Hello everyone, in this lesson we are gonna be talking about Steins Gate! An anime that has to do with time traveling, and I also will explain a little bit about other anime things.
So first of all, Steins Gate is an anime that is a seinen, meaning that is targeted to a young male audience like in their 20s and 30s, and so the stories tend to be a little more complicated or deep or emotional in some aspects. Also, Steins Gate is a mystery, psychological thriller, and science fiction type of story. So what is our story about?
We have Rintaro Okabe, a young man who is an independent scientist or mad scientist as he refers to himself and together with him he creates a little time machine to send text messages to the past. So this is really just a tiny bit of our story, in more deep level actually, our story starts with the murder of another scientist who is a young woman Makise Kurisu and Okabe fonding her body, so he leaves the building and sends a message to his friend saying what happened, and so suddenly everyone disappears and appears again except Okabe and it turns out that Kurisu is alive and fine, and a little later Okabe discovers that his text messages were sent to his friend in the past and then discovers that he can send text messages with to the past by using a machine that is basically a microwave. And by using this machine is that start getting involved with time, and the past, the present and they start discovering things about a secret organization that will actually lead to more and more troubles.
So for our protagonist, we have Okabe the self-proclaimed mad scientist who is really quiet the extroverted eccentric type of person, that sometimes can bore his friends or annoy them but he is super kind and cares for his friends and of course, is intelligent.
On the other hand, we have two female important characters which are Makie Kurisu and Mayuri Shiina. Kurisu being another scientist super-intelligent, introverted, and might seem cold-hearted at first. And Mayuri is the sweetest character with a simple calm and happy personality that is friends with Okabe for a very long time and is through these two female characters are gonna add some drama and romance to this story in their own way.
Of course, we have more characters like a Super Hacker who is part of the team, a Spy, a Warrior, and others. I really like the design of the characters. There are no unnecessary characters at all and the art style of the whole anime is really cool with this city atmosphere.
And so this story was first created as a visual novel game by 5pb and Nitroplus so the anime is based on this video game and its production was made by studio White Fox.
So since this story is related to time travel, it gets way more complicated as it progresses but everything is actually explained which is something that I really like. On the other hand, the anime has one season with 24 episodes, a movie, a special Episode 23, and a kind of mid sequel with 23 chapters? So let me explain a little, this anime does not have a second season since the events in the mid sequel is not a continuation of the first season, rather they are the events that happen between Chapters 22 and 23 of Season 1. But still, all of it is canon. Canon means that is official like officially created by the author and accepted by everyone. Also, I mentioned that it has an ova and a movie, these two things are non-canon, meaning they are not official, they were just created by the studio as a possible continuation of the story. An ova which is an original video animation is similar to a special episode but it is designed just for the DVD of blu ray. This anime has special episodes which can be really long, like a linger chapter or just short special videos so for this anime we got really short and comical little videos. Ok, I hope that was not that complicated.
And finally, as in most cases I have to say that I really like the opening theme of the anime is really cool, it does not spoil the series it presents the characters with nice animation and also the concepts of the machines and time travel in a really cool way and format and of course pretty cool j-pop style of music which is "hacking to the gate" interpreted by Kanao Ito.
So… This was everything for today's lesson. I hope you enjoy knowing about a more complicated style of anime with an amazingly good story and of course, I also hope you look forward to our next lesson. Thank you so much for listening and talk to you later. Bye-bye.
