Steins;Gate

I'm going to split this review into the story and its rather strange metaphysical presuppositions, and the graphical outlook. But long story short I wouldn't call this a masterpiece on either fields.

The plot in short is set in 2010s Tokyo and it centers around Rintarou who is an obnoxiously self centered and cringely well articulate (university student I presume). Very unpleasant character to watch and listen to. Besides him we got Kurisu Makise who spends the whole series fighting with the main character with short truces somewhere in between eventually ending in a very hard to watch romance.

Besides the two we got 4 other "main" characters. A manchild except as a woman, 2 time travellers, and a generic fat guy nerd. [Redacted]. These are all mostly irrelevant but the main character is attached to them for whatever reason so most of the story is spent attempting to save them via a time machine which seems kind of meaningless because the characters aren't likeable enough for me to care if they're alive or not, and I don't know why is Rintarou attached to them either for they have no instrumental value.

Oh yes the time machine and the time travel wackiness. This series centers around Rintarou building a time machine from kitchen appliances. (lol?) and causing CERN, yes CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research to attempt to come after them from the future from a world in which they've taken over the world as a tyrannical hegemon. Honestly the weirdest and stupidest part of the plot. The group then messes around with the time machine by travelling and sending sms messages back in time for max 30 years [redacted] do small meaningless tasks. Then the characters start dying so Rintarou feels like saving them as mentioned previously. Rintarou then figures out that space-time is deterministic via the laws of fatalism.

Why does this series represent space-time as fatalistic? So that Rintarou could rewrite all causality based laws of physics for the sake of making the plot a funky thought experiment. In my opinion a big thesis like this would need proper argumentation and empirical data as well. In this series this thesis is not justified much, it just exists this way. They randomly mention Heidegger in one episode, and Rintarou provides basic fatalistic metaphysical argumentation. Besides that, everything is breaking basic deterministic norms just for the sake of the story. It's pseudoscientific and it kind of bugs me as a university student having gone through metaphysical topics this series goes over for a couple courses.

So if the plot didn't quite please me then how was everythign else?

First of all the visuals. Definitely not great. The chararacters with their art style look really bland, and uninteresting, I could even say bad, except maybe for Kurisu which looks mostly ok enough. The animation is really weak and minimal and there's nothing to write home about.

Same goes with the backgrounds. Someone forgot that colours exists so most of the series is set in different shades of grey around concrete rectangles. In fact most of the series is spent in one grey room and it's not contrasted with anything more colourful either. The characters don't have too much colour going on either so the outlook ends up being this bland and uninteresting mess you kinda get tired looking at. I personally held this open on another window and did something else on another window while listening to the dialogue because the visuals were just too uninteresting to look at.

The music is generic. Catchy basic anime pop tune, nothing interesting.

In the end I can say that no, I didn't like it. I presuppose the only appeal this has is the funky metaphysical time travel thought concept this has. Which isn't even anything new compared to other works of fiction which have played around with the concept. Giving this a 5/10 because I've definitely seen worse and it does go over topics I'm interested in personally.