Hacking to the future: let's talk about Steins;Gate

I first watched Steins;Gate in my teens, and I absolutely loved it. I bought the manga boxset at the first anime convention I went to, and it's still one of my prized possessions. After almost a decade (and Chaos;Head Noah), it was finally time to revisit that lab and read the source material of that series I loved so much. Thankfully, I have an awful memory, so there were surprises waiting for me at every corner!

The voice acting is stellar. Imai Asami’ performance as Kurisu was incredibly gripping, Okabe is the Mamoru Miyano role for me, and Momoi Haruko was simply killing it as Faris.

You interact with the world through Okabe’s cellphone, and trip flags through replying to e-mails and making (or not making) phone calls. There's a lot of extra stuff you can unlock—I liked setting the phone wallpaper to my beloved FES and the ringtone to The Necklace of Vajrayana (a tad ironic because I had the gate of steiner phone mix as my irl ringtone for years)

Anyways. A chuunibyou college student (and company) accidentally turns his microwave into a time machine. At first they're trying to find out how it works (and changing the past left and right), but soon an evil organization is trying to kill them. Going from slice-of-life antics to a time travel thriller means that the pacing is… not always tight, to say the least, but when it hits, it hits hard.

I think one of my favorite things about this VN is how the cast is a bunch of nerds—I love stories about otaku friend groups, being part of one myself—their relationships within the group all feel very real, and they're fun to read.

Suzuha’s route was a very pleasant surprise. A great timeloop story—I felt that it showcased Okabe’s gradual descent into madness very well without being too repetitive to read through. Sadly, this was the only route (other than Kurisu’s) that I would call “worth reading”—Mayushii being an option at all felt incredibly forced, Luka’s route as a concept will give me a migraine if I even think about it (my poor girl deserved a better game), and Faris' route was such a slog to read through, I felt like I was standing in line at the DMV.

Of course, the stars of the show Okabe and Kurisu are the best het couple of all time, and their route lived up to all my expectations and much, much more. See, I spent the entire runtime thinking, “ah, they're going through all this stuff together, but they'll change the worldline and Kurisu won't remember anything at all”—it was like a cloud constantly over my heart, preventing me from fully enjoying the story—so at the very end, when they meet again and she's like, “don't call me Christina!—” and so on, I skipped the surprise, skipped the tears, and just laughed out loud from the bottom of my heart like the very picture of a mad scientist.

The road to the true ending and the true ending itself are without a doubt one of the best things ever put to screen. The problem is that a lot of the VN is… not that. Like, while Chaos;Head Noah never reaches the same heights that Steins;Gate does, I felt that the quality of the routes was way more consistent—they felt like they were actually building up a story instead of detracting from it.

Still, it's a great VN, and I completely get why it's so popular—I’ll die on the hill of saying that you should read Chaos;Head before it, but it does work pretty much perfectly as a standalone, and a story about time travel is much easier for most people to get into than the NewGen murders and gigalomaniacs stuff from the previous entry, even if I ended up preferring the latter.