Note that I have not read the visual novel that Steins;Gate is based on. This is a review which judges the anime adaptation by its own merits alone.
Over the last year since the Steins;Gate anime finished airing, the series has garnered massive popularity and acclaim, becoming an internet sensation and skyrocketing to #3 on MAL’s Top Anime page. So, the obvious question is: does it live up to the insane hype? Well, yes and no.
Steins;Gate is a mixed bag of sorts. It has some great concepts behind it, but they often fall short in their execution. The story follows Okabe “Hououin Kyouma” Rintarou, his lab assistants Hashida “Daru” Itaru and Shiina “Mayushii” Mayuri and their encounters with time travel. The story should be familiar to any science-fiction fan, and for the most part stays within the established expectations and norms of the genre, including all the technobabble and repeated recursions of time that one would come to expect. The plot is packed with drama and thrills, and this can make for a very exciting experience for those who just want to sit back and enjoy the ride without sweating the details. However, if you’re a supporter of science or even basic cause and effect, you may find yourself wanting to rip your hair out in frustration at the massive leaps in logic this show makes on a regular basis.
The series sells itself as a sort of celebration of science; the characters, self-proclaimed mad scientists, are constantly parading around in lab coats, talking about science, using science lingo and bragging about their immeasurable intellect. The problem is that Steins;Gate isn’t nearly as intelligent or “sciencey” as it would like to think it is. The scientific justifications behind the various implausible events which take place throughout the duration of the show range from the laughable to the absurd. They are grounded in some solid scientific principles such as chaos theory and special and general relativity, but whoever dreamt up these explanations is obviously someone whose grasp on these principles is shaky at best.
Now, I’m aware that it’s unreasonable to expect absolute scientific accuracy out of a time travel tale, but the series also violates some more basic principles that you don’t have to be a science geek to understand so much as you just have to think about what you’re watching as you’re watching it. Things such as the butterfly effect and world lines are treated with almost childish simplicity, and one plot thread in particular throws the entire concept of cause and effect out the window in exchange of “fate,” a device which seems extremely out of place in a sci-fi series. There are some unresolved plot threads, and some things that deserve a scientific explanation go by without so much as an attempt at one, which only serves to further damage the show’s image as a “science” anime that it spends so much time trying to build up. It’s things like this that make me wish that, if they weren’t capable of creating a convincing and consistent sci-fi story, the creators would have just gone the magic route instead of wasting so much time with far-fetched pseudoscience explanations.
On the more emotional side of things than the cold, hard science is the character-driven drama, and in the case of Steins;Gate, it’s this side that outshines the other. The characters themselves, however, leave something to be desired. Although the anime panders to otakus in other ways (the dialogue is peppered with 2ch memes, and the show is not without its fanservice scenes), the area where this is most prevalent is the characters. Daru is the perverted otaku surrogate, with the rest of the main cast neatly filling the role of a different otaku-friendly stereotype. Kurisu plays the blushing, stammering, tsundere-for-everything girl (who wants nothing more than to assure you that it’s not like she’s tsundere or anything), Mayuri the air-headed moe girl with an irritating catchphrase, Ruka the trap whose actual gender is irrelevant given the exception of one particularly ridiculous arc, Moeka the silent, predominantly emotionless girl who communicates solely by texting, and “Faris Nyan Nyan” the flirty catgirl maid who, as you may have guessed from her name, feels obligated to add cat noises into her speech at every opportunity. It wouldn't be such a problem if only one or two of these archetypes were used, but the fact that main cast is made almost entirely up of them seems just a little too convenient. Okabe, as the protagonist, manages to avoid these stereotypes altogether, and as a result he is by far the most interesting and enjoyable to watch out of the main cast.
The other characters, though stereotypical they may be, are given more depth than the average anime that contains these stereotypes. These characters are each given their own dedicated arc through which their personalities are fleshed out, and these arcs, though somewhat predictable due to the way the second half of the show is structured, are where Steins;Gate excels most. It’s unfortunate, though, that any character development that happens within these arcs is completely undone by the next resetting of time, which makes one romance subplot feel particularly forced and unnatural, something that is half-compensated for with a plot device that should have a scientific justification behind it but slips by without one anyway. The series also feels somewhat empty, as there are very few background characters in the series to accompany the relatively small main cast, and there are even a few instances where the viewer is lead on to think there are more characters than there actually are, only for it to be revealed that the true identities of these characters are actually the same as those of other characters.
The series makes some attempts at humour to lighten the mood, primarily through the interactions of the characters, which largely consists of arguing, in frequent and large doses. Now, you might expect that people who are brilliant enough scientists to break the very laws upon which modern science is based would be capable of coming up with some rather witty quips, but the banter between the characters is mostly made up of immature name-calling followed by the recipient of the name-calling expressing their distaste for the name which they have just been called. This may be amusing to some, but it got very old very fast for me and I grew tired of it by the second episode. These bouts, however, become less and less frequent as the show progresses and becomes more serious which is definitely a plus.
I’m confused as to whether I should be rating the art or the animation in this review, since the page for writing a review says art while the finished review that other people see says animation. It’s a shame that I can’t rate them separately, but I’ll talk about them both here anyway. Personally, I was not the biggest fan of the character designs as they appeared rather lifeless to me much of the time (I think it was the pale skin tone and white pupils). Many of the characters also suffered from some of the worst cases of noodle limbs since Code Geass, with the obvious exception of Daru, who looked to me like the strange offspring of a barrel and a human. On the other hand, the anime was made with very high production values, and it shows; the proportions of the drawings remain consistent and the animation is smooth, with few hiccups throughout. The backgrounds also look rather nice and detailed, and offer a nice backdrop to the characters and their various antics without distracting attention away from them.
The music in Steins;Gate is rather good, with some quite memorable background pieces that are placed with appropriate timing to accentuate the different emotions that the various scenes in the show aim to convey. The opening and closing sequences are solid tracks with some rather pretty and high-budget visuals that do a fine job of representing the series, including some hints about the show’s plot dropped here and there. The voice talent in the anime is strong, with Miyano Mamoru’s performance as Okabe in particular standing out. The other performances are somewhat overshadowed by this, but are solid performances nonetheless. I did have some personal hang-ups about the casting though; Daru’s voice (which I was surprised to find out was put on by Seki Tomokazu) was especially hard for me to take seriously during dramatic scenes due to its cartoonish quality.
Enjoyment is probably the area where people’s experiences differ most, as it is the most subjective. Personally, I found my immersion being broken frequently by questionable science and plot holes, which hindered my enjoyment significantly. The humour wasn’t my cup of tea either, but I can see why people find the show as enjoyable as they do. This is doubly true if you’re a non-critical person or are just new to anime in general, a group of people which seems to make up a large chunk of the Steins;Gate fandom as, over the last year, it has become a gateway anime through which many newcomers have been introduced to the medium.
You might now be under the impression that I hate this anime after reading this review, as it focused more on the negatives than others; however, this is not the case. Although I don’t normally write reviews, I had some issues with this series that I felt were not addressed properly in the reviews that I read (skimming over most of the 10/10 reviews that nearly fill every page) and decided to take it upon myself to put them out there as someone who watched the show after the hype died down quite a bit. If you still have an unquenched desire to read somebody praising this anime unflinchingly, then feel free to check out almost any other review for this series.