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When a friend recommended this to me, I thought he was crazy. Steins;Gate is a visual novel that takes around 40 hours (more or less, depending on your reading speed), all the voices are in Japanese with the text translated into English (not always perfectly), and it spends a lot of time on what I assume are very typical anime tropes, like all the female characters falling in love with the male lead, even though he spends most of the story being an insufferable, yet strangely likable, idiot. I don’t know, I don’t really like anime that much. I wasn’t expecting to like this.
But I did. Steins;Gate tells a story that examines the cause and effect of interfering with the timeline, and the importance of memories. Okabe Rintaro, our lab coat wearing protagonist, attends a lecture about time travel, but instead he finds a dead girl in a hallway. She’s covered in blood. He sends a message to his friend Daru about it, and then the world seems to change. The whole building is now behind a security perimeter and only Okabe can tell something is different. He then goes to his university and meets the girl who was dead, but she’s now very much alive.
It’s a tantalising hook, and from there Okabe brings Makise Kurisu into his lab. The existing members are Okabe, the leader, Daru, the overweight pervert and “super hacka”, and Mayuri, a childhood friend of Okabe. She seems naïve and kind of slow, but she’s way more emotionally intelligent than anyone else in the group. Kurisu is the typical girl genius and hardcore scientist. The group have created something they call “Dmail” which allows them to send short messages back in time, by using a mobile phone hooked up to a microwave.
Their experiments are careless, fully up to the whims of the characters who don’t understand the consequences of their actions. The first four chapters are basically setup for the last four, where the story behaves like a typical anime with typical anime characters and typical jokes and typical embarrassing situations, and lets the characters develop. There’s Luka, a boy who looks like a girl. Faris, an energetic young girl who runs a maid café and wears cat ears and meows a lot. Moeka, a socially anxious young woman who can only seem to communicate through text messages. And Suzuha, a girl who takes up a part time job at the shop under the lab.
Each of these characters are way more than they appear to be on the surface, and due to the nature of this game, I don’t want to spoil anything. All the main characters are well developed, the science fiction elements are well thought out, and the story is engaging and well written. It’s slow to start, but without that slow start, the dramatic tension in the second half of the game would likely fall flat. By the time we get big revelations about the characters and increased stakes, you will actually care about these characters enough to become fully invested in the story Steins;Gate wants to tell. When Okabe starts to break down, it is earned.
Steins;Gate will just run from start to finish, with minimal interaction from yourself. I have criticised games for lack of interaction before, but I feel this game gets a pass because it doesn’t try to sell itself as anything other than a virtual novel. I’m in a place in my life where this sort of game appeals to me. I might play through an hour or so after work. I can set the text to auto and just lean back and watch the story unfold, only having to interact when the phone prompt appears.
You have control over Okabe’s mobile phone. You’ll direct how Okabe interacts with his friends by text message interactions and whether you answer a call or not. Some of these events will impact the story. There are multiple endings, with the latter half of the game including one potential ending per chapter. They range from bittersweet to absolutely devastating, and they are all worth viewing before you get to the normal ending. And once you’ve done that, you’ll probably need a flowchart or a guide to get the “True Ending”.
Thankfully, replaying is easy. The game auto saves at sensible points of the story. There are options to skip any text you’ve already experienced, with the game slowing back down to a normal pace when you encounter something different.
Steins;Gate’s presentation is a little hit and miss. The artwork is fantastic, with the characters and scenes drawn well, but it also seems to be a bit lazy. A lot of the time, you’re simply looking at the same few backdrops of the lab’s interior, or the streets of Akihabara, with the characters standing in front of it talking to you. Action scenes are usually depicted with one still image, or they are described in prose. There’ll be sound effects and the screen may flash white or red, but quite often the story will tell rather than show. It tells it well, though. The writing is descriptive enough and it remains engaging, but it does sometimes feel like the camera is pointed away from the action. The translation is a little messed up in places, with the text sometimes displaying weirdly on screen with odd spaces or line breaks. These are minor distractions, though.
The music is fantastic, with a range of tracks that can conjure up the mystery and emotions of the story. Songs range from quiet piano pieces which can be slow and sad, or much louder orchestra or synth pieces that perfectly accompany the rising tension. Steins;Gate also knows when a scene is better served with no music, something a lot of games don’t understand. There are plenty of quiet moments where two characters are talking, and it’s up to the Japanese cast to convey the nuances of emotion the characters are feeling. It works surprisingly well. I don’t understand Japanese, but emotion is universal.
Even after putting fifty hours into this game, I still don’t like Anime, but I like this. I did watch the Anime series after finishing the game, and I found that surprisingly enjoyable. It’s a great way to experience the story without having to hold a Vita for hours on end, but you do miss some elements of the stories, particularly the alternate endings. Like Suzuha’s ending. That is going to be a difficult one to forget.
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Community review by jerec (January 20, 2017)
On very rare occasions, Jerec finds a game that inspires him to write stuff about. The rest of the time he just hangs around being sarcastic. |
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