Steins;Gate 0

Steins;Gate 0 is a science fiction drama that began as a 2015 visual novel by the game company 5pb. A visual novel is a story-based game where you mainly read text and make a few choices. It is a sequel to the famous Steins;Gate, but it takes a different path. The anime version was made by White Fox, the same studio that made the first Steins;Gate anime. It has 23 episodes and aired from April to September 2018.

To understand this story, you should know the idea of world lines. In Steins;Gate, every big change to the past creates a new version of events, called a world line. Near the end of the first series, the hero tries to change one important event and fails. Steins;Gate 0 asks, "What if things stayed that way?" It follows that sadder version of events, which fans call the Beta world line. Because of this, it is best to watch the original Steins;Gate first.

The main character is Rintaro Okabe. In the first series, he was a loud, funny university student who called himself a "mad scientist" and built strange inventions with his friends in the Akihabara area of Tokyo. Here, he has changed. He could not save Kurisu Makise, a brilliant young scientist he cared about, and the loss has broken him. He no longer plays his old role. He tries hard to live quietly as a normal student and forget about time travel.

Things change when he helps at a science event. There he meets Maho Hiyajo, a small but very clever researcher, and her boss, Professor Alexis Leskinen, from a university in America. They present Amadeus, an artificial intelligence (a computer program that can think and talk) built from a real person's memories. One version of Amadeus is based on Kurisu's memories. Okabe is asked to test it, and he can now talk with a digital copy of her. This is a comfort, but it is also painful, because it is not truly her.

Okabe's old friends, like the sweet Mayuri Shiina and the hacker Itaru Hashida, are still around, and so is Suzuha Amane, a girl from the future. The show makes clear that the time travel story is not over. There are people who want the technology for war, and there are hard choices waiting.

Steins;Gate 0 is slower and darker than the first series. It spends a lot of time on grief, trauma and how people heal after losing someone. It also asks big questions: if a machine remembers everything about a person, is it that person? Is it right to use it? For fans of the first show, this series gives a deeper look at Okabe's pain and at a world he chose not to fight. For viewers who like thoughtful, emotional science fiction, it is well worth watching.