Steins;Gate

Review:

Found through MAL and online references.

My god this was a masterpiece. Steins;Gate has been ranked very highly on MyAnimeList.net (MAL) for years and years now, always being in the back of my mind. I always revered Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood for being #1 on MAL for a very long time, but I forgot at times that Steins;Gate was right next to it all along. And this is all for good reason, it is the best anime I have watched so far. Yes, even beating Attack on Titan, a show that changed my perspective on battle anime and media overall. However, I have never watched a show like Steins;Gate before. You could try and compare it to many different time travel oriented shows, but they don’t even come close. From the tone shift, to the moments of suffering, to the characters: everything was outstanding.

First, I want to talk about the story overall. This show is quite hard to get into, because it starts a little slower. However, I was enjoying it quite a bit! There was a ton of mystery, the cast was goofy, and it was fun. That is, until Mayuri dies for the first time. Then the show becomes very reminiscent of Re:Zero (which is funny because there are Steins;Gate references in Re:Zero), where Okabe is desperately trying to save someone's life, going back in time, over and over and over. The really interesting part is that Subaru can’t tell anyone about his time traveling abilities, and the show really just doesn’t explain it. This leaves the viewer basically thinking, “Ok, I guess it’s just weird magic anime logic”. On the other hand, in Steins;Gate, Okabe can absolutely tell people about his time travel abilities, and he does so in many different timelines. However, especially towards the beginning of his time travel journeys, he is scared to tell Mayuri that she is going to die. He can absolutely tell her, nothing is stopping him. But he doesn’t want to instill fear into the poor innocent girl. And that is what makes this Re:Zero aspect of Steins:Gate so much more interesting.

The last 2/3rds of this show are incredible, making my head spin with the plot twists. The ending was absolutely phenomenal, reminding me a lot of the first Bunny Girl Senpai movie. The memory fusing dream shit that they do is the best way you can make a bitter ending a little bit sweeter. It’s a reused concept, but it’s a reused concept because it works. I’m just glad they aren’t milking the story like Bunny Girl Senpai did (they really should have ended it after the first movie). I also think it’s interesting how they give different people different degrees of Reading Steiner. Okabe isn’t even the one with the strongest Steiner despite being the MC, Faris is (as far as we know). She can feel the memories of both previous timelines and current ones. It’s just a different take than the Bunny Girl Senpai movie that I appreciated.

I also wanted to mention that scene where Okabe and Kurisu pass each other in the final timeline (the Steins Gate if you will), it reminds me a LOT of Your Name, which I really liked. I also wanted to mention that Charlotte is a watered down version of this show with superpowers added.

Another thing: None of the other time-travel animes that I have watched do things that Steins;Gate does. Suzuha literally gives Okabe things that his future self created. Okabe watches videos of himself from the future. It’s insane, I’ve never seen something like it. I also love how Okabe still acts the same goofy way when he’s 33 years old, even Okabe himself in 2010 laughs at it.

Let’s talk characters. Virtually every character in this show is important. Take any of the main-ish cast, and you can name something important. Even Faris, Mr. Braun, and fucking DARU have important roles in this story. My favorite part is when Okabe is going back to undo the D-Mails, and he has to crush everyones dreams. I like this part, because once he gets back to undo-ing the first D-Mail, he has to crush his own dream. He has to sacrifice his love. For every undid D-Mail, Okabe had to let every person accept their fate, to accept that their hopes and dreams were being crushed. And finally, Okabe accepted his fate, or rather the fate of Kurisu. This is the most beautiful part of the story in my opinion. I was so sure that Kurisu was actually going to stay dead by the end of the series. 

My favorite character’s gotta be Suzuha. She's a badass, she’s Daru’s daughter, she got them the IBN, she was so resilient to fix everything, and her failed efforts made for some really depressing scenes. The best part about her character is how subtle she is in the beginning. The first hint I got that she was time traveling was when she gave Kurisu a nasty look, but before that, you’d never guess she was anyone else than a simple part time worker. Some other crazy plot twists were Moeka working for SERN and Mr. Braun being FB. I only saw the FB one coming when my friend realized the only character with B as their last initial was Mr. Braun (and of course they left his first name ambiguous, calling him “Mr.” to not give it away).

I gotta talk about Okabe and how good of a MC he is. He starts off the show as some goofy idiot, and ends the show that way, and I absolutely adore that. However, the middle section has him emotionally breaking down, not even being the same person anymore. Yet you still see his heart, his care for his friends, his soft side.

The pacing of this show was nearly perfect. I’m not sure if I have ever been invested in a show from start to finish this much. Even the slower parts at the beginning were fine, I really don’t think this show has any crazy bad parts or anything. 

The music was very fitting, lots of piano and overall very nice. Just very high quality stuff, but nothing on the level of AOT or Demon Slayer with their cinematic soundtracks.

The visuals were by far the worst part of this show. It’s pretty old, so it’s understandable, and they do some artistically creative scenes sometimes! But it’s just not that great for most of the show, looking like any other anime from its time.

I wanna talk about atmosphere, which as of this review, is a new category! The atmosphere in this show is impeccable. The way it shifts from depressing, to comfortable, to outright TERRIFYING is something I’ve not only never felt in an anime, but any sort of show or movie at all. The show becomes a literal horror show towards the middle, with Okabe being watched, sent messages of decapitated heads on his phone, waiting for Moeka’s henchmen to pick him up, kill him, kill his friends, or anything in between. It was extraordinarily terrifying and might be my favorite part of the show overall. The feeling of unease was not something that only Okabe felt, but the viewer felt to the same degree. 

The sad atmosphere of this show really hit me hard. Everyone letting go of their wishes, countless people dying, and Okabe’s unending stress. It really reminds me of Re:Zero when Subaru is giving up, breaking down after not being able to solve anything for countless timelines. I think it’s done significantly better here in Steins;Gate, because the characters feel so much more real. I think Okabe is just a better MC overall, and he also feels much older than Subaru (even though they’re the same age). Something about him feels much more mature when he’s actually serious, while Subaru feels like a 14 year old a lot of the time.

Now, why does this show beat AOT? Well, for starters, AOT has a pretty weak first season (relatively). It lasts about a quarter of the show. Now yes, Steins;Gate also has a pretty weak first quarter, but I definitely feel like I was connecting more with the characters early on more so than I was with AOT S1. I also was very interested with all the mystery of the first 6-8 or so episodes of Steins;Gate. AOT S1 had a lot of good stuff, but it was just a lot of time just for me to not get a lot out of it. I got a million times more out of the last 6 episodes of Season 2 of AOT than I ever did of S1. The other reason I have is that Steins;Gate is a show about time travel, and it is the best in its genre that I have seen by far. I REALLY like AOT because it was a battle anime with plot twists and mystery in S1-3 and then it introduced some time travel in S4. You combine all of those aspects and you’re bound to get a top 1. However, time travel was my favorite part, it’s my favorite genre in general. So you take the best time-travel anime of all time (according to MAL), and yeah. You get something better than the battle show that has a little bit of time travel involved. Steins;Gate literally has moments in the last few eps that call back to episode 1, just like AOT does. It links back up, explaining all the mystery while also leaving the viewer mind boggled as they think “That’s what really happened here?!” It reminds me of the Future Diary as well. Too bad that was the only redeeming quality of that show. 

I definitely felt more hype during AOT than I ever did in Steins;Gate, but that isn’t the point of Steins;Gate. They are two totally different shows and I was really struggling where to place Steins;Gate because it doesn’t fit super well genre-wise with my top 5 anime. However, I have to go with my gut, this anime really knocked the ball out of the park. Calling it amazing would be an understatement, I don’t think this anime will be topped on my list for years.