Review of Steins;Gate 0
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, the relationship between a genius and a talented man and the difference between standing out within your times and standing the test of History. This is part of one of the new character's characterization but most importantly it serves as a very solid base to compare Steins;Gate 0 to its parent series. On its own, Steins;Gate 0 is... good, as in, somewhat better than average but still within that basket of hundreds if not thousands of other good animes. But as part of the greater Steins;Gate franchise, and especially when compared to Steins;Gate itself, it just doesn't hold the comparison.Here's the general idea of why Steins;Gate 0 holds shaking foundations on its own.
To begin with, the cast, as in, the one directly originating from the parent series, just like its main character, has undergone quite the transformation. To keep it short, they became more adult, but not in a good way. Instead of growing from his mistakes, Okabe simply rejected this experience as part of something that should have never been done, I could go deeper into this but it will already be long so moving on. From these experiences he came back broken, an empty husk of a character, and basically stays that way for 20 episodes. No evolution, not even an attempt to face the traumatic memory head on, just moaning, crying, vomiting and overall being depressed. By gunning for realism so badly, the anime has basically turned into real life, and nobody wants to watch real life.
The rest of the OG Steins;Gate cast also changed, in reaction to Okabe changing. And again they changed for the worse. I had a review on the movie where I said that the whole anime basically revolved around whoever has the spotlight. Steins;Gate 0 doesn't stray away from that, in a bad way. With Okabe looking worse for wear, and not being as entertaining as he was in Stein's;Gate, the rest of the cast suffered, being way more monotonous than they used to be. And then, we have the great many new characters, which felt more like their purpose was to drown out the former cast and hide the fact that everyone got a lot more boring.
The story was... very much an experiment, I suppose you've watched episode 23β, but if you didn't, move on to the next paragraph. I guess they wanted to try a story where the hero doesn't get what they want, no happy ending, not even a bittersweet one, just bitterness. And honestly, while the concept sounds interesting, Steins;Gate episode 24 kinda ruined that, by giving an ideal ending, where Hououin Kyouma managed to beat impossible odds and get what he wanted from the world. I guess if you like edgier stuff, or just sadness with no meaning, you may prefer Steins;Gate 0 to the original series but it didn't really grab me. And even though the last 5 episodes picked up the steam, the whole thing was a fight towards the status quo.
The production, while inferior to the parent series wasn't bad. I could clearly see that Steins;Gate 0 wasn't an attempt to bank off a popular series, I saw people who actually cared to make it as good as they could. But it still feels like any other anime, unlike Steins;Gate who stood out and was pretty much its own thing.
General idea, well I wouldn't recommend Steins;Gate 0 unless you have time to waste. It's a pretty good show, but there's a lot of anime which are as good, or even better without the backing of a parent series which ranks #3 on MAL.