Steins;Gate: ...Thoughts About the Time Travel
During October 2025, I finally experienced Steins;Gate, first the Visual Novel version then the anime adaptation. At the time of writing I just stared playing through the sequel: Steins;Gate 0. I wanted to write a review but I found it more interesting to write about my favorite moment's and thoughts while playing the game.
Steins;Gate is a sci-fi story that follows Okabe Rintarou and his circle of friends as they accidentally develop a Time Machine and get involved into a conspiracy spanning multiple world-lines. The Visual Novel features multiple endings depending on the choices made in during the story. The anime follows the True Ending route, while Steins;Gate 0 is a sequel to the Bad Ending in which Okabe couldn't save his fellow lab member, Makise Kurisu.
My favorite thing about the Steins;Gate story, is how consistent its Time Travel rules are. The world operates on the Worldline Theory in which parallel possible worlds exist on the quantum level which are all heading to the same outcome. It's different from the multi-verse theory in that only one world actually exists, while other worldlines are possible diversions off of it.
In Steins;Gate, Time Travel essentially replaces the current worldline with another potential world that differs only slightly depending on the diversion, but the events of always converge towards the same outcome, trying to reach a state of Homeostasis. Greater the diversion lead to worlds with different outcomes.
There are two kinds of time travel explored in the Visual Novel. (A) Sending messages to the past, which changes the diversion value of the world. Or (B) sending your memories back to your past self's body on the same world-line which doesn't affect the diversion value, thus leaving you at the mercy of the worldline's outcome.
I found the implementation of these systems really fascinating! By going back in time in the same worldline, you'll be able to relive past events, gather information or fix mistakes, but some "fated events" are inevitable, and can't be changed no matter what you do. For example, if someone is fated to die on the Friday 3th, you can prevent every possible cause of death, and they'd still die.
That leads to the other method of time travel, sending messages back in time can make other people choose differently, changing the diversion value and switching worldlines. It's limited by the amount you can send, and you can't control how the received message will be interpreted. One message could change relationships between people, a whole city, or any unexpected outcome. Some things will still stay the same since the worldlines are converging as much as possible to a state of homeostasis.
My favorite case of such a message, is in Faris ending, in which Okabe tries to save both Mayuri and Faris' father. He manages to do that, but in this new worldline, he doesn't have relationships with any of his friends expect Faris. His diversion reading ability couldn't even "read" the diversion value, suggesting it's 10% or more. Okabe's memories were incompatible with this new world. Since none of the lab members met, so there isn't Time Machine to try again.
That's what I have for today, I just started Steins;Gate 0 and the focus, at least in the beginning is on Artificial Intelligence instead of Time Travel, but I'm sure Time Travel will come back into play at some point. I'm enjoying how much Okabe's personality has changed between the games, but I hope he gets his Chunni-self back.
Thanks for Reading!~
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