YMMV / Steins;Gate

• Adorkable:
  • Okabe Rintaro. When he's not being a total ass, his overenthusiastic mannerisms can come off as this. Crops up more often as he grows fonder of Kurisu.
  • Kiryu Moeka. She's too socially awkward to talk, but during the third chapter, she sends boatloads of emails that show that she's too scared of the dark to come to knock on the door of the lab and other numerous goofy emails. Which makes quite the contrast when she kills Mayuri despite a previous mail indicating she found her hilarious. During Moeka's arc near the end, a middle ground is found between these two poles in that her awkwardness, while cute, has also made her a weak, dependent, and easily manipulated doormat, explaining the contrasting attitudes.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Players who weren't participating in turn-of-the-millennium Internet culture are often surprised to find that the John Titor posts (at least, the version on the Beta worldline) really did happen. There was someone posting on message boards claiming to be a time traveler in search of an IBM 5100 computer. Further, the 5100 did indeed have a hidden ability to emulate several types of old computer code.
• Awesome Music:
  • Skyclad Observer, which is sung by Itou Kanako, is already awesome as it is for the Xbox/PC version opening, but when it's played when Okabe speaks to his future self in Episode 23, it adds awesomeness to this scene.
  • The game's main theme, Gate of Steiner, perfectly describes the entire mood of the story, being full of galore and creeping dread, but with a roaring determination in Okabe's time travel-related story.
  • A popular AMV for the anime is set to Florence And The Machine's "No Light, No Light." And it is awesome.
  • Let's just be honest here and put the whole frickin soundtrack on this list.
  • The anime opening "Hacking to the Gate" and ending theme is pretty awesome too.
    • A Russian fan went and made a full fandub of the opening song. It. Is. Awesome.
  • And finally, the game's ending theme song for the Golden Ending, Another Heaven, which makes the this ending feels so worth it.
• Base-Breaking Character: Some fans love Mayuri for being the nicest and most outgoing member of Future Gadget, her humorous quotes which are sufficiently hilarious, the fact that she's fated to die many times in the Alpha worldline help progress Okabe's Character Development and the plot and she deduces correctly that Daru is Suzuha's father but some fans dislike her for her childish naive personality all of the time, having no intellectual common sense, her repetitive catchphrase and her countless deaths made fans paint her as the Damsel Scrappy.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: An insanely sleazy one, as Okabe seems to inexplicably completely forget about the entire attempt by Ruka to change her gender, leading to him sexually assaulting her in front of everyone. And then once the scene has passed, without any apparent explanation from him, not a single one of them holds it against him in the slightest.
• Broken Base: Whether or not Luka is transgender, or simply a Dude Looks Like a Lady, is one of the most hotly debated aspects of Steins;Gate. Some cite the fact that Luka uses a D-Mail to create a timeline where they're born female, and his ending has him stay female as evidence that Luka is a transgender woman. Others counter this by pointing out that the reason why Luka wishes to be female is so Okabe can fall in love with him, but some feel that this alone wouldn't be a strong enough motivation to do something like that unless there was also some amount of gender dysphoria involved. Luka is consistently referred to as male, outside of the timeline where he becomes female, but some argue that this is more due to Values Dissonance and that the intent was for Luka to be trans, even if the subject is not handled very well.
• Epileptic Trees: Three words, Committee of 300.
• Friendly Fandoms: With the Puella Magi Madoka Magica fanbase, due to the concept of a time-traveling protagonist also being present in that series to save his/her close friend.
• Gateway Series: The visual novel is cited as one of the best ones for new players to check out, as a popular anime series was based on it and it is one of the few to have an official English version.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When explaining the events of the prologue to Kurisu, she asks Okabe who stabbed her. She then guesses that it was him. Fast forward to Chapter 11, when he goes back in time to try to save her, only to end up accidentally stabbing her himself, and suddenly it is not so funny.
  • In the True Ending, Okabe realizes that everyone has a degree of Reading Steiner, and it's treated as a Heartwarming revelation due to the implication that Kurusu will remember their relationship despite technically not knowing him in the new worldline. His counterpart in Zero is not as fortunate, as he quickly learns how Reading Steiner can be abused for nefarious ends.
  • If you rewatch the series and see all those people sending D-mails, it seems much harsher since you know that they were indirectly responsible for Mayuri's death in the Alpha worldline and Okabe has to reverse them in order to save her.
  • Okabe's rants about the Organization and people being secret agents become much harsher once SERN and the Committee of 300 are introduced and Moeka turns out to be a secret Rounder agent - and their landlord, Mr. Braun turns out to be her boss.
  • A final couple of episodes involving the plot point of Dr. Nakabachi defecting to Russia and bringing sensitive intelligence that could ultimately start World War III. Cue 2013 and Edward Snowden defecting to Russia bringing sensitive intelligence about the NSA...
  • Okabe's Heroic BSoD after the first attempt to save Kurisu failed was bleak enough, but it becomes much darker after Steins;Gate 0 shows he becomes a depressed Empty Shell as a result.
  • In a sense, Luka's ending became that after an optional scene in the next chapter has Nae revealing what happens to Okabe in the Alpha timeline.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Okabe undoing Nae's revenge by using FB's phone to send D-Mail to tell Moeka that the search for IBN 5100 is aborted is not simply a selfish way to avoid certain death. By doing that, he also allows Nae a chance to grow into a good person contributing to the society in the future instead of an insane criminal desiring for vengeance, which she would become in Robotics;Notes
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After the first timeline shift, when Okabe meets Kurisu for the first time and she accuses him of being the one who killed her in the original timeline. She was right.
  • A few weeks after the ending of the anime, CERN published an article about neutrinos traveling faster than light. One of the things they want to do is to send messages to the past. Don't turn your back on CERN.^note Unfortunately (fortunately?), faster-than-light neutrinos have yet to be discovered.
    • Another CERN-related one: Sometime after the release of the anime adaptation, there was a man who got arrested in the real Large Hadron Collider claiming to be a time traveler. Cue John Titor-related/The Choice of Steins;Gate comments.
    • After multiple mishaps,^note On 19 September 2008, during powering tests of the main dipole circuit in Sector 3-4 of the LHC, a fault occurred in the electrical bus connection in the region between a dipole and a quadrupole, resulting in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. closings, and re-openings of the LHC, 2015 marked the first year since 2009^note When the final magnetic component in the LHC was installed and the LHC was fully repaired. that it had begun testing and scheduled activity. More "incidents" have happened since then, and generally weird stuff (including some genuine scientific and technological advancement) just keeps happening. Then again, occurrences like these are commonplace with such facilities.
  • At the start of the VN, Daru snarks that Okabe's alias sounds like an anime character. Soon, it would indeed be.
  • Some materials in the Expanded Universe make heavy use of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a metaphor for Okabe. Mamoru Miyano later voiced Jekyll and Hyde in Fate/Grand Order. May also cross into Actor Allusion.
  • Okabe uses his time-traveling ability to accomplish three things: save his best friend, save his Love Interest, and prevent the world from falling into chaos. Many comparisons to Homura Akemi from Puella Magi Madoka Magica have been made.
  • Possibly also Harsher in Hindsight: Okabe's prodding of Daru's 2D harem girls becomes this in Steins;Gate 0 when Okabe volunteers to converse with a virtual construct of Kurisu.
  • Okarin (especially early on in the story) repeatedly called Kurisu "Zombie", referring to how he first saw her dead only for her to show up alive later on. The season after Steins;Gate 0 aired, we see Mamoru Miyano's character producing a group of zombie idols in Saga, with just as much ham as Okarin to boot.
• Ho Yay: Despite him insisting otherwise, it is very heavily hinted that Luka does have romantic feelings for Okabe, even when he was male. Okabe also sees him as a Stupid Sexy Flanders.
• Jerkass Woobie: Nakabachi may have been a horrific asshole, not only for stealing his own daughter Kurisu's time machine theory to take credit for himself but for attempting to murder her as well. While a major Hate Sink in the game proper, the Drama CD Babel of the Grieved Maze made him a more sympathetic character in the Alpha Worldline who lost two of his close friends, Suzuha Amane who goes under the alias, Suzu Hashida, his university mentor and Yukitaka Akiha, Faris's father. Their deaths were his major motivation to build the time machine in dedication to them but while his daughter's diligent study to gain his approval by saying that time travel is impossible made him more resentful and angry at her, even so, he still genuinely loved his daughter as he prepared a spoon as the birthday gift she chose personally.
• Magnificent Bastard: FB, AKA Yuugo Tennouji/Mister Braun, is the local leader of the Rounders in Akihabara working for SERN. In order to protect his daughter Nae, Yuugo is willing to do whatever SERN asks of him. Becoming Rintaro Okabe's landlord, Yuugo operates as a CRT TV salesman, while also manipulating needy people, including the depressed and suicidal Kiryu Moeka, into becoming his agents, caring for them like family. When Okabe and his friends complete the Time Leap Machine, Yuugo orders Moeka and his other agents to steal it, kill Mayuri Shiina, and capture the others. His other schemes include: remotely setting up a scalping operation to pay off his superiors; ordering Yuki Amane kidnapped when she learns of their plot to bomb the sewers; sending agents to capture Okabe and Moeka when the two betray him in the Gamma worldline; and coming up with a complex delivery route for the IBN 5100 specifically to throw off pursuers. In order to keep Moeka safe from SERN, Yuugo cuts off contact with her, and when confronted he kills himself to spare her and Nae. Also killing Moeka to spare her from SERN in the anime version, he works alongside Okabe against Stratfor and DUPRA in the sequel, cementing himself as equal parts kind and ruthless, being both Okabe's enemy as well as one of his closest allies.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Dr. Pepper: an intellectual drink for the chosen ones! It's to Steins;Gate as Pizza Hut is to Code Geass.
  • From the Japanese version of the anime: "Hey mister- I AM MAD SCIENTIST. IT'S SO COOL! Sonofabitch."
  • From the visual novel: "HEY MASTER, I AM MAD SCIENTIST. SO COOOOOOOOL——SONUVABITCH!"
  • Joking about this title's Cash-Cow Franchise status with jokes about Chiyomaru Shikura (the SciADV series creator and producer) milking this title non-stop while leaving Anonymous;Code in Development Hell and taking a long time to fix Occultic;Nine's Obvious Beta problems are common in the English-speaking fandom.
• Moe: Mayuri. There is no denying her sweet personality.
• Moral Event Horizon: Nakabachi, Kurisu's father, stealing his daughter's paper and then either getting her killed or stabbing Okabe. Unlike Moeka and Braun, there isn't a single point of redemption in his favor. The drama CDs portray him in a slightly better light (though mostly by making his background more sympathetic, rather than undoing any actual course of action).
• Most Wonderful Sound: There's always something about the way both Daru and Suzuha say, "Okie dokie!" no matter the situation, that turns it into this.
• Narm Charm: The True Ending route is awesome, but it does have one unintentionally funny moment with how Kurisu's static character portrait is "animated" to show her finding and picking up the Upa that Mayuri dropped.
• Player Punch: Mayuri dying for the first time. And the second time. And third time... and so on.
• Porting Disaster: The PC port is a minor example of this. The resolution is downscaled (from HD 720p to 576p), buggy, and prone to crashing problems. The English localization fixed the bugs and crashing problems. The 2016 Steam Edition remedied all of the above issues, as it used the Full HD 1080p assets of the PS4 port.
• Rewatch Bonus: Gratuitously so. Only natural for a series about time travel of course. Seemingly innocuous details from earlier on become important later on and the last episode/chapter hinges heavily on what happened in the first episode/prologue.
• Sequel Displacement: It can be easy to forget that it takes place in the same universe as Chaos;Head and Robotics;Notes, especially since neither of them was localized in their original VN releases, and the narrative connections between them are rather loose, to begin with.
• Signature Scene:
  • Okabe finds Kurisu's dead body before he accidentally sends a D-mail.
  • Every time the Divergence meter shows up in Okabe's Reading Steiner with varying values when he either sends or undoes D-mails.
  • Okabe revealing to the audiences that Luka is a 'guy'.
  • Mayuri killed in cold blood by Moeka after revealing herself to be a rounder working for SERN as the story immediately turns Darker and Edgier after that shocking event as Okabe puts his best efforts into protecting Mayuri from the Rounders through time leaping, she still dies horribly in many other ways like turning into a Jellyman or being accidentally shoved in front of a subway train by Nae.
  • Suzuha's tragic letter to Okabe after she time-travels to 1975, losing her memory until twenty-four years later, particularly the infamous moment when she wrote 'I failed' in Japanese so many times within her letter devastating him and everyone, especially the audiences, in grief.
  • Yuugo revealing himself to be working as a Rounder for SERN instructing Moeka under his alias: 'FB' to find the IBN 5100 and report back. This makes it his last time interacting with her before Moeka is killed (by gunshot in the anime, by Nae in the VN) and he commits suicide with his gun after Okabe discovers his secret identity.
  • Kurisu making her Love Confession to Okabe, seconds before he presses the 'enter' button key on the IBN 5100 to erase the first D-mail erasing her out of existence since she's already dead in the Beta Worldline.
  • Okabe causing Kurisu's death by stabbing her accidentally with Nakabachi's knife as he attempts to rescue her from her predestined death, and initially breaking down in grief and failure.
  • Okabe viewing a phone video sent from the future by his Future Self telling him about World War III and instructing him on how to go to the Steins;Gate Worldline by preventing Kurisu's death by pretending she's already dead and destroying her time-travel thesis papers.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: A well-known observation about the anime is how much time is spent early establishing the characters, setting, and mechanics of time travel. It takes twelve episodes, nearly half the total length of the series, for the plot to go from 0 to 100.
• Ugly Cute: Daru to some, despite him being an unrepentant Otaku and portly appearance.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A downplayed version from the developers' attempt to humanize the character more, at the very least. Dr. Nakabachi, Kurisu's father, is hit with this trope despite the developer's attempt to humanize him in the Drama CD Babel of the Grieved Maze, in which his purpose in researching time travel meticulously was to dedicate the research to his deceased best friends, Suzuha and Yukitaka. Despite being depicted as someone who isn't really too far off from Okabe's personality in his youth (using stage names, having bombastic personalities, wearing peculiar outfits), none of the fans are buying the developers' attempts to make him a more sympathetic figure. Not helping the case is that his Jerkass personality far outweighs his decent side (on both worldlines) and since this revelation only takes place in the Alpha worldline, fans consider that his Beta counterpart doesn't have this justification, which makes him very, very hard to sympathize with in the end.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Seeing that the game is set in the year 2010, it had to be this, similar to how Chaos;Head is to the Turn of the Millennium^note 2009, to be exact. There are many examples that support this trope, most prominently the fact that the Phone Trigger system uses Flip phones and E-mails instead of smartphones and Chat applications (which became the norm of mobile phone communications since the mid-2010s). This is why the Phone Trigger system was replaced with the RINE Trigger system^note based on the LINE chat app in the sequel.
• The Woobie: Pretty much the entire main cast at one point or another (except maybe Daru), but ESPECIALLY Okabe.
• Woolseyism:
  • The English adaptations replace references to 2chan memes with ones more familiar to native English speakers.
    Kurisu: Why do you have to be such a Wesley!? *beat* Uhh... I mean, we're getting way off-topic.
    Okabe: ...right, we should get back on track. How is your work progressing, Next-Gen Girl?
  • In the original Japanese, Suzuha speaks in very outdated slang due to her knowledge of the past being severely limited. The English dub replaces this with her speaking in eighties movie quotes, such as the first time she introduces herself to Okabe:
    Dub Suzuha: Hey, you guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuys!
    • In the visual novel, her use of 'Oha!' was replaced with 'Wazzup!' This is very appropriate as both were memes in the year 2000 that became stale after a few months which perfectly highlights how ignorant Suzuha is about modern pop culture.
  • Also notable is the dub's handling of Okabe's tendency to refer to Daru as a "super hacka," which is evidently used by most as a derogatory term to refer to someone who claims they're a tremendously skilled hacker, but in reality, are anything but. Since most of the American audience probably wouldn't understand that without someone explaining it to them, the dub opts to have Okabe refer to Daru as a "hack," which is generally used to refer to someone with no talent in their chosen profession. In either case, Okabe clearly uses it because he just thinks it sounds cooler than "hacker."
  • Okabe's "I am mad scientist" phrase is replaced with a Jive Turkey act.
  • The Audio Commentary reveals that some of the jokes were replaced for English audiences with Shout Outs to Doctor Who. Noted examples are Kurisu stating that one cannot simply bounce around the timelines in a blue police box, Suzuha telling Kurisu and Okabe that "This is where it gets complicated", and possibly even Okabe's shouting "Doctor!" in the first episode, and his final confrontation with Nakabachi, as this is not what was said in the original Japanese.

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