Steins;Gate 0: Part One

The well-regarded 2011 anime series Steins;Gate is a better-than-most adaptation of a video game that has sired assorted spin-offs and OVAs, including this sequel. The original premise—a kind of X Files meets The Big Bang Theory—loses its lighthearted qualities here (except for some inappropriate fan-service boob and lesbian jokes). While fiddling around in a home lab, science graduate Rintaro Okabe and his motley otaku-type hackers and girl hangers-on developed a small but functional DIY time machine that not only changed reality in their Japanese college-district neighborhood but also plunged them into a secret superpower arms-race to control time travel—leading to apocalypse. Here Rintaro, after trying numerous different "world lines" in search of an alternate chain of events that doesn't usher in WWIII, has settled in a reality that is superficially close to the one he left behind. But two characters from the dystopian future are here as refugees, with their powered-down time machine, and other cohorts are different or missing—among them Kurisu, Rintaro's love, who died before his eyes in the calamitous original world line. When a teenage girl genius unveils a revolutionary artificial intelligence called Amadeus, Rintaro is shocked that it seems to have been copied from memories of Kurisu when she was still alive. Does he dare try to change history to retroactively rescue Kurisu? Viewers must be deeply invested in the characterization (and the alt-characterizations) to follow the material, and the slow pacing requires strong attention spans, but this is a popular franchise. Compiling the first 12 episodes from 2018 in a dual-language Blu-ray/DVD Combo set, rated TV-MA, extras include episode commentaries. A strong optional purchase. [Note: Steins;Gate 0: Part Two is also newly available.] (C. Cassady)