Final Thoughts – Steins;Gate 0

Steins;Gate 0 is insulting.

I said before that I was disappointed, and it only got worse and worse from there. In fact, with one pointless and stupid decision after another, the second half of the show is even worse than the first, consisting of lazy writing that rehashes the original in new and unexciting ways, utterly pointless death scenes that get undone minutes later (I mentioned before that Ruka had dropped out of the plot, that’s not quite true, 0 has one last insult to throw her way) and cheap production work.

And I wasn’t even that massive a fan of the original, but frankly this show should horribly piss off anyone with even the mildest appreciation for Steins;Gate. For one thing, once you become aware that the endpoint of this show is just getting Okabe to go back in time and get the True Ending from the original (hence the rebroadcast in advance), it becomes virtually impossible to get emotionally invested in anything that happens, because you know it’ll all be undone in the end, because Okabe will inevitably travel back to prevent it from even happening.

For another, the production is the worst effort I’ve ever seen from studio White Fox. It’s so flat, stationary and uninteresting that it becomes actively boring to watch just for the production alone. The only element of the production that works at all are the opening and ending sequences, because they found a killer opening way cooler than the show itself and didn’t replace it in the second half, thank God.

But the last thing is that the story itself is boring as hell, and it’s for a really obvious reason – the pacing on display here is Sword Art Online Phantom Bullet-tier garbage. It’s like the team felt that because the original ran two cours, this spinoff should as well, but the story of 0 could have comfortably been told in half the time it has. We spend so much time Developing Doomed Characters that the plot takes a major backseat for the majority of the runtime, and that wouldn’t work even if the story were any good. If Steins;Gate 0 had only been twelve or thirteen episodes, I might have been more charitable with it, but it just keeps going and going. The reality is that the story could have ended pretty comfortably without the overly predictable second half – you could even keep the first eight episodes completely intact if you wanted, and after that, have Okabe focus entirely on getting the time machine to go back far enough and recruit everybody to help him instead of the meaningless effort to stop World War 3 in a timeline where it’s bound to happen anyway (that being the point of the story).

I suppose that I’ll just be forever haunted by this thing’s MAL rating (sitting, three weeks after finishing, at 8.74, the 38th best-reviewed show on the site, though I admit that that’s fallen since the last time I looked a month and a half ago). This far after airing, a score doesn’t usually stray far from where it lands the week after it’s over, and the idea that so many people who love the original think this was anything approaching a worthy followup is disturbing to me.

Me? I’m comfortable awarding Steins;Gate 0 with a 4/10, and an honorary addition to the Hall of Shame despite it being two points too high. It has its moments, but they get drowned under a lot of really stupid, repetitive crap. I’m also dropping it 21 episodes in, because I don’t even care how it ends at this point.