Today’s message, is yesterday’s future.
Steins Gate RE:Boot is a visual novel game developed by Mages. Inc and published by Spike Chunsoft.
The story follows Rintaro Okabe and his friends as they accidentally discover a form of time travel with Rintaro’s new invention, the PhoneWave. Rintaro is a university student in Akihabara in Japan who created the tech club called the Future Gadget Laboratory. After hooking up a phone to a microwave (thus the Phonewave) in order to call ahead and start cooking, the friends realise that the machine allows them to send emails several days into the past and change the future.
Rintaro thinks of himself as a mad scientist called Hououin Kyouma, fighting against a shadowy group that he calls The Organisation, but no one takes him seriously no matter how many times he tries to correct their use of his real name. It seems early on in the game that Rintaro is just playing with a fantasy about conspiracy and that his paranoia that other characters he meets are working for the Organisation is just him being overly dramatic, but just because he is paranoid, does that mean no one is following him? The story starts off slow with a fairly lengthy introductory chapter, which has almost no participation for the player. Once the cast expands though, both the story and the character interactions really start to get interesting.
When you begin, Rintaro only has two other characters to talk to, his childhood friend Mayuri who he thinks of as a little sister, and Itaru, a hacker who doesn’t take much notice of Rintaro’s odd manner.
Rintaro and Itaru discover early on that an email Rintaro sends arrives 5 days before he sends it, but neither really grasps that the PhoneWave is responsible at first, After listening to a lecture on time travel by the genius 17 year old Kurisu, Rintaro starts to experiment further….
Through use of the Phone Trigger System, the player can choose whether to answer or ignore Rintaro’s calls and whether to reply to emails. These choices shape the path the story takes to its conclusion, and there are 7 possible endings. 6 of these have been taken from Steins Gate Elite, the first remake to the 2009 original, and updated with new vocals, better visuals and a greatly expanded text that fills out the characters and brings the world to life. The 7th story path is brand new.for this game and takes Rintaro along a completely different route where the PhoneWave is never completed and no messages are sent to the past.
It took me a little while to get into the game at first, being new to Steins Gate, but the longer I played the more engrossed I realised I had become. I would really like to watch the anime since playing this game. The phone trigger system works very well and reminds me of books I used to read as a kid where you would skip to different pages to pick how you wanted the story to progress. I would have liked a little more interaction in the game for the player but once the story really took off I didn’t mind as much. It is a nice touch that you can customise your phone, although the options are limited to the colour of the wallpaper and sounds for your ringtone and messages.
Steins Gate supports several languages for the subtitles, including English, but the audio is only in Japanese. The game features an auto mode where the dialogue will progress on its own, you can adjust the speed to your reading capabilities or leave the auto mode off and tap a button for each new sentence. If you do happen to miss some of the dialogue you can still see it by going to the backlog page in the systems menu. You can also reach the tips page through the systems menu to see an explanation of any words or phrases that appear in orange, these are often cultural references or technical/scientific terms. You don’t really need to read them all as some of these will be known to you or pretty obvious at least, but it still comes in handy very often.
