I’ve successfully gone through all of the routes in Steins;Gate. I’m currently missing one CG and have clocked close to 41 hours into the game. I wasn’t totally concentrated on the game (as I was reading IMs/IRC on my notebook’s screen) so this time is going to be off. One site I checked said you need about 25-30 hours which sounds pretty believable. See below for my review of the Xbox 360’s Steins;Gate.

Gameplay:
As a visual novel, there’s not really much gameplay going on here besides clicking the ‘A’ button constantly to proceed through the story. I didn’t really notice any problems with the game except that the text gets a bit cut off if there are four lines of text. I don’t know if it’s my setup’s problem or not but there you have it. The load times were fine even though I didn’t install the game although I presume there’s really not much to load on a visual novel anyway…

CG:
The CG quality of Steins;Gate fluctuates quite a bit in my opinion. There are some good ones but then there are these other ones where the characters seems to be drawn out of proportion or they don’t really match up with how they look in their sprite form. No question about it, CHAOS;HEAD’s was a lot better. The character designs themselves were fine. I know I said before that they weren’t very moe but I’ve really come to like the cast, especially Kurisu. I mean, who doesn’t like tsunderes anyway?

Music:
There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in the music part I don’t think. After having played several visual novels with Takeshi Abo as the composer, you kind of have a feel for what the tracks are going to be like. What little of FES’s songs I heard were very good and the ending theme, “Another Heaven”, by Kanako Itou is really soothing. I think its placement during the closing credits at the end of chapter 11 was really well done.

Story:
First, I want to say that I wasn’t very impressed with the specific heroine routes. I won’t try to assign a score to them but I felt they were all pretty bland for the most part. I did enjoy Suzuha’s and I think that’s probably because Okabe got kind of sick and twisted and I enjoy these kinds of spooky “insights” from a character’s psyche. Kurisu’s was okay but that may be because I like Kurisu as a character. I was a bit disappointed and surprised to find that her ending was really no different from the standard chapter 10 you go through when you’re going for the true end.

Now, about the scenario as a whole, I’m more than satisfied with it. I don’t know if anyone was able to figure out who Suzuha’s father but I certainly grinned a bit when the truth was revealed. The way it was all pieced together…you know the feeling, you beat yourself over it because you feel as if you could’ve figured it out if you had just gave it some thought.

There are some depressing parts in the game like when the D-mail was sent out in chapter 6 and chapter 8. The conclusion of chapter 9 wasn’t so much about being depressed, rather, it was more about giving you this uneasy feeling as you realize the difficult choice that Okabe is now going to be faced with after all the crap he had to go through in the previous chapters. Moving along in the scenario, I felt that the interactions between Okabe and Kurisu in chapter 10 was done really well, I may reread that chapter again at a later time.

With regards to chapter 11, ah, what a surprise. I didn’t think much of it initially but when the other bits were revealed, it then occurred to me how everything clicked together. I’m not going to say anymore because I don’t want to raise any eyebrows with my vague references that may indirectly become spoilers. Anyway, I’m very happy with the way the true end concluded. It was bitttersweet in a way until the final scene when it brought a smile to my face. :)

The dialogue in the game is done really well. There were many parts in the game when I laughed quite hard. The voice actors and voice actresses really did a great job here I think. I hope to hear more from Asami Imai in the future.

Thank you 5pb. and Nitroplus for your hard work. I eagerly await the next installment of the 科学ノベル series.

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