I have developed a liking for anime content over the last years, and the latest series I have watched is Steins;Gate. This is a series about a guy who calls himself a mad scientist and his friends. They all work together in a small lab inside a regular apartment and they develop weird stuff in there.
The scifi topic explored in this series is time travel. According to the mad scientist, there is an evil organization that is trying to take control of time-traveling technology so they can end up controlling the world. The series has several references to real-world happenings, for example, the evil organization is called SERN which is almost the same as the real-life organization called CERN in Switzerland.
There are also several mentions of an anonymous time traveler called John Titor, this username existed in real-life and his messages explained how he was an authentic time traveler. Another reference involves some of Titor's messages in real life about a mission of his that consisted of retrieving a computer named IBM 5100 from the past, in the series, a similar computer called IBN 5100 is also mentioned and is of utmost importance.
The method for time traveling in the series is discovered by chance and it will have a crazy snowball effect with all sorts of repercussions. The beginning of the series was slow but it eventually increases its pace and ends up being a very satisfactory watching.
The mad scientist will have to figure out how to save not only some of his friends but also how to save the entire world from an apocalyptic third world war, which will be caused by time-traveling technology in the future. Time-traveling plots are always challenging to write because it is always likely that something unexpected will happen and a clever solution will eventually need to be provided. This is indeed the case in Steins;Gate and the final solution has its merits because it was quite original.
I will probably watch some of the Steins;Gate content produced after the first season, there is another season that I believe explores another reality, and there is also a movie. Personally, I don't remember watching such a good anime series in recent times, the last one I watched that I really enjoyed was Parasyte. Steins;Gate is right up there on par with Parasyte when it comes to high-quality anime entertainment.
If you like scifi and anime, then you should definitely take the time to watch this series. There are a lot of silly scenes but not to the extremes of When They Cry. Comedy is one of the genres, so expect a lot of immature moments involving the mad scientist. In my case, I found him to be a very likable character and sometimes funny as well.
The best
- One of the best anime series I have seen.
- It has several funny scenes.
The worst
- One character doesn't make much sense, except just for trying to make the situations more cozy or cute.
More information: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1910272/ Review: AAA In numbers: 8.5/10