Steins;Gate

Such a nice romantic story with sci-fi elements. Some of those girls could have used a good throttling, but you survive them because you’re traveling through time and trying to save the world and your beloved, right? :-) I wasn't into it at times, but at other times it was cute and interesting. No harm in trying the first few episodes to see if it's your cup of tea. A strong 3 stars. (01/09/2012)

For a long time, it seems like a sophisticated intimate more-or-less conversation between a bunch of "geeks" (and one Rick Sanchez impersonation played by Doc Tennant) during one steamy summer over the rules and possibilities of time travel and parallel universes, then it's dressed up for a while as an increasingly intimate and personal righting of previous wrongs and a struggle against the irreversibility of fate (where some rules are ignored when necessary), only to be revealed in the end to be nothing more than an emotional relationship tale as it concludes with an embarrassing deus ex machina that negates the set rules altogether. Half the series is a "journey there" and half a "journey back", where there could have been twenty episodes less between the opening and the finale as well as twenty more and it wouldn't have made any difference to the plot. However, when it trips over its own feet and stops working as "time-based sci-fi", it's kept afloat, and admittedly successfully, by the characters, they are so likeable that they hold it together. The first third is by far the best, it evokes a sense of paranoia (however underhandedly often by having everyone wear the same clothes all the time for weeks, worlds or realities), it sets up good themes and time travel rules (it's a derivative of ideas from other works and theories, but not uninteresting), and one can forgive it for missing a lot of the obvious time-playing obfuscations precisely because the creators are playing with theories you know or have seen elaborated elsewhere. So if you get caught by one of the online "best time travel movies/series" lists, where this anime is often featured, there is a risk of disappointment, because it is "time travel sci-fi", but not very good because of the second half and especially the ending. But if you don't care about that and accept that time travel here is merely a means of "getting the characters on the emotional grasshopper", then it's definitely recommendable. That's what it's built on. (01/27/2021)

This was a great idea, but terribly executed - that is how I would briefly describe Steins;Gate in a nutshell. If someone had told me that there was an anime packed with otaku culture, depression, paranoia, CERN, time travel, Norse mythology, romance, kawaii aesthetics, thriller, and some transgender themes, I would have probably thought that it would have turned out as some hard-to-take-seriously dreadful adolescent crap. But you would be surprised - it works unexpectedly really well and can be taken seriously. It all fits together nicely, and the time travel process is especially interesting, but when such a cocktail is dispensed at the pace of a dead snail, interspersed with countless scenes that are completely meaningless, and the screenwriting frequently wandering off to end up in dead ends, it results in something atrociously tedious that took me a while, almost a year before I could finally finish the 24 episodes. I often read that the first episodes are boring, and then it gets much better and grabs you. However, I only noticed an increased interest in myself only around the 12th episode, which is damn late for a 24-episode anime, after which they were successful in making me bored out of my mind yet again, and it was only during the last few episodes that the overall impression improved a bit. I am convinced that cutting the length of this season in half and removing some practically useless characters (I mean Feris and Luka especially) would help and my rating could be completely different. My rating is exactly on the border between 2 and 3, but if I compare it to a similar anime I rate as a 3 (for example, the much livelier Erased or The Tatami Galaxy), then I am not able to give it more than 2 stars. (03/25/2021)