Review of Steins;Gate 0

Originally, I’d written a review upwards of 2000 words. A rant basically. I have tried to get my feelings on this ‘0’ in as little a word count as possible and it still is long. Heavy spoilers in the review. And a suggestion: Don’t watch. Erase SG0’s existence from your memory. So if you were like me when you first heard of this, or maybe you read the synopsis somewhere, and thought that they’d cover the dystopic setting of SG’s future and got all excited, well, the staff of this anime basically slapped you in your face and said ‘F*** you’. With a grin. If youhaven’t figured it out yet, I’m absolutely pissed that they ruined the sequel of Steins; Gate in the way they did. The dystopia does makes a cameo around episode 20, 21, and that’s it. Those two were some of the two better eps of this absolutely horrendous abomination.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not angry they didn’t show the Dystopia as much. I couldn’t care less. No, I’m taking issue with how they ruined nearly all the characters, had no sense of storytelling with whiplash-inducing narrative shifts and a poorly written plot. See, the LN plot might have been great, idgaf. The anime didn’t manage to convey the plot in any way that can even be considered average.
Near the start, around episode 12 or 13, the show basically completely throws away all the plot points it developed before. Now see, until this point, the show was good. I had hopes. The original was fine till that point. Then shit happened and as we all know that shit hit the roof. I thought same could be the case here. But no. At that time, one generous person enlightened me that they were basically adapting all the routes from the game. They had just gone from the Suzuha route to the Kagari route. Or whatever. Point is there was ‘0’ continuity. I should have realized at that point to hold no hopes in the capability of the show’s creative team.

A minor aside: on the point of Kagari. I call her Kagabitc*. Remember Orihime from Bleach? Replace ‘Kurosaki-kun’ with ‘Mama’. That’s all she is. And true to my Orihime comparison, she served more to boil my blood than to contribute anything meaningful. And the show spends, what, 6, 7 episodes on her. Threw the entire pacing off. Then there wasn’t even any form of proper payoff and eps 16-19 happened. Uh, I’ve never seen worse action and worse character deaths in anime and just generally, that entire part was shit. Story and animation. At one point, the show tries to become matrix all of a sudden with cringe worthy results (and stilted animation to boot). ‘0’ was convinced Kagari is important. I considered her trash. That’s about as much valuable word count I’d like to waste on her.

Now, I could go on and on about all the things that infuriate me about this shitshow. But I’ll save you the rant. I’ll focus on two instances of my disappointment towards the end of the show.
In episode 20, there is a powerful scene when Rukako dies in the Dystopia, and Daru says it’s a relief. Okabe looks at him (thank god he just looks and not scream his lungs off) but the expressions they all have, their cold acceptance of reality just causes him to tear up and scream not at them but at seemingly their fate. Or the sky. Who knows. Point is this was a really strong scene. It conveyed emotions more vividly than words ever could. It gave me hope, anticipation that at least the rest of the last arc of the anime would be just as well written, that there wouldn’t be pointless dialogue about feelings that could have been better enunciated through expressions and actions. You get where I’m going right? In the fucking next scene itself, it throws away all it has built up in terms of emotion by spelling basically everything out that the earlier scene managed to convey. And just for good measure, it has even more monologues. Hey, I’m not saying monologues are bad. The first series had a lot of them. But most of them were wrapped under Norse mythos (remember those fun lines? There’s almost ‘0’ such cool stuff in this season), Kyouma’s antics or something else so they didn’t exactly feel like an exposition dump. You had to think, for a vastly better part than is required here, what the characters meant and feel. ‘0’ assumes you are an idiot. Basically.

Ep 21 saw Kyouma finally return (yeah, ep 21. That’s how long it takes Okabe to be awesome again. Till then he’s just an angsty crybaby). And that episode was great. Still I distinctly remember even with Kyouma’s return the show managed to nonetheless trip over itself. Then the abomination of episode 22 happened.

In a nutshell, he cries over killing an AI (remember the AI Kurisu I mentioned?). Like really? A program. And brah you’re crying over that? What? And to make it worse, the only way the show seemed to think to make us believe this shit possible was to compare this episode with a similar one back in the OG, ep 23 I believe, when real Kurisu dies. Seriously? Back then, Okabe didn’t know that ‘Steins;Gate’ existed. The reality before him was either Kurisu or Mayushi. That’s what made it powerful. But now at the time of this ep he does know. By attempting to draw parallels in hopes of evoking similar feelings of strong emotion, a pretty underhanded move, they quite conveniently ignored the existence of SG world line where Kurisu is alive. They have to reach that place, that is what the entire narrative before that point had been leading up to. Mayushi has to go to the past, convince past Okabe to save Kurisu. So to enable Mayushi to do that, Amadeus has to die (I say ‘die’, but really it shouldn’t be considered anything that dramatic). To spell it out, what would have happened if Amadeus was erased? Kurisu would live. An AI based on a human for the actual human… Is choosing one or the other really such a hard choice. Was SG0 trying to tell me that Okabe had fallen in love with the fucking AI as well? Huh? To further compound the issue, there is a second at the end of the parallelism when AI Amadeus’ lips are focused upon, with fucking lipstick on. If you try to tell me that they weren’t trying to remind you of the kiss, the single best kiss probably in all of romance anime, from the OG, then I’d call you a fool. And oh, do they let the horse die then? No, even when sending a d mail (called d-rine for plot convenience… its explained, but it still kinda is ok?) they have to play this stupid issue up that somehow erasing Amadeus should hold any sort of emotional impact. It’s an AI for fucks sake. And the poor direction, the overblown melodrama, definitely didn’t help.

I hope I managed to get across my feelings of intense disappointment with this season. If you’re a fan of OG Steins Gate, then I can only tell you not to watch this. Let the cat die, it’s not worth saving. I will say this though, the last half of the last episode is something really special, reminiscent of the epicness of the original. Gave me chills throughout. The first half was still bad though lol. Thanks for reading this really long and rant-y ‘review’.