Wherever you look, this anime gets praised to high heavens and is considered a staple of the 'Greatest of all time'-anime canon the community has conceded on.
I strongly disagree but I perfectly understand why: it's pure weeb 'haute couture'.
More than a decade ago I tried to get through this series. Back when I was quite the weeb teenager myself. Even then I couldn't stand it and gave up after only a handful of episodes. Now as a 30-something adult I've completed the series and boy, what a struggle that was, took me weeks.
I wont beat around the bush and write whole paragraphs going into detail about the intricacies of the story, the characters and the developments. That's unnecessary when the main issues are painfully obvious and in your face.
The characters are obnoxious. All of them. They're all anime stereotypes - but worse - it's done deliberately in a meta-comedy style where the series is kind of trying to make fun of anime clichés and itself. Which gives the creators the perfect excuse to make the characters - you've guessed - it into anime stereotypes. Main character Okarin for example pretends to play a mad evil scientist complete with sardonic laugh. However, the few male characters there are (this is low-key a harem anime) are nowhere near the levels of hair-pulling cringe you'll get from the female cast. They're all designed as high pitched or shy soft-spoken kawaii waifus to have weebs drool over them. Central to the plot is Mayuri, a dimwitted infantile girl. She's a hollow shell of a character and really just there as a plot device. Together with the rest of the characters they go through experiences ripped straight from a high school romance anime.
Next: the story. It's dull, a slow meandering build-up that consumes half the series' episodes to finally hit you with a unearned out of the blue plot twist midway the series. The plot twist was supposed to shock the audience but it rather gave me relief. One of the annoying characters dies off and it finally seemed like we would get some momentum and that the story would turn away from silly anime vignettes towards something more serious. I was wrong on both accounts.
After said big event, the anime turns into a time-travel cliché: you know where the hero keeps looping through time to fix a grave error, but time itself as if it's a 'magical sentient entity', keeps course-correcting so the event is inevitable anyway.
"time is a river, you can't change it's course by trowing in a pebble" - type of nonsense. Ever heard of the butterfly-effect?
This is a good Segway into the pseudo-science. The series doesn't even make the slightest effort into suspending you're disbelief. Influencing time as to make it follow a preferred course is as simple as sending a text-message. Sometimes there's side effects when it fits the plot, other times there aren't when it doesn't. It's all very arbitrary. This anime has 'Magical time-travel'- rules. Not the plausible ones.
I can muster the suspension of disbelief necessary to believe that a bunch of teenager accidentally discover how to send small amounts of digital data back in time. But not when they "invent" a device to send back a person's full personality and memory-set. Not when said device is an eff-ing pair of headphones, that they hobbled together in an afternoon, with some spare parts bought from the hardware store around the corner.
A group of teenagers having more knowledge than the entire body of the scientific world combined. Able to make a device - that can read and digitize you entire cerebral being and send it back in time - out of a pair of headphones. Get out'a here!
Now back to the story. The more serious tone and urgency of the second half doesn't prevent the anime from indulging in weeb culture and delivering fan service. There's an entire episode, pretty late into the series, dedicated to Okarin going on a date. So don't expect much of a focused streamlined ending. It's a bunch more contrived plot twists, convoluted storylines, deus ex machinas with some anime fluff sprinkled throughout and then it's over.
Apparently this is one of those anime franchise where there's a complicated watch order. You need to stop halfway through episode 23, watch a special, then all of Steins Gate 0 and then it's supposed to be better and make more sense.
Yeah you can eff right off with your watch order. Steins gate 0 came out 7 years later mind you. It's up to the producers of a series to envision things the right way and release them in a proper order from the start. It's why I always watch things in order of release and not in inner-series chronology. If that makes it suck, not my fault or problem. There's already more then enough prequels, spin-offs, midquels and expanded universe bullcrap in the entertainment industry as it is. Keep it simple and make something great, then you won't need to fluff it up over the coming decade.
In conclusion. The reason why steins gate was so well received by the anime community is because it's an artificially flavored buffet that caters perfectly to their taste: a healthy dose of harem casting, high school romance and waifu-baiting, a sprinkle of yaoi (boy-love) and gender-confusion and everything royally doused in a thick sauce of self-referencing anime culture.
I like anime as a medium. I think it's cool Japanese producers don't reduce animation to something either exclusively for kids, or comedy when it's made for adults. In Japan they'll use the medium of animation for whatever they please: Drama, action, sci-fi, horror, political thriller, ... And I have definitely enjoyed anime in the past, some of it is amongst my favorite fiction ever ghost in the shell, jin-roh, samurai champloo, ... . But I despise weeb culture. And unless you're a weeb yourself you shouldn't take any recommendations on what anime to watch next from a weeb. It's bound to be cringe. And on that note I'll circle back around and finish how I started:
Never trust a weeb.
I strongly disagree but I perfectly understand why: it's pure weeb 'haute couture'.
More than a decade ago I tried to get through this series. Back when I was quite the weeb teenager myself. Even then I couldn't stand it and gave up after only a handful of episodes. Now as a 30-something adult I've completed the series and boy, what a struggle that was, took me weeks.
I wont beat around the bush and write whole paragraphs going into detail about the intricacies of the story, the characters and the developments. That's unnecessary when the main issues are painfully obvious and in your face.
The characters are obnoxious. All of them. They're all anime stereotypes - but worse - it's done deliberately in a meta-comedy style where the series is kind of trying to make fun of anime clichés and itself. Which gives the creators the perfect excuse to make the characters - you've guessed - it into anime stereotypes. Main character Okarin for example pretends to play a mad evil scientist complete with sardonic laugh. However, the few male characters there are (this is low-key a harem anime) are nowhere near the levels of hair-pulling cringe you'll get from the female cast. They're all designed as high pitched or shy soft-spoken kawaii waifus to have weebs drool over them. Central to the plot is Mayuri, a dimwitted infantile girl. She's a hollow shell of a character and really just there as a plot device. Together with the rest of the characters they go through experiences ripped straight from a high school romance anime.
Next: the story. It's dull, a slow meandering build-up that consumes half the series' episodes to finally hit you with a unearned out of the blue plot twist midway the series. The plot twist was supposed to shock the audience but it rather gave me relief. One of the annoying characters dies off and it finally seemed like we would get some momentum and that the story would turn away from silly anime vignettes towards something more serious. I was wrong on both accounts.
After said big event, the anime turns into a time-travel cliché: you know where the hero keeps looping through time to fix a grave error, but time itself as if it's a 'magical sentient entity', keeps course-correcting so the event is inevitable anyway.
"time is a river, you can't change it's course by trowing in a pebble" - type of nonsense. Ever heard of the butterfly-effect?
This is a good Segway into the pseudo-science. The series doesn't even make the slightest effort into suspending you're disbelief. Influencing time as to make it follow a preferred course is as simple as sending a text-message. Sometimes there's side effects when it fits the plot, other times there aren't when it doesn't. It's all very arbitrary. This anime has 'Magical time-travel'- rules. Not the plausible ones.
I can muster the suspension of disbelief necessary to believe that a bunch of teenager accidentally discover how to send small amounts of digital data back in time. But not when they "invent" a device to send back a person's full personality and memory-set. Not when said device is an eff-ing pair of headphones, that they hobbled together in an afternoon, with some spare parts bought from the hardware store around the corner.
A group of teenagers having more knowledge than the entire body of the scientific world combined. Able to make a device - that can read and digitize you entire cerebral being and send it back in time - out of a pair of headphones. Get out'a here!
Now back to the story. The more serious tone and urgency of the second half doesn't prevent the anime from indulging in weeb culture and delivering fan service. There's an entire episode, pretty late into the series, dedicated to Okarin going on a date. So don't expect much of a focused streamlined ending. It's a bunch more contrived plot twists, convoluted storylines, deus ex machinas with some anime fluff sprinkled throughout and then it's over.
Apparently this is one of those anime franchise where there's a complicated watch order. You need to stop halfway through episode 23, watch a special, then all of Steins Gate 0 and then it's supposed to be better and make more sense.
Yeah you can eff right off with your watch order. Steins gate 0 came out 7 years later mind you. It's up to the producers of a series to envision things the right way and release them in a proper order from the start. It's why I always watch things in order of release and not in inner-series chronology. If that makes it suck, not my fault or problem. There's already more then enough prequels, spin-offs, midquels and expanded universe bullcrap in the entertainment industry as it is. Keep it simple and make something great, then you won't need to fluff it up over the coming decade.
In conclusion. The reason why steins gate was so well received by the anime community is because it's an artificially flavored buffet that caters perfectly to their taste: a healthy dose of harem casting, high school romance and waifu-baiting, a sprinkle of yaoi (boy-love) and gender-confusion and everything royally doused in a thick sauce of self-referencing anime culture.
I like anime as a medium. I think it's cool Japanese producers don't reduce animation to something either exclusively for kids, or comedy when it's made for adults. In Japan they'll use the medium of animation for whatever they please: Drama, action, sci-fi, horror, political thriller, ... And I have definitely enjoyed anime in the past, some of it is amongst my favorite fiction ever ghost in the shell, jin-roh, samurai champloo, ... . But I despise weeb culture. And unless you're a weeb yourself you shouldn't take any recommendations on what anime to watch next from a weeb. It's bound to be cringe. And on that note I'll circle back around and finish how I started:
Never trust a weeb.