Steins;Gate

By: Robert Murphy

As you begin your very first episode of Steins;Gate you may not be able to understand why people revel in its excellence as a great all star of an anime but you start to dig further in and you have an “ah ha” moment like no other. The show is further proof of the Doctor Who principle of a mad man with a genius level intellect being endless amusement to watch; in fact all our main character was missing was a sonic screwdriver. The story follows Rintarou Okabe, a self proclaimed mad scientist and a man who is allegedly being monitored by a secret shady government agency known as the “Organization” who want his information on time travel. Together with his crack team which consists of Mayuri, a young girl with a love of cosplay and Itaru, a chubby otaku and genius hacker, they work on new secret inventions and “fight” the Organizations evil plans.

The show works along the lines of a time travel or adjacent world principle where if you did something in one world it would create a separate world that was affected by your decisions in the first world. Now I know time travel can make some people roll their eyes but much like I said before, Steins;Gate pulls off a Doctor Who style principle with witty banter and quipping along with nonsensical characters that make it all come together. The best moments involve Okabe and his friends making machines like toasters and microwaves into new inventions and having arguments of the madness behind it all. Many of them involve Okabe and Kurisu, who joins the Okabe’s group halfheartedly at first and she is an extremely intelligent young girl who counteracts Okabe’s madness and own self proclaimed genius quite nicely. But when they aren’t arguing they’re usually trying to undue some tragic thing that their invention has caused and created a horrible future. Okabe learns what messing around with time lines or “worldlines” as they’re called in the show and what can happen when you meddle with things trying to make them better but making everything so much worse.

The characters of Steins;Gate are some of the best I’ve seen in a show in a very long time and they all posses incredible chemistry throughout the show. This is important because when the “wordlines” in the show end up getting messed with by the group, Okabe is the only one who remembers anything that happened before. This makes things not only difficult for Okabe but incredibly great for the plot as he must try and get his friends back together to help him in fixing things. Because each character has some underline chemistry and feeling toward one another, it transcends whatever happened to change the world they are in, they know that they know one another somehow and in someway. It’s all handled beautifully as well which is good because you could easily see how it could have not worked out in another circumstance.

Never has a show worried me so much as to why everyone liked it but after wading through the first episode Steins;Gate will hit you like a ton of bricks. The characters are all so incredibly strong and it is rare that I don’t find fault with a character in a series and I love that it’s finally happened. Everything feels essential to the story; there are no ridiculous plot elements or fan service characters, its straight forward show when it comes to delivering its story and everything it has to offer. You may have to avoid rolling your eyes if you’re critical of time travel anime or shows in general but in my opinion it’s done brilliantly.

Good:

A great cast of characters all around with no real weak characters to speak of

A time travel/alternate world principle story that is handled extremely well

The witty bantering and underline chemistry between each character makes the story great to watch

Bad:

Their may be some eye rolling with the time travel concepts and the ability to make them out of household items

Scully Rating: 9.0 out of 10