Title: Steins;Gate / シュタインズ・ゲート
Type: TV Series, 24 episodes
Genre: Science Fiction, Thriller
Themes: Time Travel
Year: 06.04.2011 till 14.09.2011
Plot: Rintaro Okabe is a self-proclaimed “mad scientist” who believes that an international scientific organization named SERN is conspiring to reshape the world according to its own interests. He and his friend Itaru Hashida inadvertently create a gadget able to send messages to the past. The discovery and experimentation of this instrument become the catalyst of fundamental alterations to the present. Okabe is the only one aware of these changes because he possesses a Reading Steiner, the ability to retain the memories from previous experienced timelines. Oblivious of the consequences of their actions, Rintaro and his friends end up creating modifications of grievous proportions. He must then try to find a way to return as close as possible to the original timeline in order to save his precious lab partners.
ANN
Review:
Rintaro Okabe (the mad scientist) aka “Hououin Kyouma”, or sometimes “Okarin” called by his close friends Mayuri and Daru, has a lab where he and his other lab’s member (Daru) invent all kind of useless gadgets and never tell anybody about the lab and what they’re doing in it, but Mayuri-chan and Daru are not the secretive kind, while Okabe is. Okabe always in the state of paranoia and suspicious that he’s being watched by a secretive organization called SERN, he’s obsessed with the concept of time traveling and have always thought that it’s a doable theory, to make a time machine, thus he believes that SERN is always watching him. The mad scientist and his nerdy friend Daru were able to customize a microwave that can send a text message to the past but they didn’t know that they’ve succeeded with their invention till the day when Okabe sent a text to Daru after witnessing a homicide of a genius researcher called Kurisu Makise who opposed the possibility of time traveling. Then after sending that text message to Daru suddenly Okabe felt something but couldn’t be explained and the next thing he saw is a strange object crashed on the roof of the building where he witnessed the murder of Kurisu. Whenever Okabe tried to explained what happened when he was in there nobody believed him and thought that he lost it, but when he was discussing it by chance with Daru he found out that the same time he text him, Daru’s phone was connected to the microwave and then everything made sense and the discovery of the device was announced. As they performed different experiments, the lab members increased unintentionally, and Okabe named each and everyone of them with tag numbers, as member #003 for Kurisu and called her Christina or Assistant.
The first 10 episodes of Steins;Gate were funny, especially Daru’s perverted statements and Okabe sarcastic reactions to any result they achieve or any frustrating situation he’s in. But then things changed dramatically after those episodes, and everything seems to be serious and could be depressing for some, but I liked how it turns out like that. Okabe is serious all the time, and exhausted to save his lab members but no one noticed except his “assistant” Kurisu, every time he leapes through time, she notices that and always there to offer assistance. Things becomes damn dangerous, and it exceeds the endangering of lab members’ lives to the whole world, but what Okabe cares the most is saving his friends’ lives, and that’s his number one priority through the rest of the show especially his closest friend Mayuri, each time he tries he finds out a way to avoid and a new one to take. Until he reaches the solution to save Mayuri-chan, with the help of Kurisu, he realizes that to save Mayuri’s life, the outcome of that would lead to the original timeline where Kurisu must die, the same day he met her, the day when he first sent “by accident” a text message through time. That was just one twist of the show, and it’s filled with a lot more of twists, and I loved each and everytime the story flips significantly.
Steins;Gate certainly isn’t another cheesy time traveling story, it was really well-made, the sequence of the events were amazingly attached and everything seems make sense although nothing makes sense in a science fiction with a time travel theme plot. The greedy consequences of the major organizations could steal away people’s freedom, the arrogance of discovering a new innovative device isn’t worthy when you pay the life of your close friends for it.
El Psy Congroo
Art: 6/10
Storyline: 8/10
Characters: 9/10
OP/ED: 7/10
