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.

Quick Updated Impressions – Steins;Gate 0

I’m disappointed in a lot of things.

I’m disappointed that, fifteen episodes in, this show has only barely presented a plot, and only one truly great episode (the eighth). I’m disappointed that it somehow currently carries an 8.9 on MAL and is the 19th highest rated show on the entire site, simply because it’s Steins;Gate.

I’m really disappointed that this production as a whole has just utterly collapsed. Let’s start with a brutal but honest statement about the visuals here: 0 looks boring. Where the original carried great direction and decent production, this time we get substandard talking heads with no dynamic or symbolic elements of any kind. This is probably one of White Fox’s worst production jobs, if not the worst.

The story does not fare any better, with brief pieces of interesting ideas interspersed with unoriginal filler, whether it’s a rehashed sitcom plot in the middle of what should be a very tense, dramatic situation, or an excuse to show Faris deliberately groping the bustiest girl in the show without her consent. Lots of subplots are brought up that have just gone nowhere (Amadeus, which the opening builds up to be central to the narrative of saving Kurisu, just seems to have been a way to heighten the dramatic narrative of episode eight, because she immediately becomes irrelevant two episodes later, Suzuha is basically exiled to the lab roof for the entire first half of the show, and Ruka is explicitly kept out of the loop, only for it to not matter when they disappear from the plot right afterwards). It’s pretty obvious at this point that 0 could have pretty easily been good with 13 episodes if only to force the pacing to hurry the hell up.

At this point, I’m still watching because I want to see if the ending can at least salvage this up to a 7, because right now…

Score so far: 5/10

Quick First Impressions – Steins;Gate 0

Welcome to the Darkest Timeline! How did we get here?

Well, as per usual for the Science Adventure series, that’s really difficult to explain, but I’ll try and do so without spoilers. Basically, the original Steins;Gate had a plot that relied on characters creating contrivances on purpose, jumping back and forth between alternate realities and timelines. The game this adaptation is based on came out in 2015, and prior to the release, the original show was re-aired, but ended an episode early as a major element of Episode 23 was removed and the ending of the story changed dramatically, with this new version being referred to as “Episode 23 Beta”. Unfortunately, the new version was never licensed (meaning Crunchyroll at the very least has dropped a major ball here) but basically it created this new scenario wherein our hero has renounced his chuuni ways and given up to become an ordinary person.

His life isn’t quite as boring as it sounds, however, as he’s still surrounded by strange people, there’s a time traveller involved, and WWIII might be looming on the horizon.

The only thing I can really fault this premiere for is that it is just nowhere near as cool as the first episode of the original, though considering that rather than three directors this project has been left with only one (and it’s the guy that made Qualidea Code) it’s not hard to guess what happened. Still, with White Fox handling production again, once things really get trucking here they’ll be just fine, I just can’t see this project achieving the same level of artistic ambition.

Basically, if you like Science Adventure, this looks like it’s gonna be a major upswing after the letdown of Occultic;Nine, but if you haven’t seen the original Steins;Gate yet, that is a must-watch before you even read the description of this one on Crunchyroll.