Just like various other visual novel adaptations, the Steins;Gate 0 anime is very disappointing. It sucks to say this because the Steins;Gate adaptation was actually a pretty good alternative to the visual novel, well aside from the out of character moments that plagued it, an example of which being when Mr. Braun killed Moeka.

But why is it that the adaptation for S;G was good, but S;G0 was bad? The answer has to do with how each of the stories are handled in the visual novels. In S;G, the story is quite linear, only ever diverging when you are given the choice to view a few of the various endings of the game. In S;G0, however, the story is non-linear, as at the end of the common route there’s a moment where the game branches into two different paths, each path having different endings associated with them. The two paths, or routes, are “Promised Rinascimento” and “Vega and Altair”

This is important to mention because of how needlessly congested the adaptation is, since the adaptation team thought it’d be a good idea to try and merge both routes together which resulted in the ugly mutated amalgamation that we got. Not only do they merge the routes together, but they also throw in a drama CD to add a little spice to it. Because of the mess that they decided to make, that meant that changes had to be made, both to the story and to the characters, in order to try and make the story make sense.

The characters in S;G0 failed to hit the mark because many of the character arcs were incomplete and as a result, weren’t as impactful as they were in the visual novel. The moments where I appreciated what the adaptation team did with the characters are few and far between, one of which would be the lead up to Mayuri’s monologue in episode 17, this moment originally being from the drama CD mentioned earlier.

The story really does suffer because of how the team went about adapting it, merging all the routes together in an attempt to make it as close to the full package as possible. I don’t really understand why they decided to do it this way, instead I think a better way they could’ve adapted this would be to dedicate a cour to each route. One of my favorite scenes in the visual novel is at the end of the PR route, where a major turning point for Okabe occurs. But it’s butchered and stripped of its original purpose only to then be used as a direct jump-off point to include more Okabe x [Kurisu] moments because the team wanted to milk as much out of that pairing as possible.

There were also other points in the story where nothing made sense, one of those being when Okabe's reading steiner activated at the Christmas party. The part that makes this so silly is how, in the new worldline, time clearly passes, around a month to be specific. But when reading steiner is activated again and he's returned to his original worldline, he’s still at the Christmas party. I don’t need to tell you that this is impossible. The activation of reading steiner does not pause time, it only allows the user to retain the memory of previous worldlines when the worldline changes, but apparently the adaptation team just decided that it’d be okay to ignore how time works in a series where time travel is the central plot device.

The other point in the story that was complete nonsense was when Valkyrie, a resistance group in the future, had access to [Kurisu] and had it monitor Okabe while he was in a coma for 11 years. There are various reasons why I don’t like this, the biggest one being that since [Kurisu]’s data has been accessible to Stratfo since Amadeus’ inception. It’s not like Valkyrie doesn’t know this, because they use this against Stratfo to confuse them so that they aren’t able to capture Okabe before he can get to the time leap machine. This is an asspull that is used strictly so that the team has an excuse to squeeze in more Okabe x [Kurisu] moments, as if the anime is in desperate need of that.

One main problem with the adaptation is how they seemed to prioritize Okabe and Kurisu, which isn’t inherently a bad thing because I kind of liked episode 8 and what it was aiming for. But [Kurisu] is NOT a replacement for Kurisu, and it never has been, Maho even points this out. But it seemed like Okabe had a really hard time coming to terms with this as opposed to how he was in the visual novel. There's even a bad ending in the game which you get when Okabe fails to recognize this and treats [Kurisu] like a replacement for Kurisu. Even the conversation that Okabe has with the program is reminiscent of Okabe's and Kurisu's conversation in S;G before leaving the alpha worldline. It doesn't work for various reasons, the main of which being that Okabe now has the resolve to save Kurisu so he has no reason to bid his farewell to an AI.

There’s not really much to say as far as the soundtrack goes, since they’re mostly the same as the ones that appear in the visual novel. One of the things that really bugged me was the underutilization of the “Amadeus” track by Kanako Ito. I get that there is meaning to points of which this song is played but I feel like that reason doesn’t justify its underutilization.

All in all, you could maybe derive some resemblance of enjoyment out of the anime if you just ignore the glaring flaws, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It is a shame to see how awful the Steins;Gate 0 adaptation is compared to its predecessor.

TL;DR

The adaptation sucks. If you’re thinking about watching this after watching Steins;Gate, go read the visual novel instead, you won’t regret it. Hell, I’d even go as far as to say go back and read Steins;Gate too before you dive into Steins;Gate 0.