While I’m still not sold entirely on this anime, spending time with Okabe and Kurisu bickering is probably the best way to get me hooked again on this franchise. Where do you stand on the new series of Steins;Gate?
While it has taken some time to warm up, this episode sees far more of the character interactions I enjoyed in the original though the dialogue still seems to be slower paced and the characters all still seem to be genuinely subdued. And I get that part of this is that Okabe isn’t the only character who has been affected by the previous events and the fact that he has become so flat is most definitely impacting on the rest of the crew, it also impacts on the overall enjoyment of watching the anime. But Okabe talking to Kurisu as they walked around Akihabara was definitely fun.
However, this show has not forgotten to progress the plot while it deals with these past demons. There are definitely things in motion and a sense of something coming and coming soon. The question the audience is left with is how does it tie in with the AI and what will Okabe do.
Still, if we learned nothing else from this experience, we probably should take on-board the lesson that surprising the time travel warrior is probably not the best survival strategy.
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Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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I love your skepticism. So far you have mentioned how doubtful you are every time despite generally liking all the episodes. I’m going the other much less reasonable way…
I’m naturally suspicious of spin-offs. So far the only anime spin-off I really enjoyed was A Certain Scientific Railgun. Generally speaking, spin-offs and me don’t get along.
I feel like this series is off to a much quicker start than the original. That’s a good thing, I reckon. My opinion differs from the one friend you’re watching with, but I like that they basically assume the audience already knows and cares about the characters. In doing so, they can get the story moving along more quickly. Like you were saying, it definitely does still feel less enjoyable overall, but I think some of that is by design. Our characters have all totally been messed up by what happened. It’s not something we should just expect them to get over quickly.
This Okabe-Amadeus thing has got me stressing tho.
My friend bailed on watching episode 3 and told me to let him know if it gets better and he might catch up. It’s all well and good to say the characters are a bit messed up and depressed but if by conveying that you are turning your audience away, possibly they needed to consider how to make us all care about this a little bit more. And I’ll admit, one person isn’t the entire audience, but even though I’m still watching it, and I liked episode 3 more, if I wasn’t a huge fan of the original, I wouldn’t have watched beyond episode 1.