Time after time.
I force myself to stare into my friend’s eyes. It’s painful. I feel like a villain. Do I really want to send this life-altering email? If I do this, they’ll lose someone important in their life. But If I don’t, I’ll lose someone important in my life. It’s an agonizing decision, but it’s not the first gut-wrenching call I’ve made today, and it won’t be my last. I silently beg my friend’s forgiveness and press the send button on my phone. The past and present change instantaneously. I hope I did the right thing…
This kind of tough choice is the basis of Steins;Gate, a visual novel for the PS4/Vita that does a lot of neat storytelling acrobatics but doesn’t quite stick the landing. While I really enjoyed the emphasis on science and friendship in the first act, much of it gets torpedoed by intrusive dating elements that detract from the second act’s darker, more serious tone.
Steins;Gate gets off to a great start. As the goofy, self-proclaimed “mad scientist” Rintarou, I loved experiencing the thrill of time travel while learning about real-world science. Terms like Kerr black holes and “lifters” were easy to understand, thanks to humorous use of pop culture to explain abstract phenomenon. (Okarin cites RPGs and erotic manga to explain bits of quantum theory at one point – you have my full attention.) I also appreciated the underlying story of friendship between Okarin and his fellow lab members. Whether Okarin was verbally sparring with the brilliant and sarcastic Kurisu, babbling silly nonsense at his childhood friend Mayuri, or praising his best bud Daru for his hacking skills, I felt a real bond of friendship between Okarin and his peers – which is why I was fully invested in trying to save them when his time-traveling experiments start to go terribly wrong.
More than once I spilled tears as I pushed the ‘send’ button on my phone…
My attachment to my friends made tough decisions like the one above incredibly difficult. More than once I spilled tears as I pushed the “send” button on my phone, which activated a mini time machine in Okarin’s makeshift lab and changed the course of history. Some of the changes I made in the beginning were intended to make my friends happy, but ended up making things miserable for someone else, causing me to try and undo what I thought were good deeds, which meant possibly depriving my friends of happiness, and leaving me feeling like a big jerk.
Unfortunately, a lot of the emotional impact of these decisions is undermined by intrusive dating elements in the second half of the story. Rather than feel like a natural progression of the story, sudden confessions of love from the ladies felt forced and awkward. For instance, I’m pretty sure in real life a woman wouldn’t simply fall into my arms after I told her I planned to change history and permanently separate her from a loved one. Yet that’s exactly the sort of thing that happens in Steins;Gate. This frustrated me because it completely yanked me out of the relationships i spent the first half of the story getting invested in.
Worse, not every encounter with a female character is permissive. I was particularly disturbed when one woman was nearly sexualy assaulted by Okarin. Not only was this out-of-character for the normally chill protagonist, but the camera’s focus on the woman’s breasts and the lurid details of how Okrin was straddling her to prevent his “enemy” from escaping felt like I was being encouraged to ogle her as she struggled for freedom. I felt ill watching it, and though the story manages to mostly recover from this terrible blunder by shifting the focus back to science and friendship, I could never quite shake a feeling of unease after that scene.
Steins;Gate offers multiple endings based on crucial decisions you make during your playthrough, most of which are bittersweet. I actually like that, because not only does it ground the story in reality (mess with history’s weave and everything gets tangled), it also motivated me to try for the “true ending,” the only real happy ending you can achieve. Plus, by exploring all the different endings, I was able to extend my playtime to about 20 hours, which felt like a pretty good return on my investment.
In large part, I enjoyed Steins;Gate. Its first half is smartly told, its characters are genuinely likable, and I enjoyed learning about science in humorous ways. I just wish that the dating elements had been more smoothly incorporated into the established narrative and not forced (gruesomely at times) on the player. Sometimes, it’s enough to just be friends.
