Ever 17/Headscratchers

Does time travel in Ever 17 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 time line 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 Ever 17, 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.
- 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".
- 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").
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.
Is it ever explained how or why Hokuto has blonde hair when his parents have dark blue and black hair respectively?