English Dub Review: Steins;Gate 0 “Altair of the Hyperbolic Plane -Beltrami Pseudosphere-“

Come back to us, Hououin Kyouma. We need you.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Mayuri has come across the truth of Suzuha’s origin and pleads with her not to go back into the past. Her words don’t stop Suzuha’s courage, however, and the young girl still decides to press on with her plan. Faced with all the troubles around her, Mayuri ends up in tears, confessing how much she loves Okabe and how much she wants Hououin Kyouma to come back to them.

Okabe, meanwhile, freaks out when he learns that Mayuri knows about the time travel and everything Okabe has been through. He rushes back to the lab and finds that Amadeus has sent out a message for them to follow. This message directs Okabe to Mayuri, who’s decided to go with Suzuha to travel through time.  Okabe gives everything he has to stop her, but Mayuri is set on her decision.

As Suzuha is about to set out to the time machine, she receives a video D-Mail from Daru in an alternate timeline that has instructions for her on a mysterious “Project Arclight.” But she has no time to view it since a group of soldiers ambush her and Mayuri on the roof and surround the time machine.

Suzuha tries to counterattack with an ambush of her own with some degree of success, but Mayuri ends up getting shot in the crossfire, the reality of her death being a constant even in this timeline.

Our Take:

This week’s episode of Steins;Gate 0 exhibits a lot of the troubles that the show has had so far and doesn’t really do a whole lot to address them. While it does decent enough at keeping things moving by developing out Daru’s confidence in his daughter and having Mayuri finally confess her feelings for Okabe, but it doesn’t really elevate from a fairly standard episode. As always, its got solid voice acting, a good soundtrack, and well-localized writing, but the story itself just isn’t enough to keep me interested.

You know, Steins;Gate 0 has a bit of a problem with delivering exposition. It’s a common problem with anime but is especially glaring here when characters can’t seem to deliver dialogue without going into detail about what they’re feeling and explaining their character motivations, almost as if they knew the audience was watching them. The golden rule is “Show, don’t tell,” and boy oh boy, does Steins;Gate 0 do a lot of tells. Not that the dialogue is particularly poorly written or insulting, just that its a little much for the tone and pacing of the episode. Instead of capturing my attention and wrapping me up in the story, I’m finding myself getting just a bit bored with how many wholesome conversations there are.

Steins;Gate 0 is trying really hard to do a deliberate procedural drama, ripe with psychological frustrations, but I feel like it’s not really getting there, save for a few good moments. Good stories should be like roller coasters, taking us up and down and around and spinning us every each way so we don’t know what’s coming next, but this feels a lot more like a lazy river ride. It’s not terribly unpleasant, but it doesn’t do a lot to take me up and down; mostly it just drifts along, explaining itself and telling me where we’re going without any room for surprise or intrigue.

There is a saving grace for the episode in the midway developments that throw the mystery of Amadeus back into the mix, as well as the episode’s ending, but it still comes just a little bit too late to keep the episode riveting.

This episode really sums up a lot of the gripes I have with the show. It piggybacks really hard on the successes of the original, without becoming something unique and interesting in its own right. Given the way everyone talks about the events of the original, things here feel a lot more like footnotes to stuff that already happened. Now that might have worked fine in the original visual novel, but anime has different necessities. Too many episodes, not enough story, and not enough direction. I can only watch Okabe and his friends be sad before I start to get bored.