Steins;Gate / シュタインズ・ゲート

In my Raging Loop review, I said that one of the things that I thought made the game work so well was that the protagonist was intelligent and approached the situation in the same way the player would, creating a narrative flow that was engaging, natural, and aligned with what the actual player wanted to do even though there was very little direct control.

Steins;Gate is not like that.

Our protagonist is the self-proclaimed mad scientist, Hououin Kyouma, mwa ha ha ha ha ha! Or, if you ask literally anybody else, the 18-year old dork Okabe Rintarou who constantly spouts over-dramatic nonsense and is obsessed with a conspiracy carried out by them. (Or, in another word, a chuunibyou.)

The game opens with Okabe going with a friend to a talk hosted by a scientist who claims to have discovered a new time travel theory. An explosion and the appearance of a strange metal capsule on the roof of the building cause a brief disruption, but the lecture continues as planned. Near the end of the talk, Okabe tries to call out the scientist as a sham, but is dragged out by a girl who wants to talk to him. The girl asks Okabe what he wanted to tell her a few minutes ago, which is peculiar, because Okabe has never met this girl before.

He lets her go on her way, but comes across her again a few minutes later. Except this time, she’s lying face face down. In a pool of red. Not moving. Whoops! Okabe grabs his friend and runs outside, only to witness every single person on the street besides himself and his friend disappear. The metal capsule that was on the roof has also now embedded itself in the building, as if it had crash landed.

With all these extraordinarily bizarre events occurring in succession, Okabe... goes home and resumes his daily life.

Okay. Sure.

Life goes on, and Okabe and his friends accidentally invent a time machine. This time machine doesn't allow physical objects to be sent back, but rather sends text messages (called D-mails) back in time. If the recipient of the D-mail changes their actions based on the message, this creates a ripple effect which alters the present as well. Unfortunately, the only person who can perceive this change in reality is Okabe.

Eventually, a certain event occurs that greatly displeases Okabe, and the plot of the game becomes Okabe trying to use the time machine to prevent this event. I’m being purposefully vague here, since while this isn’t a major spoiler (it’s the plot of the game, after all), it’s still something that is probably preferable to not know going in if you haven’t been spoiled yet.

To give away the punchline, I didn’t like Steins;Gate that much because Okabe is infuriatingly stupid.

Okabe is infuriatingly stupid.

I cannot say this enough times.

Any time there is any sort of reasonable solution to a problem, Okabe will flat-out ignore it. Any time there is any sort of plot development, Okabe will take hours to comprehend it. Any time there is obvious, heavy-handed foreshadowing, it will completely go over Okabe’s head. (Oh, but any time Okabe comes up with an idiotic, convoluted solution, it will work perfectly, because it will end up tying into the next plot point the game wants to visit.)

At the beginning of the game, Okabe and his friends are testing the time machine to see if it really works. Okabe sends a text message with the explicit purpose of changing the past to alter the present. After sending his text message with the explicit purpose of changing the past to alter the present, the present is suddenly altered. Okabe is confused and bewildered by the fact that the present was suddenly altered after sending his text message with the explicit purpose of changing the past to alter the present, and it takes him several minutes to come up with the idea that perhaps the text message he sent to the past with the explicit purpose of altering the present altered the present.

I am not making this up. I am not exaggerating.

I am being tedious and repetitive, because this is what it feels like watching the events through Okabe’s eyes.

Okabe is infuriatingly stupid.

I could go on (and on and on) about the times Okabe is infuriatingly stupid, but it would involve too many spoilers, so I will restrain myself.

While the plot itself isn’t bad, it’s dragged down by Okabe’s infuriating stupidity.

(When I said I couldn’t say that Okabe is infuriatingly stupid enough, I meant it.)

Here are the issues:

The beginning of the game is way too slow and boring. The introduction (as I’ve described) is quite mysterious, but Okabe just brushes it off, since he’s infuriatingly stupid, so that doesn’t really go anywhere. The time we spend meeting the secondary characters and figuring out the time machine just takes too much time. While part of the speed (or lack thereof) is due to Okabe’s infuriating stupidity, I do think the majority is just from slow pacing.

The middle portion of the game, which comprises the bulk of the plot, has most of its enjoyment sapped from it by the fact that Okabe’s infuriating stupidity makes most of it feel unnecessary. During this stretch of the game, Okabe essentially spends each chapter dating a different teenage girl in his life. While this could be fine, many of the conflicts—and to a certain extent, the plot as a whole—arise and are complicated by Okabe’s infuriating stupidity. So instead of learning about and getting invested in the characters, I just sat there wondering why we were going through all of this in the first place.

The conclusion of the game is the best part, but even then it has its flaws. At last the characters stop acting like idiots and we get to see what the entire game was building up to. This is the place where Steins;Gate finally has something resembling a clever idea, but the main problem is that it feels like the game bends its own rules to get its happy ending. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it does dampen the satisfaction. Also, the ultimate antagonist isn’t introduced until the very end. Overcoming them almost immediately after we first learn about them just doesn’t have much emotional weight.

(Full disclosure: I had seen Steins;Gate’s ending twist somewhere else, by someone that I know took it from Steins;Gate. I suspect the twist would have been much more impactful if I hadn’t seen it before, so you may like it a lot more than I did.)

The characters are mostly done well, but the game tries to milk them a bit too much. They have some interesting quirks and twists to them, but due to Okabe’s infuriating stupidity, what could have been a pleasant strolls through the characters’ psyches become exhausting hikes. Okabe’s melodramatics start off amusing, but quickly wear out their welcome, and then his arrogance and self-indulgence make him insufferable. He does actually have some self-awareness on how annoying he is, but those moments are few and far between, and they’re kind of undercut when he goes back to being a chuunibyou immediately after.

Steins;Gate consists mostly of reading and making choices since it's a visual novel, but the choice system is actually kinda cool. Rather than simply getting a pop-up menu to make your choice, every choice in the game is made through Okabe’s cell phone. The branches split based on whether Okabe sends (or doesn’t send) a text, makes (or doesn’t make) a call, or picks up (or doesn’t pick up) an incoming call. It makes perfect sense in-context, and helps with the immersion since most major choices are about sending a D-mail to the past. Some of the branch splits aren't obvious, but a symbol will appear at each branch when replaying a chapter, so none of the branches are hard to discover.

What is hard to figure out are the text message responses you can send. Over the course of the game, Okabe will receive text messages from various characters, and you can reply to them. In each text message, certain words may be highlighted; by selecting one of the highlighted words, Okabe will send a reply based on that word. Depending on your response, you might get another text message back, and if you can keep the conversation going long enough you might end up with bonus goodies. This is a neat system for interacting with the characters, but there is a major flaw: you can’t see your responses before you send them. Once you select the keyword for your reply, that is the message you need to send. This makes it much harder to interact with the characters the way you want to interact since it's basically impossible to predict the message Okabe will compose from just the keyword. If you could preview the message Okabe will send before actually sending it, this text message system would be vastly improved. Sending the proper text message responses is how you unlock the true ending, by the way, so this flaw ends up becoming the major annoyance in trying to beat the game.

The graphics are nice. The sprites have an effect that adds patterns to what would otherwise be solid colors, and this combined with the subdued palette give the game an almost dreamlike atmosphere. The backgrounds are detailed, and aside from a few characters with slightly questionable anatomy, no real complaints can be made about the visuals.

The music is appropriate and non-intrusive, but by the same token not that memorable. It sets the mood, so I guess that’s all we need. The entire game is voice-acted, and it really helps bring the characters to life. Okabe’s voice actor is especially good, nailing both Okabe’s over-dramatic persona and his wimpy true colors.

One last fun point: Steins;Gate has hilarious Engrish. It’s in the CGs, so it’s still present in the English version. I won’t say any more, but it’s definitely one of the treats of the game.

Anyway, people will tell you that Steins;Gate is an amazing, brilliant game.

It isn’t.

The game wants to reach certain plot points at certain specific times, which forces Okabe to be infuriatingly stupid so he doesn't make conclusions before the proper time. In order to hit very specific plot points the game wants in the proper time in the proper order, Okabe must make infuriatingly stupid decisions or ignore obvious alternatives.

Steins;Gate was clearly made by someone who is passionate about sci-fi, time travel, and nerd culture. It’s well-made as a time travel story (to the extent that Okabe’s infuriating stupidity doesn’t get in its way), but it doesn't stand head-and-shoulders over any other well-made time travel story, contrary to what some of its fans may tell you.

It’s a dating sim-lite adventure game with a sci-fi time travel paint job.

If that’s what you want, go for it. Just turn your brain off as you play, and know that the characters will be doing the same.