I'm coming into this game after playing Steins;Gate Elite, which was one of my all-time favorite games. It very well may be the best visual novel I've ever played, in my opinion. I just wanted to make clear before I give my review that I have never played the original 2009 Steins;Gate game. Steins;Gate 0 came out about 6 years after that game. While I'm almost one hundred percent sureI'm coming into this game after playing Steins;Gate Elite, which was one of my all-time favorite games. It very well may be the best visual novel I've ever played, in my opinion. I just wanted to make clear before I give my review that I have never played the original 2009 Steins;Gate game. Steins;Gate 0 came out about 6 years after that game. While I'm almost one hundred percent sure that, other than localization, the concept writing is obviously what takes up most of the development time for the Chiyomaru games, I will go ahead & criticize the art for this game. I know there are many hardcore S;G fans who religiously appreciate the designs from Huke, even to the point that some fans denounce the considerably well done anime & upgraded version of the first game I already mentioned, Steins;Gate Elite, done by White Fox. Unfortunately for S;G0, there were several times where there wasn't a sprite made at all for scenes, I even got tired of the character backdrops that got used instead of new sprites. While I enjoy the art Huke has done, I think it's horribly inexcusable that SO many sprites were reused from the original game. I'm not necessarily blaming Huke, here. However, it was clear despite never having played the original that many sprites got used from the 6-years-older original, which is incredibly sloppy to me. Normally this wouldn't really bother me... but the sprites that are updated with winter outfits look very different than the original sprites, so the reused ones look extremely bizarre to be included. This is even more apparent with how different the styles are when the setting is in summer again & you're seeing new characters next to the reused summer sprites. There were also many, many lines with the "lip sync" turned on that the mouth did not animate at all while characters were speaking. I'm unsure about if the time allotted for development was the issue, if it was money, or what, but I hate seeing such a high quality written visual novel look so clearly cheaply made. Which brings me to the positive notes I had: this was still a very good story with characters I love. The voice acting is excellent & the sound design, as expected, is incredible. The music is very well composed & makes for a great tone setting. I was surprised about the Switch port not having any changes made to the several mistakes in the script, but for how many lines there are, there really aren't that many discrepancies (other than with the RINE text messages, sometimes those didn't make sense at all). Also the auto scroll feature is in dire need of adjustment, even at max speed the non-voiced sections move about four times slower than the voiced dialogue. I don't know how the original S;G handled its multiple endings, but I do wish the flags for the choices diverging was much more clear, but it's very easy to just look up how to achieve all the endings without getting spoiled. I know it sounds like I was very down on this game, but I did enjoy my time with it. Hopefully the upcoming Steins;Gate 0 Elite will be on par with Steins;Gate Elite and remedy my issues with the art in particular.… Expand
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