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Warning- SPOILERS.

Coming into this show, I thought it would be a masterpiece. I was hyped to experience what is apparently one of the highest rated shows of all time on MyAnimeList.net. But this shit is just garbage.

But what I watched, was absolutely nothing like any of the other top anime I've seen. It didn't have the animation production value, it didn't have a full cast of multifaceted characters, it didn't have a satisfying plot, and despite the brief 24 episode length, I found it to be extremely repetitive and constantly having to recycle old ideas.

This show is so different from a genuinely impresive anime that ... it's extremely confusing to me how anyone could watch this and think "This is one of the best shows ever."

For starters, let's examine the characters.
--Rintarou Okabe. Guy. Pretentious unemployed guy who thinks he's a mad scientist despite not having any real skills. Regular schizo.
--Kurisu Makise. Girl. American scientific genius who falls in love with Okabe.
--Mayuri Shiina. Girl. Okabe's childhood friend who has no other reason to exist than to fawn over Okabe.
--Itaru "Daru" Hashida. Guy. Okabe's roommate who has insane hacking ability but only uses that to assist his unemployed roommate Okabe.
--Luka Urushibara. Girl (or is she?). Neighborhood friend of Okabe's. Transgender. Falls in love with Okabe.
--Faris NyanNyan. Girl. Runs a Catgirl Cafe. Rich spoiled girl. Develops a thing for Okabe.
--Barely any others.

Are you seeing a pattern here? This is anything but a fully developed universe. The template they are working with is not a full fledged world like Naruto, or Fullmetal Alchemist, or even Sword Art Online. This is just a harem anime, existing to soothe the egos and stimulate the passions of lonely teenage boys. And I don't necessarily have a problem with harem anime in itself, I just don't like when it pretends to be meaningful, and pretends to actually be able to grapple with deep subjects, when it's a transparently masturbatory fantasy.

The fact that everyone in this world only exists for the benefit of the main character and that all the women magically end up infatuated with him, despite him being an unemplolyed schizophrenic, is not beneficial to the story. It is immersion breaking.

The majority of the hype seems to be about the time travel element. And I can understand this being appealing to people. But when I compare this story to every other time travel story I have ever come across- such as the time turner from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or Back to the Future, or Groundhog Day, or Looper, Steins;Gate has by far the least interesting, least impactful, and least appealing version of time travel.


Basically, the authors of the story decided that just because you have the ability to travel back in time, doesn't mean you have the ability to change fate. So the main character, Okabe, goes back in time over and over, trying to change something, only to find that he cannot do so.

Furthermore, there is a strange "life for a life" thing going on-- when the main character saves one life, fate steps in and takes another life of a person close to him.

Now the main character, despite having the ability to teleport back in his timeline, feels completely helpless. Pretty crazy, right? Not exactly what you would expect from a show about traveling back in time, which you would expect allows you to change anything.

Furthermore, every change the main character makes in the timeline, costs his friend a day of life. Please pause for a moment and consider how insane these rules are. Where did this come from? What mechanism is ensuring that an extra person dies to compensate for the life that was saved? Is there some kind of deity watching over this universe, saying "oh look, we're one death short" and then just killing someone to make up for that? Basically yes.

Traditional time travel stories open up Pandora's Box and allow the characters to go back and genuinely change anything. But Steins;Gate says "You can go back, but the Hand of God will prevent you from doing anything important. You can only use time travel to do things that don't make any difference." This is just astronomical levels of stupid. It turns time travel from a fascinating tool into window dressing.

So these are the mechanics of time travel in the show. What do they do with it? Simple. They make the main character deal with this handicapped version of time travel over and over, banging his head against the wall, failing to use his time travel ability to create ANY lasting positive change for 24 episodes, milking his suffering for emotions and drama.

Then at the very end, they relax this handicap, and allow him to make just ONE lasting and positive change, at the exact moment needed to create a happy ending. So convenient. This is incredibly lazy and stupid storytelling and I'm astounded that more people aren't seeing through it.

It is hard to overstate just how much the "Fate" element in itself separates Steins;Gate from other time travel stories. The set of possibilities that are opened up by time travel are tantalizing. But in a bait and switch, it is revealed that none of the things that time travel lets you do normally, like win the lottery, are even remotely possible in this story. Lame!

If anything, time travel in this universe allowed the writers to put in LESS work than in a traditional linear story, because every character except the main character cannot see the plot unfolding as he hope between universes. So they don't go through character development. The writers don't need to think about how they react to different events. It's like they're continuously going through amnesia. They remain exactly the same from beginning to end. The writers barely had to do anything! Genius!

I don't really find anything in this show impressive at all. The main character is a pretentious douchebag who lords his intellect over his friends, and who remains condescending and douchey to his friends all the way to the very end of the show. There are more plot holes than you can count. I kept waiting for something clever to happen, but it never did. This show was a complete waste of time. By far the dumbest and worst time travel content I have ever come across. I would give it a zero if I could.