
a review by AaronYoghurt

a review by AaronYoghurt
El Psy Kongroo
Preface
Just so you are aware of my biases, I am going to preface this review by saying that I love Steins Gate and that I was a massive fan well before diving into zero. I watched both the original and zero 5+ times over. I have watched all OVAs and the movie. I have read the source material (visual novels) for both S;G and S;G0 with 100% completion and have watched/read my way through steins;gate elite aswell. Now that you know where I stand, and what background reading I have done - let's begin.
The Rollercoaster
This review is going to feel a bit schizophrenic; my views on this anime are very mixed and my review will flip-flop back and forth between high praise and harsh critisism. I love Steins;Gate 0. I also hate Steins;Gate 0. The sequel (I'm going to call it a sequel for ease of writing even if it's not 100% accurate) has, in my opinion, both the worst and the best scenes in the entire series. The pacing is all over the place, some of the characters seem irrelevant, and it has the most bloody contrived and immersion-breaking scene in anime from recent memory...
Where it went wrong (S;G 0 Visual Novel and Anime Spoilers)
As a rule of thumb, if you need a flowchart to explain a story then you're in deep water - S;G0 is no different.Without going overly into detail, the VN has two main routes, A and B, the split-off point is fairly early in the story. The true ending which the anime tries to adapt resides at the end of route A, however to unlock the true ending of route A you need to first complete route B, and send a D-mail back to the aforementioned split-off point. After you've done this, you then load a previous save that was before the cutoff point, and continue back into route A. It is easy to see why this would be an absolute mess to try and adapt linearly, especially in only 23 episodes - the director opted to only adapt route A and make some minor modifications to tie up loose ends that would have been explained in route B.
What complicates this even further is that some character arcs lean almost entirely on route B (the route that was not adapted). Most notably Kagari, my favourite character in the VN, got absolutely gutted in the anime. Her character arc was very strong in the visual novel, but it was contained almost entirely in the unadapted route B. Her amnesia was used to explore themes of individuality, looking to the future and becoming your own person; additionally her close physical resemblance to kurisu was actually explained and not framed as a weird coincidence. They could have chosen to leave her out of the anime adaptation entirely; instead they tried to fit a square peg into a round hole and it ended up feeling rushed and somewhat out of place. Something similar happened with the character arcs of Moeka, who had three-hour visual novel arc about learning to value oneself condensed into a single five minute scene in the anime, rife with 'fanservice'. Maho got hit too, to a lesser extent.
Paradoxically, the fact that the anime felt too slow at times could have been solved by making it longer (3-cour). The reason that episodes 4-15 with a few exeptions seem to drag, is that they don't really lead to a satisfying end result. 12 episodes is not enough time to flesh out the stories of three different characters (maho, moeka and kagari), especially when you have to work around the fact that these different stories are supposed to be taking place in entirely different timelines from one another. They opted to (understandably) focus mostly on Maho, but as a result, kagari and moeka's stories ended up half baked and it feels like time wasted.
In my opinion, Kagari should not have been adapted, there was never enough time. They should have used the time spent on Kagari to flesh out Maho even more, and the anime would have been better for it. There are several other characters that could have been left out entirely, most notably professor Reyes. A three cour season would have fixed all of this, but alas, 23 is what we got.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, shows should be rated based on how much you enjoyed it. When all is said and done, flaws and all, I did really enjoyed watching Steins;Gate 0, especially nearing the end. Seeing a man, utterly broken, lift himself out of a psychological rut and find the resolve to once agan push forward is a tried and tested theme in story-telling, and S;G 0 is no exception. It's inconsistent in both its pacing and its characters, sure, but the highs more than make up for the lows. I can't ignore the directorial mistakes that were made in this anime's production, however I would be lying if I said that I didn't skittishly wait every thursday-night to watch the latest episode on release. If I can sit through a show on the fourth rewatch and still very much enjoy it, it has to be worth something. 8/10 would recommend, but don't dive into it expecting it to be Steins;Gate 2 - it's thematically very different.
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