Steins;Gate (2): From good to gone (SPOILERS!)

After roughly thirty hours of intense reading and button-mashing, I am finally done with Steins;Gate. I am somehow relieved that the whole thing is over at long last, but that is not my dominant feeling about that game. No; my dominant feeling is disappointment.

That’s right, disappointment. Steins;Gate basically failed to live up to my expectations and transformed over time into something that I didn’t quite enjoy. Of course, you could blame me for having expectations in the first place, but here’s the thing: the game itself planted these expectations in me. The truth is that I had no preconceived idea about Steins;Gate before I started playing it; however, after being fed the delicious data-laden four exposition chapters, my expectations regarding the narrative went off the roof. I pictured a convoluted storyline with branching paths completing each other à la 999, rife with plot twists and dramatic time paradoxes, all peppered with mind-bending concepts and dripping with irony and dark humour.

Worse by the ending

What I got instead was a cliché light novel with a strong romantic flavour and a touch of harem. When I complained about the mundanity of Suzuha and Okabe’s blooming love story in the “Irreversible Reboot” ending, little did I know that this was actually the template for five of the game’s six endings. I was absolutely livid when I realized that, and after having cleared these five romantic endings in a row, I was literally frothing at the mouth. Had I written a post at that moment, it would have been the most scathing harangue of them all; fortunately, the uncovering of the so-called “True Ending” somehow saved the day and soothed my foul mood. That’s not to say that said “True Ending” is a deeply satisfying outcome that managed to redeem the whole game in my eyes, but it certainly fared much better than its five counterparts. At least, it didn’t turn out to be a harem ending of sorts; I think a piece of my soul would have died if it had been the case. Anyway, let’s take a closer look at these ill-fitted romantic endings:

—6/Isolated Jamais Vu: This ending occurs at the end of the 7^th chapter if you choose not to send the D-Mail, regardless of how many True Ending flags you triggered before. It pairs Okabe with Faris and is by far the most unpolished ending of the bunch, leaving gaping plot holes in its trail. For one thing, it actually takes place on a yet another Attractor Field, although the game never tells you that clearly. According to the Steins;Gate wiki, this is supposed to be Attractor Field Omega, an attractor field in which the SERN threat may still be lurking around if the presence of the divergence meter is to be believed. The changes occurring in this worldline are quite drastic, since Okabe finds himself being your average student instead of the chuunibyou patient he used to be and not knowing Daru and Mayuri at all. That is all nice and well, and I certainly appreciate the harshness of this outcome, but there is a problem: we are not told how this result was obtained. We only know that Faris sent a certain D-mail that was supposed to save her father, but the actual content of that mail is not shown to us; instead, we only get to witness the radical consequences of its sending. Do you seriously expect me to swallow this and be happy with it, game? Sorry, but that won’t happen. I won’t let you get away with such complacency, and I deem that ending the crappiest of the bunch. Next!

—5/Irreversible Reboot: This ending occurs at the end of the 6^th chapter if you choose not to send the D-Mail, regardless of how many True Ending flags you triggered before. I criticized it in my last post, but in hindsight, it is actually my second favourite ending after the True Ending. It is poignant and laced with angst, and it gives a greater understanding of Suzuha’s character. Of course, it is not satisfactory either, since we’re left with no idea if Okabe and Suzuha’s risky trip to 1975 bears fruit (and to my dismay, the others endings don’t allude to this point at all).

—4/Lind of Corruption and Rebirth: This ending occurs at the end of the 8^th chapter if you choose not to send the D-Mail, regardless of how many True Ending flags you triggered before. It takes place on Attractor Field Alpha and pairs Okabe with female Lukako. Honestly, this ending is a complete joke. We have to face the horrible truth here: Lukako’s absurd sex change was implemented in the game for the sole purpose of allowing Okabe to have a romance with Lukako without treading into Boy’s Love territory. Sure, the writers tried to integrate that element into the narrative by making it affect the worldlines, but the result is utterly laughable: it turns out that female Lukako broke the IBN 5100 because she was sweeping the storehouse where it was kept, while male Lukako only swept the courtyard and thus left the computer intact. So, same body, voice and clothing from male to female, but different sweeping patterns? Allow me to grin sarcastically at that point.

—3/Stardust Sky: This ending occurs at the 10^th chapter if you triggered none of the True Ending flags beforehand. It takes place on the recovered Beta Attractor Field and pairs Okabe with good ol’ Mayuri, but also implies the death of Kurisu. This is an unremarkable ending for the most part and seems to have been put in the game solely to inflate the number of available outcomes.

—2/Paradox Meltdown: A tad harder to obtain, this ending occurs at the 10^th chapter if you triggered up to five True Ending flags. Taking place on both the Alpha and Beta Attractor Fields, it is a very emotional ending that shows Okabe admitting his crush on Kurisu and mourning the fact that he has to sacrifice her to save both Mayuri and the future. It is also mostly superfluous, since it turns out to be a truncated version of the True Ending.

Although endings 4 to 6 offer interesting developments as well as revelatory insights into some of the characters’ psyche, they have the major flaw of shifting the focus from the eradication of the SERN menace to the pursuit of Okabe’s newfound romantic interests. Well, excuse me, but I don’t care one bit about Okabe’s carnal urges and fickle love stories. What I care about is to know whether the SERN threat has been circumvented for good, which is not answered in a conclusive way in any of these three endings. Worldlines have been manipulated so thoroughly that it could be the case, but we don’t know for sure, which is deeply frustrating. As for endings 2 and 3, they do solve the SERN issue by shifting back to the original Beta Attractor Field, but they are far from being satisfying either. If you look at it closely, they are actually the same exact ending in terms of actual events, the only difference between them being Okabe’s romantic focus: “Stardust Sky” shows him content with his decision to save Mayuri and brushing off Kurisu’s death, while “Paradox Meltdown” extensively shows his despair at losing his beloved Kurisu. At any rate, they both turn out to be a trifle boring and they fail to elicit the deep relief that a return to Attractor Field Beta should be expected to provide.

True Ending, where art thou?

To feel that much-awaited relief, you have to wait for the unfolding of the fabled and highly elusive “True Ending”. Titled “Open the Steins Gate”, it is by far the most complete and satisfying of the bunch: it ties together loose elements that appeared at the very beginning of the story and wraps things up in a clever and delightful way. Too bad this masterful narrative was not the template for all of Steins;Gate’s endings, really. That delicious dish of a True Ending is only ever-so-slightly spoiled by the cliché concept that supports it, namely the existence of a worldline independent from any attractor field where the future could be shaped according to one’s own free will. Hum, haven’t I seen this before in, like, a million J-RPGs? Oh, well.

I finally used an FAQ to navigate my way to this ending—and boy, don’t I regret it. The requirements for the unlocking of “Open the Steins Gate” are ridiculously arcane, and I’m pretty sure that I would have given up on the game long before triggering them. Here’s the deal: you must build a relationship with Kurisu that will prove intense and enduring enough to motivate future Okabe on worldline Beta to dive again into time-travel research and find a way to set things rights after Kurisu’s death. This is done by exchanging a series of emails with Kurisu over the course of the game’s ten chapters, and the true ending flags are triggered by answering specific words in her emails—or, in one case, by not answering them. Aside from the fact that exchanging a couple of emails seems a trifle too superficial a way to strengthen a love bond, even in these digital times, these flags present a stinging problem: although they make perfect sense in the context of the True Ending, it is virtually impossible to guess what they are before uncovering said True Ending. You could spend dozens of hours trying to figure out which emails are relevant between Mayuri’s, Faris’, Lukako’s and Kurisu’s and trying every single possible combination of answers before unearthing the True Ending—that is, if you don’t get bored to death and jump ship long before. Things are all the more confusing as this flag system is only used for the True Ending and it corollary, the truncated “Paradox Meltdown”, while the other four endings use a branching path system. Maybe this is common practice in the realm of Visual Novels, but it is quite confusing for a beginner like me. 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, which is the closest thing to a VN I’ve played before Steins;Gate, used a branching path system and stuck to it; as a result, it was much more satisfying to navigate and the uncovering of the various endings was much smoother. There was a flag of sorts to unearth, granted, but it was only a single occurrence and it made perfect sense in the context of the narrative, so guessing what this flag was and recovering it was piece of cake. On the other hand, the lack of cohesiveness of Steins;Gate’s ending requirements and the arcane quality of its flag system forces you to rely on trial-and-errors—or FAQs as a last resort—which is anything but fulfilling.

And all that’s in between

Endings aside, Steins;Gate's narrative suffers from a couple of blatant flaws. It fortunately avoided major plot holes, but that is only a small relief compared to the disappointment brought by these flaws, which go as such:

—Ad hoc overdose: Steins;Gate relies way too much on ad hoc to get out of narrative binds. Okabe is stuck because he doesn’t know the contents of Faris’ D-mail and has absolutely no way to recover them? No problem! Just let Faris gain Reading Steiner out of the blue and remember all of a sudden events from other worldlines, even though it was previously established that only Okabe had this ability—and even though it creates more problems than it solves, problems that I will cover in a couple of lines. No one can figure out the identity of Suzuha’s father? No problem! Just transform dumb-as-a-brick Mayuri into Conan Edogawa long enough to solve the matter, and—case closed! Yeah, right. And no, making Okabe comment on the fact that Mayuri can be “surprisingly perceptive at times” doesn’t add a shred of believability to that most unlikely turn of events. There is also the infamous Lukako affair that I mentioned in my first post, along with plenty of other minor occurrences that I won’t detail here to avoid boring everybody to death—including myself.  Such cheap narrative tricks are infuriating and shouldn’t be used in a storyline that presented itself from the onset as based on scientific concepts and ruled by strict determinism.

—Missed identification to narrator: Protagonist-based first person narration is supposed to help one relate to the narrator and somehow identify to them. It fails spectacularly in the case of Steins;Gate, and it does so for one simple reason: Okabe is an absolute MORON. There is no way I can relate and identify to a character that cannot put two and two together on a regular basis and sprouts crap such as “Twenty years from now is such a long time, I don’t want to sacrifice my friends’ precious memories right now. Let’s rather sacrifice the future of the whole humanity, yoo-hoo!” I know that the latest theories in neuroscience claim that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making are not fully developed until age 25, but such a lack of common sense and twisted sense of priorities is just ridiculous. As a whole, most of Okabe’s decisions are totally at odds with what any sensible person would decide in the same circumstances—and let’s not even talk about his propensity to get horny in the most inappropriate situations. Hum, could you forget your privates and think a little more about the fate of the world instead, you stupid and unrelatable main character? Jeez, I so hate being stuck in your brain.

—Lack of attention to details: Like most Vita games, Steins;Gate has a very obvious “budget” quality. That’s okay per se: it is the Vita style, and it is kind of endearing, actually. However, it is not okay when the lack of polish goes as far as to undermine the narrative. There are numerous times when the pictures on screen blatantly contradict the text, which is simply unacceptable in a visual novel. I’ll limit myself to one single example: in endings 2 and 3 after the return to the Beta Attractor Field, Okabe mourns the fact that Kurisu’s upgrades to the PhoneWave are gone and that the machine is back to its prior state. Yet what do we see on screen? Heck, you guessed it: the PhoneWave with all the upgrades added by Kurisu. Way to ruin the moment and destroy its emotional impact, game! This mistake is hardly forgivable, especially since the game does feature pictures of the original PhoneWave; it’s not like the developers needed to create a specific picture for that scene. This is simply carelessness, carelessness that spoils the immersion.

It’s time to wrap this up, folks. Although I adored Steins;Gate at first, my love sadly grew cold as chapters and endings went by. That game had some incredible potential and could have been a masterclass mind-bender; instead, the writers decided to play it easy and to indulge into some romantic meanderings. Well, be it. I don’t buy it, and Steins;Gate will remain a major disappointment as far as I’m concerned. That won’t deter me from playing more visual novels, though—and very soon at that, because I need compensation. I need a fresh mouth washer to clean my palate of the bitter taste left by Steins;Gate, and that mouth washer is going to be none other than Danganronpa. I hope it will perform its duty well and give birth to a stellar review! For now, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!