out romantic slice of life stories can be a fun, low-risk experience, he was hungry for something a little wilder.
With KID, the studio overseeing him, Uchikoshi and director Takumi Nakazawa were limited in the amount of science-fiction elements they could implemenet within the storyline. Like the rest of the medium, Uchikoshi was expected to paint tired scenarios of the protagonist bonding with each of the women in a route structure. Typical stuff.
infinity as a project still stood out in the story's metaphysics -- the narrative flows in such a way that nothing quite feels grounded and definitively Real. The typical route-to-route structure present in other visual novels becomes a means for the story to explore its idea of malleable reality, while still working in the confines of "romance VN".
Infinity involves a looping week as the protagonist, mediocre college student Makoto, navigated through the confines of the world and found love with each of the girls in the cast.
infinity saw a standalone fandisc on the fucking Neo Geo Pocket Color called Infinity Cure. Cure recontextualized the weird malleable reality as part of a literal mental illness capable of reshaping the world. Cure Syndrome works when a number of observers are convinced something is true (in Cure's words, a delusion), and allows it to manifest and become reality.
I'd rather not spoil the added storylines here in detail, but I'll just say the entire VN's storyline is now brought into question. Everything down to women falling for Makoto to the outings and experiences shared in the story could be manifested by delusion, and the narrative wraps up on an unintentionally horrifying revelation that Makoto could be trapped so far within delusion that it's fundamentally indistinguishable from reality.
Infinity + Infinity Cure saw a rerelease as Never7: The End of Infinity. With the Cure routes, the narrative took a unique perspective on our relationship with the visual novel structure, showing how malleable the world around us is within these programmed experiences. There's an uncomfortable implication that our relationship as "observer" to narrative-heavy, branching games has a stranglehold on what can and can't exist in them. Visual novels are inclined to meet our sensibilies, become an easy fallback or comfort zone. Even if Never7 wasn't able to break out of this trap itself, its narrative storytelling devices would lay a path for a thread of "woke" visual novels deeply invested in this reader-protagonist-world relationship.
I'm going to cover the monumental Ever17 and its enormous impact next, as there's a clear throughline from the original Never7 to its sequel that makes sense with this established historical context.
Thanks for reading!