Review for Steins;Gate Part 1

Introduction

... And so it is written that the geek shall inherit the Earth. Well if it isn’t, it bloody well should be. Since the nineteen sixties, when US television was building its schedule according to demographics, the geek demographic has grown to be the most powerful in the entertainment industry. Originally a pejorative descriptive for someone who was overly interested in a hobby or pastime, synonymous with nerd, it has become clear that it is the very same geek that is shaping what we watch and what we read. The term has transformed as well, becoming all encompassing and inclusive. It’s no longer just a sci-fi thing, although Star Trek and Star Wars geeks still abound. But you can be a Twilight geek as well, a Harry Potter geek, a CSI geek, even a Dallas geek. The point is that if you devote a fraction of your time more than necessary to enjoying something, if you find yourself buying some tie-in merchandise, reading a tie-in novel on the Tube, if you find yourself subscribing to a fan forum online, then you are a geek. Your spending habits will be analysed by studios and entertainment conglomerates to shape what we will enjoy in the future. Your collective whining will save precarious TV shows from cancellation. That’s how much power you have as a geek.

That isn’t a power reflected in entertainment though. Let’s face it, we don’t really want to see our own lives reflected on television and in movies. We don’t geek out about other geeks, or if we do it’s only very rarely in shows like Spaced and The Big Bang Theory. When it comes to blockbuster entertainment, when it comes to serious action and drama, we want to see characters that are bigger than life, who spend their free time in the gym, honing bodies that we can only dream about, we want characters with personality, style, élan. Let’s face it, we would pay to see Die Hard with Bruce Willis, not Die Hard with Comic Book Guy. The same is just as true for anime. Unless it’s a comedy, the heroes are larger than life and worthy of the appellation. But think about those demographics once more. If the geek really will inherit the Earth, if we are the silent, ‘living in our parent’s basement’ majority, then surely by the law of averages, a geek will one day save the world. A geek will be the glass jawed hero of an action adventure, armed with spectacles, slide-rule and asthma inhaler, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Gundam and a first edition Spider-man issue one. Well, wait no more, as in Steins;Gate the fate of the world rests in the hands of geeks, people for whom reality is just an unwelcome distraction from the relentless pursuit of gratification through niche entertainment.

The Future Gadget Laboratory is home to the protagonists of Steins;Gate. Mayuri “Mayushii” Shiina may be the most down to earth member of the lab, a cute, dreamy girl with a liking for Oopa toys and cosplay. She works as a cat-maid in a cosplay cafe in Akihabara. Itaru “Daru” Hashida is the group’s programming expert, or super hacker, a man who appreciates the 2D aspects of feminine allure, aside from a certain someone in that cosplay cafe, and who knows good innuendo when he hears it. They might be your typical otaku with questionable social skills, but their leader takes fandom to extremes. Rintaro “Okarin” Okabe has actually gone beyond fandom to full-fledged delusion. He’s a self-styled mad scientist (calling himself Hououin Kyouma), who wants to take over the world through his inventions and has established the Future Gadget Laboratory to that end. Of course no mad scientist would be complete without an all-powerful foe to justify his insane paranoia. If anything goes wrong in Okarin’s world, he attributes it to the ‘Organisation’, and resorts to reporting his paranoid observations on his (switched off) mobile phone.


Once in a while, paranoia is justified, especially when one of Okarin’s inventions does something unexpected. It seemed like a good idea, controlling a microwave oven with a mobile phone, so you’d have a hot meal waiting for you when you get home. That isn’t what happens when Okarin and Mayushii attend a Time Travel seminar given by Professor Nakabachi. Something weird happens on the roof, while the seminar’s a bust, just rehashed fan theories. But when Okarin is in the middle of causing a scene, a red-haired girl named Makise Kurisu drags him out of the room to ask him some really odd questions. She knows him, but he doesn’t know her. He doesn’t have much of a chance either, as the next time he sees her, she’s just been murdered.

Of course Okarin has to share the news, and he texts Daru, but by the act of pressing that button, he causes the world to change. The next day, it’s as if the Nakabachi seminar never happened. In fact it was cancelled when an honest to God satellite crashed into the building... And Makise Kurisu is still alive! The phone microwave (temporary name) is a time machine! In fact this time Okarin gets into a row with Makise during a lecture about time travel. She’s a bona fide scientist, and becomes interested in his invention, despite his infuriating delusions. Other things have changed as well. Okarin’s books on John Titor, the self proclaimed time traveller have vanished, but John Titor now holds forth on the Internet. From him, Okarin learns that he isn’t the first to experiment with time travel, and that SERN in Europe has been conducting some more chilling experiments, and worse, they want a monopoly on the technology. But SERN haven’t figured out what Okarin has, how to use the time machine to change the past. It becomes a race against time to perfect the time machine, but by doing so, Okarin might just have opened Pandora’s Box. Soon others show up in Akihabara, interested in Okarin’s creation.

The first twelve episodes of Steins;Gate are presented across two Blu-rays from Manga Entertainment.

Disc 1
1. Turning Point
2. Time Travel Paranoia
3. Parallel World Paranoia
4. Interpreter Rendezvous
5. Starmine Rendezvous
6. Butterfly Effect’s Divergence
7. Divergence Singularity
8. Chaos Theory Homeostasis – 1

Disc 2
9. Chaos Theory Homeostasis – 2
10. Chaos Theory Homeostasis – 3
11. Dogma in Event Horizon
12. Dogma in Ergosphere

Picture

Steins;Gate gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at the 1080p resolution. The image is clear and sharp throughout, and the animation comes across without issue. Steins;Gate is a detailed and stylish anime, with memorable character designs and detailed world designs based in the real world. The character animation is smooth, detailed and engaging to watch, while the story has an autumnal, faded, almost sepia palette that is deftly applied. The direction is accomplished, establishing emotion and feel through creative animation style. Steins;Gate is a top quality anime with strong production values. This Blu-ray doesn’t quite do that justice, as the prevalence of digital banding, colour gradients in areas of similar colour is much more than I have come to expect from Blu-ray. While the show’s detail is never in doubt, and the progressive playback is impressive, the banding looks almost as prevalent as that on a DVD, and that is disappointing.

The images used in this review are sourced from the PR and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English, and Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Japanese, with optional subtitles and a signs only track. I gave the English audio a try, and sure enough the surround upmix offers greater space and vibrancy to the effects and music. The dub itself is okay, better than okay actually, cast well and performed with the distinctiveness and quality that you would expect from a show like Steins;Gate. The problem is that there is no way that it could ever match the original audio. There’s no matching the manic vulnerability of Mamoru Miyano as Okarin, Tomokazu Seki delivers unprecedented perverted nerdiness as Daru, and no-one, but no-one other than Kana Hanazawa should be permitted to ‘Tutturu’. The original Japanese cast deliver such distinctive and expressive performances, that even as a dub fan, once you hear them, you’ll never want to hear the show any other way.

The subtitles are timed accurately and free of error. There is also a lot of screen text that needs to be translated, and for this Blu-ray, Funimation opted to use a plain white font, akin to the subtitle font, but scale it up to match the on screen text, orient it to the same angle, and place it next to the Japanese text that it translates. Sometimes this amounts to a whole screen of computer text, and there is a lot to read, so a (shining) finger on the pause button comes in useful. There is one audio dropout on disc 1, 2.11:37 into playback on the Japanese track. The volume drops at that point anyway, till all that is left is a fading ambience, but a complete drop in audio for a fraction of a second is still audible. The English audio is unaffected. I also had the DVD check discs to look at, and the same flaw is audible on those.

A quick observation about those DVDs... As they were released as NTSC in Australia, Manga had to create the PAL masters from scratch for the UK. Manga don’t have the same facility at subtitling their discs as Funimation or Madman, and most of the on screen text translations that you will see on these Blu-rays won’t be on the DVDs, and even when they are, they will just be at the bottom of the screen as usual for subtitles. It’s also worth noting that the DVDs actually use a different subtitle script to the Blu-rays (Daru describes Moeka as ‘woody-inducing’ on the Blu-rays, ‘kinky’ on the DVDs).

Extras

Both discs present their content with animated menu screens. As usual, these Blu-ray discs appear to be identical in content and presentation to the US release, although coded for Region B by Madman Entertainment and most likely shorn of any US Funimation trailers.

Another point to note about Steins;Gate on DVD, With Manga creating the PAL masters themselves for the UK, it’s more than just the subtitles that have been affected. What this boils down to is that most of the extras on this Blu-ray release are Blu-ray exclusives in the UK.

On disc 1, you’ll find an audio commentary that accompanies the first episode, supplied by Trina Nishimura (Makise Kurisu), and Tyson Rinehart (Hashida Itaru). It’s a fairly light and inconsequential commentary that starts off with a lot of ‘awesome’ and the usual mutual backslapping. It takes a few minutes before they get to talking about the show, and don’t adjust your sets. That loud beep isn’t an extended profanity, rather a whopping great spoiler for part 2 that the engineers wisely excised.

On disc 2, there is an audio commentary on episode 12, with Head Writer John Burgmeier joined by Writer and voice of Okarin, J. Michael Tatum. This is an interesting commentary if you want to know more about the process of adaptation, and they talk surprisingly little about what even they recognise as a pivotal episode.

You get the textless opening and the textless closing.

All of the latter are confined to the Blu-ray; the one extra which this disc has in common with the DVDs is the Akihabara map. This little featurette lasts 90 seconds, and scrolls the camera across a map annotated with text, highlighting the key locations in Steins;Gate as they would appear in the real life Akihabara.

Conclusion

I watched this show originally when it was streamed on Anime on Demand, tuning in week after week, delays not withstanding to get the next instalment. It hit all the right notes with me, with each new episode intensifying my geekgasm to the point that when it hit the halfway mark, episode 12, I erupted with a ‘Best. Anime. Evahh!!’, which given its protagonists, and its target audience is wholly appropriate. This is the second time around for me with Steins;Gate, then, and I get to re-evaluate my earlier effusion. It isn’t the best anime ever... that one’s coming out on Blu-ray in two weeks. But Steins;Gate is pretty close. It’s certainly one of the best anime released in years, easily the best sci-fi anime, and also the best thriller as well. Given that I was just as praising about Kids on the Slope a couple of weeks ago, and that I ought to warn you in advance that I’ll be melting over the forthcoming Cowboy Bebop Blu-ray, is indication that we are in for a golden summer of anime. Anime fans could single-handedly kick start the economy this year.

What stops Steins;Gate from being an instant classic is a question of accessibility. It’s not a show for everyone, indeed on paper, it very much looks like one of those anime that is put together by committee to appeal to a target otaku demographic. It has the character stereotypes, the moe girl in Mayushii, the tsundere girl in Makise, the shy girl in Moeka, the peppy girl in Suzuha, and more, while Daru conforms to the ‘leet’ anime fan cipher for the target audience, with only Okarin breaking the mould as the proverbial mad scientist. The show is also replete with pop culture references targeted at the audience demographic, and put together it looks like a male, twenty-something anime fan’s perfect menu. It’s something that nearly every mainstream anime put out by a studio aspires to these days, and sometimes not a lot of thought is given to the show beyond that. It’s something apparent in the recent Aria: The Scarlet Ammo, and more appropriately it was also true of Chaos;Head, released last year by Manga Entertainment.

Chaos;Head had these ingredients, and it was a poor show. Chaos;Head was made by Nitroplus, the same studio that created Steins;Gate, and apparently Steins;Gate is set in the same universe. The thing is that Chaos;Head merely satisfied itself with fulfilling the target demographic parameters. Steins;Gate begins with that, and then transcends it all completely. The characters are so much richer than their archetypes, the story plays with and subverts the genres that it references while the narrative is intricate, well thought out and perfectly planned. You wind up drawn into this world, wrapped up in the characters, and eagerly, yet with an impending and growing sense of dread, watch each subsequent episode. Once you are hooked, you are hooked and Steins;Gate will not let you go.


It’s hooking you where Steins;Gate may falter, as you’ll see the archetypes before you get to know the characters, and the geek chic on display here may not be to all tastes. You have to look beneath the surface. The second thing is that this show does not dish out its story on a plate, neatly organised and concisely info-dumped into your cerebrum. You have to work at Steins;Gate, pay attention to each episode, and piece together the plot yourself. Given that this is a show about time travel, you can bet that isn’t the simplest of endeavours. That isn’t helped by the show throwing you in at the deep end with episode 1. I normally jot down a few notes for each episode when I watch a series for review, just to list the key points. With episode 1 of Steins;Gate, I wound up with a page of A4, filled with notes. It’s a dense, intricate and complex narrative that holds onto its secrets with the tenacity of a bulldog. But it is so worth prying away at that jaw to get to grips with its story. Patience and effort is the key, but it will take Steins;Gate three episodes to hook you. By the time episode 4 begins, you’ll probably be obsessed about the show and have Mayushii’s ‘Tutturu!’ as a ringtone.

Steins;Gate is a sci-fi thriller, although the thriller elements aren’t all that apparent at first. In fact it starts off more as a comedy, despite the unsettling events of the first episode. With the adventures of a group of geeks, puttering about in their Future Gadget Laboratory, it’s hard to take them seriously, especially as they don’t take themselves seriously either. Daru’s pretty much a stock fanboy with ‘leet’ hacking skills, and a slightly perverted nature. Mayushii is like the mascot of the group, although Okarin thinks of her as his hostage. He’s the glue that binds the group together, through sheer force of personality, loud proclamations, and his insistence that he is the Mad Scientist Hououin Kyouma. He’s ‘suffering’ from the delusions that some particularly obsessed young teenagers have, that the world is out to get them, or they harbour secret powers yet to manifest, that they are the hero in their own narrative. Most teens so afflicted when I was in school channelled that in D & D, although I suppose online RPGs would provide a similar outlet today. Okarin has let the delusions go on a little long though.

The story remains unclear as to how much of it is an act, and how much is real. It could just be an affectation, or it could be a sign of mental illness, and given the growing paranoia as the show progresses, Okarin’s delusions and perceptions become central to the narrative. Most importantly in this regard, Steins;Gate has the production values to back its story up. The colour palette is subdued for a reason, camera angles may be warped, perceptions become skewed, and you begin to share in Okarin’s isolation and paranoia.

Of course you’re not really paranoid if they are really out to get you, which is what happens when Okarin actually makes a time machine. He puts a microwave and a mobile phone together and all of a sudden he can send texts and e-mails to the past. He doesn’t realise it at first, but a text he sends in the opening episode has the effect of changing history. That he has a different memory of the previous day to everyone else gets him thinking about time travel, but at first he thinks he’s just created a weird microwave that turns bananas into green gel. Things start to move forward when genuine scientist Makise Kurisu joins the group, and more importantly Daru manages to hack into SERN. Rumours surface of SERN experimenting with time travel, and the show’s second chilling moment arrives when they learn of SERN’s Jellyman experiments. But generally it’s the comic and light-hearted antics of a group of geeks (and one closet geek) working together to create a nifty gadget.


We also meet some other people in Akihabara who know the group, or exhibit an interest in what they are doing. One shy girl named Moeka Kiryu, who prefers to communicate through texting even when she’s face to face with whomever she’s talking to, is looking for the antique computer that Daru uses to hack SERN. Suzuha works part time for Okarin’s landlord in his TV repair shop, and has a strange, naive outlook on everyday life, but takes an instant and irrational dislike to Makise. Faris works in a nearby cosplay cafe, and is a rare 3D object of affection for Daru, and she has surprising influence in Akihabara. Ruka is the son of a local priest, and is just too cute to be a boy.

As the secrets of the home made time machine are revealed, they realise that while they can’t send matter into the past, they can send information, something that SERN never realised in all their experiments. They realise that it is possible to send d-mails (Delorean Mails) to the past, brief messages of just a few characters. With each subsequent message that they send, the world shifts to a new timeline, and their surroundings change. The thing is that it is only the delusional and paranoid Okarin that actually remembers the previous timeline, he’s the only one that realises the world changes, and the more messages they send, the greater the alterations. It only serves to make him more paranoid and isolated. It’s around this time that the light-hearted nature of the show begins to diminish, and an overwhelming feeling of dread grows.

Despite his Mad Scientist persona, Okarin begins to show reluctance about what they are doing, while conversely it is the initially sceptical Makise who continues headlong with the experiments, especially when she figures out a cheat to physically travel in time, a Time Leap. Okarin realises that enough is enough, stops the experiments, and decides to go public with what they have learned, after a celebration of their success.

The first time I saw the final episode on this release, the Future Gadget Laboratory party, I had no idea what was coming. Yet through the episode I had this growing pit of dread in my stomach, merely through the way the story was directed, the undercurrent of paranoia, and the counterpoints in the music. It was so deftly done. This time I knew what was coming and I dreaded every second of this episode. But I was glued to the screen regardless. Steins;Gate is impeccable storytelling, with amazing and engaging characters. In any other year this would be miles ahead as the best anime of the year, but the quality of the anime coming out this summer is exceptional. You probably won’t believe me, but Part 1 of Steins;Gate isn’t a patch on Part 2!