Review of Steins;Gate 0

As with the first half of the original Steins;Gate anime, the bulk of the Steins;Gate 0 adaptation has been rushed to the point where it's difficult to care about anything that happens. My favorite scene from the Steins;Gate 0 VN is the Gehenna sequence. It's simultaneously one of the most haunting and epic scenes I've ever seen in fiction. It's absolute perfection; I wish I could erase my memory of it just so I could experience it one more time. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the adaptation team decided to scrap it in its entirety. The lead up has been completely cut out; the scene itselfhas been replaced with some kind of confusing, abbreviated flashback-y dream sequence with zero context. The more impactful part of the scene was cut off from the build up, eliminating the contrast and thereby minimizing shock factor; and as a final nail to the coffin, the initial segment of the scene is depicted very much like the hallucination scenes in the Steins;Gate movie (which itself completely contradicts the games in terms of how Reading Steiner works) thereby trivializing everything that follows. It's almost as if the writers were deliberately trying to do a case study of "how to ruin a perfect scene".

So the biggest selling point in the story has been omitted... for what? I don't know, I guess the anime director/writer didn't really like it.

The adaptation does have some merits. I felt some of the slice-of-life scenes in the VN to be a bit drawn out, and the anime does feel slightly better-paced in this respect. But that doesn't really make up for the downsides... namely, that the most epic scene in the story is literally nowhere to be found, and that every other twist has virtually no build up, leading to most of the story being almost devoid of emotional impact. The ending is still good, but it's not worth wading through 20 episodes of nothing.

Anyway, I would just recommend skipping the anime, unless you've played the VN and want to check out what's different. As a standalone, it's considerably worse than the Steins;Gate adaptation, and not really worth the time investment.