marrow #26 | posted 05 may 2025
the steins;gate anime is Formative Media for my bestie so i knew the stakes for this playthrough (and subsequent post) would be higher than anything i've faced so far. would i still love him if i thought it was ass? would his sense of self handle it if it didn't hold up? worse: what if i my reaction to this soul-baring by proxy was one of complete indifference, creating a rift in our friendship as we suddenly are made to realize some fundamental qualia incompatibility? shivering thusly, i purchased steins;gate (2009) and used polyversal to apply the committee of zero patch. some 23 hours (across ten days) later and here i am.
so let us begin. steins;gate (2009) is the story of rintaro okabe, aka okarin, aka Hououin Kyouma, an 18 year old chuunibyou college student spending his summer break as a mad scientist in a "lab" above a crt shop, with fellow lab members mayuri (his ditzy childhood friend) and itaru (his otaku & computer nerd high school friend).
a fateful day, okabe and mayuri are at a time travel conference when they hear a scream. they find kurisu, a genius researcher, murdered. after fleeing, he emails itaru with his flip phone (we'll see his phone a lot) and things suddenly Go Weird: the previously bustling street is empty, and a satellite has crashed into a nearby building.
the next day, however, kurisu is alive and well, giving a conference about the impossibility of time travel. the email about her death actually arrived the week before. as it turns out, the lab's current invention, the phonewave (name subject to change) can send emails into the past. oh yeah baby. it's the world's first time machine, and it's a microwave with a phone stuck to it. surely no problems will arise from this invention / discovery.
ok i'll just list all the other main characters here because that's kinda what the game does lol. first the gang's friends, faris — mayuri's coworker at the catgirl maid cafe and a fellow chuuni — and luka — daughter of the temple's head priest. suzuha is a new part-time worker at the crt shop. moeka is a quiet and timid editor looking for a legendary retro computer.
pronoun note: i'll be using she/her for luka throughout. if subtext wasn't enough, she gets the quote "i want to be a girl"
. it's just text. she's absolutely a victim of a kind of transmisogyny symmetrical to that of danganronpa. the 2009-2010 gratuitously transmisogynistic brothers. do you not worry, i'll further address how the game fucks up in due time.
i think the first thing i wanna talk about is the physical form of the thing. if one were to map out all the world line [1] changes we'd probably get a more straightforward branching tree. but the game plays very linearly. since you're not the one making these choices, it has a different feeling altogether. vndb calls this a ladder structure. you don't have routes as such: for three of the six endings, you get a single well telegraphed choice that drops you off into a dead end. these are rather strange to me. maybe they're a little too long. the other three endings are better thought of as two, with an additional dead end on the way to the true end route. it looks a little like this:
except this might overstate the difference between the normal and true "routes". or rather, make you think such a difference exists in story terms. the events across both routes are largely the same, except that for the true end a certain character gets a couple extra scenes here and there as her relationship to okabe is further developed. meaning: after playing the normal route, playing for the true end was a matter of loading a chapter four save, then letting the vn skip itself for six chapters, occasionally stopping for choices and the aforementioned extra handful of scenes. and that kinda sucked! i really don't like claiming there's a right / Best way to play a game, but i wish i'd gone straight for the true end and treated the other five as side dishes.
i further believe the existence of five additional endings is in itself a bishoujo game vestigial organ, like a few other traits that didn't really work for me here.
steins;gate has, ostensibly, five heroines [2]. but there's really only ever one romantic interest. look, i'll get this spoiler warning out of the way just so i can talk frankly.
if you really wanna go in 100% blind on who's the final girl then skip ahead now. but honestly who cares. and this way you'll miss the whole romance analysis.
kurisu makise is the "canon" love interest, with mayuri as a lukewarm runner up. this is the updated spoilerful ladder:
ok cool. mayuri is really only a love interest out of obligation. well, all of them, if you ask me — that's half of why i'm talking about vestigiality in the first place. but the case here is that okabe's protectiveness of mayuri works perfectly well as a platonic thing, and is for the most part treated that way too. when mayuri sends an email meant to read as jealousy or romantic interest it feels like the game is half-heartedly going through the motions, and you don't really get anything like that from okabe's perspective. her ending's essence is "well it's been some time and i guess we're dating now". just so nothing...
of course it's fine / expected for the non-true endings to be rather underwhelming. but they don't really add much to the characterization or understanding of this world, nor do they "teach" you how to get the Good and Correct outcome. the true ending requires the triggering of six flags: correctly going through kurisu's email tree [3], starting at chapter 4. but said choices are for the most part unclear. there's no real way to tell whether an answer will get you closer to kurisu — one of them actually kinda sucks! while i like the email system to casually develop the characters even while offscreen and in ways unrelated to the main conflict, i don't think it works well for such a pivotal choice... were the true end flags decoupled from the email system entirely (or if the game were kinetic, as i think it wants to be), the effect would be the same, only it'd save me form checking a flowchart every time she sends something, like i'm asking the group chat how to reply to my crush [4].
the second vestigial organ here is all the ecchi (including the boobiful designs). there actually isn't that much of it — which only makes it more jarring when okabe's like "shiiit i'm worried there's assassins after us or something so let me open the bathroom door— omg mayuri and kurisu are naked XD". it's so juvenile. i mean, yeah it's a pg-13 game. but would steins;gate be better as an eroge? nah i don't think so. i don't even think it should have its lame (and probably period-typical for a shonen) ecchi replaced by good and fun ecchi [5]. hell if you ask me (and even ao3 [6]) it shouldn't have romance at all.
steins;gate does a thing that really annoys me, which is depicting romantic interest mostly through jealousy. this is a bit of a petty critique but i just had to say it. i think it's pretty shitty that one of the true route character development emails is "what was that hug just now? i'm jealous..." yknow.
truth is that while the romance with kurisu is not super bad or anything, i think it's actively hindered by the game's unwillingness to give up its tsundere. yes i am well aware i've been talking about this archetype a lot recently lol.
just as kurisu is called a tsundere by other characters, okabe's called chuuni. it's intentional, and it's good and cute that they're both using simple archetypes as masks to avoid vulnerability, and the story is very much interested in having them learn to be sincere with themselves and others [7]. but we get a lot more proximity to okabe since he's the pov character, and i just cannot overlook the gender of it all. because i think it inevitably reads as "she's brash but she's after all a normal cute girl" yknow?
i feel kurisu's expression of her feelings is undercut by the mandatory tsundere "tch it's not that i like you". not because i expect or want her to be fully honest about her desires all the time, but because it's so formulaic it doesn't read as kurisu. we've seen her get closer to the lab mems, we've seen that despite wanting to appear Cool and Mature she's also 18 and an otaku and @channer. so to have the game push her back into the mask often reads as just lazy shorthand to me.
and i think this could have been avoided if she weren't a romantic interest... like with mayuri, the power of friendship would work just as well, if not better. and yes, i can lesbify any tsundere. i have screenshots to back up my claim. "stop eyeing lukako's entire body from top to bottom like a snake ready to devour her"
? ok. and protag!kurisu would have had crazy toxic yuri with suzuha.
but yeah i really mean it. not that the game Should Have Been about kurisu's lesbian experience with time travel (though hey, why not. pic related). but that the story would have been improved if it weren't also trying to have this vestigial organ of a romance.
again, the whole thing smacks of gender.
speaking of gender. i gotta talk about luka.
so. as part of testing the phonewave (name subject to change) the gang needs to send some d-mails (that's what the emails to the past are called). they're also using kurisu's research as a neuroscientist to upgrade it but don't worry about it right now, also i won't really be doing much of a plot summary here as i did with the fate/stay night analysis.
yeah they get a few lab members to send a few more d-mails that can change the past in measurable ways [8]. since this is a time travel story, of course this meddling with the world line fucks things up, and now they gotta undo all of that. each of the three "side" dead ends is the result of refusing to undo a change, okabe unable to sacrifice that heroine's happiness.
hmm. so what was luka's d-mail?
"i want to be a girl."
from the moment we meet luka, we get okabe talking about how she's so pretty and whatever but nuh-uh don't get fooled by the fact she wears girl clothes (due to familial pressure, lest you think she's a pervert). she is and identifies as a boy [9]. transition is impossible. nonexistent. but with time travel it isn't needed: based off a superstition that eating more vegetables during pregnancy will make the baby a girl, they send a message to luka's mom's pager back before she was born. and it works somehow (don't think too hard about it), and now we are in cis luka world.
she still gets some misgendering from okabe early in this world line since he doesn't know the change actually happened until he fucking gropes her. with an accompanying cg. it makes me sick!! sick!! but uh yeah at least the narration mercifully shifts to she/her !
i'm not here to argue for luka's transness (it's self-evident), but i also must add that despite only okabe really remembering world line changes, she gets really fucking upset when okabe says she is / was a boy! and sure, that's because the story arc here is that she has a crush on okabe and feels like he's rejecting the very possibility of viewing her as a romantic interest. but it's still relevant to mention imo...
and yeah this is the core of luka's chapter / mini-route. okabe repeatedly fumbles the "hey so we need to undo the d-mail" conversation. he eventually manages to explain the whole situation, and luka agrees to the undo if okabe becomes her boyfriend for a few days. he fucks up the dates at first, he spends a fair chunk of time worrying about how he still doesn't view luka as a girl, but eventually they find their chemistry again.
luka actually regains some of her other world line memories, and she's in love with okabe there too. but while okabe has no problems with homosexuals he's definitely and unfortunately heterosexual (he actually says that almost verbatim btw) so no romance is possible in the fixed timeline. canonically they accept this and the d-mail is sent, end of story, we barely see luka again.
but for her ending, okabe chooses her happiness instead. the big fucked up thing i keep beating around the bush about so that i can discuss things without a spoiler tag [10] happens, but together they persevere (emotionally). the credits roll and then we get a fucking nail in the coffin jumpscare: a cg of okabe and luka with a baby in their arms. see, in the end she's a Real Woman because she can bear a child, isn't that nice? isn't that a happy ending? jesus. die a million deaths.
um yeah. luka's arc could be so compelling... it still is if you squint. how can you face your trans friend and say "hey i know you wanted to have this cis life but the butterfly effect / fate means this will indirectly cause this disaster, so we need to undo all that". but since the game cannot engage with or admit to her transness, this conflict cannot happen. even before the necessity of an undo, the story cannot feature luka wondering about whether she wants to rewrite her entire life so far so that she can be cis, what that could mean for her. the true route cannot say that the circumstances of her birth don't mean luka is doomed to life as a man, that living as a trans woman is fucking worth it, that transition is a material possibility.
we can only fucking hope her storyline gets rewritten for the upcoming re:boot, but i doubt it. i doubt the reboot will be any good honestly, but i don't have to think about it.
everyone get more transfeminist now.
i ended up frontloading my qualms and complaints (i am a certified hater, am i not?) but i actually did really like steins;gate as a story! it's got interesting characters — i think they did a great job with okabe as a protagonist, and the rest of the cast is mostly well done too, (trans)misogyny aside. and i also enjoy the mix of predetermination and free will in this approach to time travel, and the different physical means too. it's all rather unique, and it suits the overall non-flashy vibe.
the grounded conflict is very much up my alley too. i find that i don't love grandiose stakes and action scenes, especially in mostly textual media. the threat of future war and dystopia looms, but the main / guiding conflict is very "small" and personal. for a fair bit of the game we aren't really sure if there is a conspiracy or not, and there's room to doubt the claims about the future. we never even see the future (or the past, for that matter). everything we see happens inside this month long period. it's cool.
and it feels kinda lame to say but i think i do like that we have an Unambiguously good all-is-well true end. the game really gets into some melodramatic tearjerker territory at times (get that fuckass sad piano rendition of the main theme away from me), and if it had a crybait ending i might have rolled my eyes far enough back to be hospitalized.
oh and the art is so pretty. the sprites are a beautiful blend of soft and painterly with gritty textures, and the backgrounds are lovely and detailed. some cgs leave a little to be desired though, the contrast between okabe and the girls really emphasizes the anime sexual dimorphism going on. faris looks like a microbe sometimes. oh well. the voice acting is excellent too.
so yeah good game! i feel the anime might be better in terms of pacing just because of the whole sticking to the true route thing. not sure it's one of the best anime of all time material though (maybe if it liked women more), but then again one ought not take such statements too seriously.
[1]: i think i gotta explain this. world lines aren't quite parallel worlds but you can think of them that way. this is the time philosophy here: when an event "changes the past", what's actually happening is that you shift into a world line where that event has always happened. imo this is really the only way the oft-claimed yu-no influence really appears. there's more to time than that, but that's venturing into spoiler territory.
[2]: as okabe really likes to emphasize, luka might be beautiful but "[s]he's a boy [sic]"
. we'll get to the luka problem.
[3]: clarification: you don't make traditional choices in this game. while the story happens, okabe occasionally gets an email from other characters, often with 2-3 reply choices, developing brief parallel conversations.
[4]: in that regard, maybe it's immersive. i've never done this irl though so i'm not sure.
[5]: i already shared my definition / theory of good ecchi in the yu-no post but: the "victim" should be playing along. there has to be a pornotopic levity to the tone, else it just reads as irredeemably sexist, instead of getting my pervert lesbian pass. nods sagely.
[6]: i like doing little ao3 census for media to see what i can glean about The Fandom. steins;gate has under 500 fics, under 400 when excluding crossovers. there's not a bustling shipping scene. shoutout to the two faris/moeka warriors; i don't know what's going on in your heads (i think's got to do with s;g 0) but i respect the grind.
[7]: faris route addresses this theme too, and it's really good at developing her and letting us see beyond her chuuni catgirl persona.
[8]: only okabe really remembers the change and the original world line though, so it's kinda moot. some people are more sensitive to world line shifts than others. don't think too hard about this.
[9]: unfortunately it must be said since some people are addicted to reading transfem-coded characters as transmasc: okabe being trans-affirming towards a transmasc luka holds water only as long as you put on horse blinders and turn off your brain and don't read past her introductory scene.
[10]: mayuri's death, a fixed event in this cluster of world lines that can only be avoided by escaping this alpha attractor field (i'm not explaining all that).