Steins;Gate

While time travel is often used as a lazy plot device, there are some shows that are about time travel and are able to add something new to the topic that even the first human person thought about after regretting the decision to cuddle the saber-toothed tiger.
Steins;Gate is a story about time travel and its problems. Sure, it might be nice to simply revert time and try again, but can we change fate? How many times will we fail before giving up?

The story follows the protagonist Okabe, an useless member of society and his friends, the "super-hacker" Daru and Okabe´s childish childhood friend Mayuri. The group spends most of its time sitting around in their "Future Gadget Laboratory" and occasionally inventing a new, useless "Future Gadget" with random version numbers. At a congress about time travel, Okabe finds the female scientist Makise Kurisu stabbed, he runs away and gets a text message which triggers a hallucination. After coming back to his senses, he learns that Kurisu is alive, but a big metal thing crashed into the congress building. Kurisu visits the group at the Future Gadget Laboratory and they learn that one of the Future Gadgets is able to send text messages into the past. They spend the first half of the show fucking around with time and helping out their friends, until shit hits the fan and Okabe has to save the world.

While many people say that the first half of the show was boring, it does a good job in setting the rules for the world the story takes place in and introducing us to the amazing written characters. The fact that we know most things about time travel by the time time travel is actually used in a serious way is an important factor that makes this show so good. Many shows have the problem of using time travel as the deus ex machina and making the rules up on the way, Steins;Gate tells us what is possible and what is not. You can´t send messages to the future and the person receiving the message has to actually do the thing to have an effect on the world. The introduction that takes half of the runtime is mostly necessary to make the characters grow on the audience.

The characters, spoken by amazing voice actors, are the biggest source of enjoyment in Steins;Gate, they have understandable motives and are realistic. Okabe is introduced as a sophomoric young man who has nothing but his self-esteem, Daru is a fat pervert who sits on his computer the whole day and Mayuri is a child in the body of a young woman, sweet but annoying. This main cast and the other, not less strange side characters, support each other in their daily life, and this is what makes us love every single one of them. In the second half of the show, we meet every character again, we learn about their past and feelings. Okabe as the protagonist stands out, he has quite a bit of character development in the second half, he is someone who really cares about his friends and wants to help them, but has to recognize that he has to decide whose wishes are more important.

Steins;Gate is a great show, it manages to use time travel to tell its story rather than using it to set up the story or save the protagonist if the writers have written themselves in a corner. If I had to name a thing that I disliked about the show, it would be the supporting characters that appear two or three time throughout the story. While I still liked them and they managed to give a new perspective to some cliches in anime, they still felt one-dimensional in comparison to our amazing written main cast.

Steins;Gate is an anime that nearly everyone in the community watched and liked, it deserves the attention it gets. While some have to sit through the story of the first half, the second half is an example for well structured and written story with characters that have a great dynamic in their group.