Let’s talk about suffering.

“This is the story of the future that could not be saved.”

This is a line that describes Steins;Gate 0 very well. From the very day it was announced, it took fans by surprise and it showed us images of a ruined Akihabara as well as many of the characters from S;G, along with a broken Okabe. S;G 0 promised a darker story than the one told in the original. A story full of suffering and despair for Okabe, as he struggled to live in a world he gave up on saving.

Steins;Gate 0 tells the story of the Okabe from the Beta World Line after he gave up on saving Kurisu. Broken inside and living with the pain and guilt of giving up on her, Okabe gets rid of his Hououin Kyouma persona and does his best to live his life as normal college student. Things go just fine for him until he meets Hiyajo Maho, Kurisu’s senior and researcher who introduces him to Amadeus, an AI program with Kurisu’s memories inside it, and once again gets dragged into a conspiracy surrounding Kurisu and the time machine.

From the very beginning, S;G 0 lets you know just how broken Okabe is inside. Almost every trace of his former self is gone, he lives in fear of the memories of other World Lines haunting him, and needs to take medicine to keep himself calm at times. This is the Okabe Rintarou from the Beta World Line, and this is the condition in which he is once again thrown into the deepest pits of despair as he finds himself fighting a battle against time itself just like he did before.

But it’s not just Okabe, the other Lab Members, as well as some new characters, all find themselves dragged into the conflict as well, and it’s up to them to give Okabe that push he needs to regain some of his former self so he can make everything right again.

So one of the things S;G 0 did best in my opinion was the never-ending sense of tension that lasts through the whole game. Okabe’s dead inside and the world is in the brink of an inevitable World War 3. This means it’s a very desperate situation for everyone, and reading the game transmits that feeling perfectly. You’ll be reading any scene no matter how normal it seems simply waiting for everything to go horribly wrong, and the game will answer your expectations perfectly a few times.

That doesn’t mean the entire game is serious though. It does have its fair share of comfy moments and comedy, which are in fact done very well. But that doesn’t change that reading will have you feeling tense just waiting for the next big development to happen.

The entire story is just a series of horrible events that keep pushing Okabe deeper and deeper into despair. But everything that happens just makes it so much more satisfying when Okabe comes back to his senses and decides to solve everything. Every horrible thing that happens around Okabe is just there as a sign for him to wake up and stop running away from his fears, to overcome his doubts, face reality and once again take his lab coat and become the mad scientist Hououin Kyoma.

The story is told with branching routes just like how the original was, though in S;G 0’s case each route goes on for much longer than the one’s in the original. There’s 5 routes and a final epilogue unlocked after everything else is cleared and some extra conditions are met.

These would be essentially the Kagari, Maho, Amadeus, Mayuri and Leskinen routes. Each of these differ a lot from the others and tell very different stories.

Kagari’s focuses on her relationship with Mayuri and the things Kagari did while separated from Suzuha. It has a lot of cute scenes of Mayuri and Kagari spending time together, we also learn about the time Kagari spent together with Mayuri in 2036.

Maho’s goes deeper into her relationship with Kurisu, the conspiracy surrounding Amadeus, and as a bonus it gives Moeka plenty of screentime and actually makes her a more sympathetic character for the reader despite everything she did before, which was a surprise.

The Amadeus route was actually one of the best and most interesting ones in the game, since it goes into much more detail about the world of 2036 and what the Lab Members are doing in that time, as well as what became of Okabe in 2025. Kagari also plays a center role in this route and helps us learn about the conspiracy surrounding Amadeus.

Mayuri’s route is, along with Amadeus’, one of the better ones in S;G0 by far. It has so many great moments and payoffs that it’s impossible not to love it. Tons of really crazy stuff happens in the world and new mysteries start popping up, involving even Mayuri’s cosplay friends. Once again, along with the Amadeus route, this one has one of the best and most exciting endings in the game. The entire final hour of the route is an amazingly intense ride that ends fantastically.

Then there’s Leskinen’s route which, in a way, could serve as a set up for the rest of the VN. It reveals some important stuff and gets pretty dark towards the end, and while it’s not as good as the previous two, it’s still pretty great and easily one of the routes that causes the most tension in the entire game.

The characters are mostly the same fans came to know and love back in 2009. There’s some new characters who weren’t around in the original, like Maho, but anyone familiar with the Epigraph trilogy most likely knows about her. Maho was a great addition to the cast. She’s very different from Kurisu, but still plays off of Okabe really well and the game makes it very easy to come to like her and care about what happens to her in the story.

Along with Maho comes Amadeus, an advanced AI designed to have a will of its own. An AI that can decide whether or not to answer questions based on arbitrary reasons like “it’s embarassing”, and who can also “forget” information just like a human being. It’s basically an AI based on someone’s memories, in this case Kurisu, that mimics humans perfectly.

While Amadeus is pretty much Kurisu, she’s not there to act as the “assistant” Kurisu was in the original. Instead she’s just another secondary character playing a secondary role, while Maho gets to play a much bigger part in the story. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There’s still plenty of Okabe and Amadeus Kurisu messing around with each other, but don’t expect her to have as much screentime as the original Kurisu did.

Daru and Suzuha were actually some of the characters I liked seeing the most in S;G 0. Suzuha tells Daru about him being her father at the very beginning of the story. And ever since then you can see Daru taking his new father role seriously and caring about Suzuha. It’s the father-daughter interactions that were missing in the original and that let us see a different side of these characters, giving them more development and making the readers care more about them. Suzuha’s mom, Yuki also comes into the story here, and while she doesn’t actually know about the future, Suzuha and Daru’s interactions with her were great to see.

There’s also Kagari and Professor Leskinen. Kagari is a war orphan from the future who was adopted by Mayuri. They explain that she traveled to the past along with Suzuha but got separated from her along the way. She looks an awful lot like Kurisu and hides plenty of mysteries regarding what she was doing all those years she spent alone in the past.

Leskinen is a researcher at Victor Condoria University, who took care of Kurisu and Maho back in America. He’s also the one leading the Amadeus project and the one who decides to introduce Amadeus Kurisu to Okabe at the beginning of the story. He’s a lively man who acts cheerful in front of everyone and takes a liking to Okabe from the first time they meet.

It’s kinda surprising but SERN is mostly out of the picture in this one. They have little to no involvement in the story, and instead we get new evil organizations working in the shadows to fuck everything up. I always thought they’d keep SERN as the villain of all things S;G but it was still nice to see that there were other evil organizations involved in the story. It just shows us once again how fucked up the world of SciAdv really is and how evil those who control everything are.

Art and music in this game were both great. huke’s art in particular has really improved, and it shows. There’s parts of the game where some characters go back to their old 2009 sprites and it looks super awkward next to huke’s 2015 designs. Just compare old 2009 Kurisu to S;G 0’s Amadeus and the difference is huge. Okabe himself also looks a lot better in this game which I like, though it’s kind of a shame that they didn’t keep his design from the Epigraph trilogy. I get that it was to make him recognizable, since he looks nothing like the Okabe people are used to. But that design fit more with the idea that this is an Okabe who gave up on his chuuni ways and is trying to be normal. Not to mention that it would have probably made Hououin Kyouma’s retrun much more satisfying.

As I said, the music was really nice too. A lot of the tracks are great to listen to and are perfect for setting the mood. The opening and ending themes are fantastic as well. One of the ending themes is actually a song related to Kagari and Mayuri, which gave me all sorts of feelings when I heard it after finishing that route and I just loved it. Of course there’s also the true ending’s theme “Gate of Steiner” which is by far the greatest in the whole soundtrack. A really good version of a familiar theme from the series that plays at the most perfect timing, giving great closure to the story and making you feel completely satisfied about having finished it. A great piece of work fitting for a visual novel of this quality.

Basically, Steins;Gate 0 is an amazing ride that far surpassed its predecessor. I’m aware a lot of people had their doubts on whether this would be good or not or whether it was necessary to have this when the original already had a satisfying ending. Well, Zero was the other side of the story that we never really had the opportunity to see, and it ended up being way better than the original, so I think everything turned out better than expected.

Anyone who liked the original needs to experience Zero for themselves. If you liked it, there’s no way you won’t feel great reading this fantastic piece of work.

Now, reading this made me realize that adapting it into an anime is going to be kinda tricky, so I kinda have my doubts about it, but we’ll see how they do it.They did the original justice, so I can only hope they don’t fuck this up. But who am I kidding, of course they will.

Also, Faris looks fucking retarded.