the anime seems messy

[the.smart.engineer.2009]

i "played" the vn first, then watched the anime. maybe i am biased now, but the anime seems all over the place with things suddenly happening out of nowhere.

opinions?

[Perdomai]

The anime is trying fit in stuff from all different routes

[Lightning]

I haven't played the VN but seems like the anime mixed a lot of routes.

[TeoTeo900_]

There is no specific route in the anime, it's just a mix of every route in the game. Of course, the finale is Mily-way crossing but it doesn't go trough a specific route.

[Sirlion]

The anime imho is bad. Great start, falls after episode 12. It's a mishmash of all routes put together desperately trying to fit in, but they did a poor job halfway through and ended up stuck with utter garbage.

[Experiment1]

This is what happens when they try to fit 40 hours of content into an 8 hour span.

[Subtilizer]

original anime worked because side endings were easily EASILY neglectible and the story was basically very linear however with S;G 0 having 2 paths of which the side endings really contribute to the story especially GS you can't do a proper anime adaptation and no matter what it's gonna be bad compared to the source material

[crumby]

I have seen half of the anime (and not yet tried the game). The anime is bad imho, all over the place like you said. (And this embarassing christmas episode.. like 99% of anime produced these days). And the depressed Okabe is a bit boring.

Is the game better ? I am not a fan of VN but the first was good because of originality and story.

[the.smart.engineer.2009]

the game makes a lot more sense.

[Hououin Kyouma]

The anime is not an adaptation. It is the expansion of the VN, with a new route. A new route which leads directly to the true ending. In the VN there was no direct route to the true ending. In the VN, the true ending is only a chapter, which is not the direct continuation of any of the other routes.

In terms of worldline iteration chronology, the events of the anime takes place between VA and MWC. The anime is not really an adapation, it's like the 8th and final route of the VN.

Steins;Gate 0 is about worldline iterations. You can play 7 different routes in the VN. Every route begins with Okabe fails to save Kurisu, and every route ends with Suzuha traveling back from 2036. When a route ends, a new route starts. Iterate the routes over and over again, until you reach the starting point of the anime. Then the anime will take you directly to the true end, MWC.

The whole point of 0 was that there is countless failed worldlines and futures which needed to reach Steins Gate, because you can't get to Steins Gate directly. You need to try dozens, thousands, or a million times to reach it. So there was many Okabe who tried to reach it, but only the last Okabe (anime Okabe) succeeded. But the other Okabes was also needed for the success.

[cluckyinventor]

@Hououin Kyouma
For a non-adaptaion expansion, the anime did a pretty poor job. Some of their choices don't make sense in the context of a pure expansion.

I generally liked the S;G 0 anime when they purely did expansion (e.g. the last half of episode 23 which clarified the rather vague depiction of Milky-Way Crossing in the VN). Had the anime truly been an expansion that showed a 7th competent route (if it is technically a 7th route, it's not a competent one), I think I would have liked it much more.

However, you can hardly call the S;G 0 anime a proper expansion when they felt the need to jam absolutely every little thing in the S;G 0 VN into that route no matter how little sense it made (and how much it ruined the pacing and detracted from explaining important things).

An example of a scene that just doesn't really fit into the S;G 0 anime would be the whole song arc from Recursive mother goose (eps 12 & 13). Immediately after Kagari gets her memory back, she just gets kidnapped again. This arc isn't a part of Okabe's journey on this route; it's just there because it was there in the VN.

Sure, they should have plenty of references to the events of the other routes. An example of this done well would be the message Okabe receives in MWC of the S;G anime. They don't show him sending that message (I mean, he didn't in that route), but they still have a nod to the route where it did happen. In the S;G 0 VN, Mayuri gets a music box with the song that's so important in Recursive Mother Goose. These references show the importance and connections of the events dispersed throughout the routes without having to kill pacing and the sensibility of the story.

It's certainly true that they may have needed to fully explain some events for people who only watched the anime, but there are scenes that should have been cut down to references so that they could focus on expansion or explanation rather than adaptation.

[Fenro]

for me i played the novel first for all of its endings, then i watched last 4 episodes of the anime, imo best way to go at it.

same goes with the first steins gate game, i feel like the anime just cant adapt all the small details that goes into the novel, but it can deliver a stronger "true ending" experience