Steins Gate Visual Novel Free Download

[Agalia Valcin]

SteinsGate is a 2009 science fiction visual novel game developed by 5pb. and Nitroplus. It is the second game in the Science Adventure series, following Chaos;Head. The story follows a group of students as they discover and develop technology that gives them the means to change the past. The gameplay in Steins;Gate includes branching scenarios with courses of interaction.

Steins;Gate was released in Japan for the Xbox 360 in October 2009. The game was ported to Windows in August 2010, PlayStation Portable in June 2011, iOS in August 2011, PlayStation 3 in May 2012, PlayStation Vita in March 2013, and Android in June 2013. JAST USA released the PC version in North America in March 2014, both digitally and as a physical collector's edition, while PQube released the PS3 and Vita versions in North America and Europe in 2015. Additionally, the iOS version was released in English in September 2016. The game is described by the development team as a speculative science ADV.

A follow-up game, Steins;Gate 0, was released in December 2015, for PS3, PlayStation 4 and Vita, and received an anime adaptation in 2018. A remake of the original visual novel titled Steins;Gate Elite which presents fully animated cutscenes from the Steins;Gate anime was released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch and Steam in 2019. Included as a bonus for the Nintendo Switch version, an entirely new game called 8-bit ADV Steins;Gate[a] in the style of Famicom adventure games from the 1980s, was released. A thematic sequel, tentatively titled Steins;???, is in development.

Steins;Gate's gameplay requires little interaction from the player as most of the duration of the game is spent reading the text that appears on the screen, which represents either the dialogue between the various characters or the thoughts of the protagonist. Like many other visual novels, there are specific points in Steins;Gate where the user is given a choice to affect the direction of the game. For these decision points, Steins;Gate presents the user with the "phone trigger" (フォーントリガー, fōn torigā) system. When the player receives a phone call, the player can choose to answer or ignore the call. Incoming text messages have specific words underlined and highlighted in blue, much like a hyperlink on a browser, which the player can select to reply to the text message. Most phone calls or text messages do not require a response, though there are certain points in the game where the player is required to take action. Depending on the player's choices of how to respond to these phone calls and text messages, the plot will progress in a specific direction.[1]

Steins;Gate is set in the summer of 2010, approximately one year after the events that took place in Chaos;Head,[2] in Akihabara. Physical locales of Akihabara like the Radio Kaikan building can be spotted in the game.[3] According to Chiyomaru Shikura, who headed the planning of Steins;Gate, Akihabara was chosen because it is an easy place for acquiring hardware parts, which makes it the ideal place for people interested in inventing and tinkering with things.[4] The notion of time and time traveling are the main themes of the game.[3][5] The concept of cause and effect is featured prominently in the game as the protagonist travels back in time numerous times to perform different actions in an attempt to alter what has happened in the future.[5] Steins;Gate also features hard science fiction elements.[6]

Steins;Gate takes place in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. On July 28, 2010, Okabe Rintaro and his friend Shiina Mayuri head towards the Radio Kaikan building for a conference, where Rintaro finds a girl named Makise Kurisu lying in a pool of blood.[24] As Rintaro sends a text message about the incident to his friend, Hashida "Daru" Itaru, he experiences a strange phenomenon and the people around him disappear, with no one else noticing anything had changed.[25] After later running into Kurisu, who is strangely alive and well, and discovering the message he had sent to Itaru had arrived a week before he sent it,[26][27] Rintaro soon deduces that the 'PhoneWave' he and his friends had been developing is, in fact, a time machine capable of sending text messages to the past.[3][28] He and his friends soon learn that SERN, an organization that has been researching time travel for some time, has actually succeeded in sending humans into the past, although they seem to have all resulted in the test subjects' deaths. Rintaro begins experimenting with "D-Mails" (Dメール, D mēru, short for DeLorean mail), which begin to cause major differences in the timeline. Kurisu also manages to create a device to send a person's memories through the microwave, allowing that person to effectively leap into the past.

However, SERN learns of the time machine and sends a group led by Moeka to retrieve it, killing Mayuri in the process.[29] Using Kurisu's time leap machine, Rintaro travels back in time numerous times to try to save Mayuri, but to no avail. As Rintaro reaches wit's end, he is approached by Amane Suzuha, a girl from a future ruled by SERN due to their possession of a time machine, who tells him that he needs to return to a Beta worldline in which Mayuri won't die. By undoing the effects of the D-Mails that caused shifts in the timeline, Rintaro regains possession of an IBN 5100 PC that they lost earlier, allowing them to crack into SERN's systems and delete the evidence of Rintaro's original D-Mail. However, Rintaro realizes that by doing so, he would have to return to a world line in which Kurisu is dead. After realizing their feelings for each other, Kurisu tells Rintaro to save Mayuri.[30] Reluctantly, Rintaro agrees and deletes the evidence of his D-Mail from SERN's database, returning him to the Beta world line, where Kurisu died as she did at the start of the story, and the rest of the cast, sans Rintaro, do not remember that anything had happened.

A couple days later, an alternate world line variant of Suzuha appears before Rintaro, having arrived in a time machine from the future. She tells Rintaro that the only way to prevent World War III in the future is to prevent Kurisu's death at the hands of her father, Dr. Nakabachi, who stole her time travel theory to publish it under his own name.[31] However, this operation ends in a disaster as Rintaro ends up killing Kurisu himself by mistake.[32] After this failure, Rintaro receives a message from his future self, telling him that the way to save Kurisu without altering the events that led to him developing a time machine is to fool his past self into believing Kurisu had been killed and thus achieving the final divergence value of 1.048596%, which he dubs 'Steins Gate'.[33][34] Returning to the past again, Rintaro puts his own life in danger in order to save Kurisu's life, prevent Nakabachi from successfully escaping with the time travel theory, and fool his past self, setting him on his journey through time. After this, Rintaro returns to the Steins Gate world line, safe from the threat of a third world war. Later, Rintaro and Kurisu manage to reunite by chance (or by fate) in the streets of Akihabara, with Kurisu appearing to possess some lingering memories of their history together.[35]

Steins;Gate is the second collaborative work between 5pb. and Nitroplus after Chaos;Head.[36] The game was created with the concept of "99% science and 1% fantasy" in mind.[37] The planning for Steins;Gate was headed by Chiyomaru Shikura of 5pb.[5] The characters were designed by Ryohei Fuke, also known as 'Huke' (one of the illustrators of the Metal Gear series, and the creator of the Black Rock Shooter franchise) whereas the gadgets were designed by Sh@rp.[5] Naotaka Hayashi of 5pb. wrote the scenario with assistance from Vio Shimokura of Nitroplus. Tatsuya Matsuhara from 5pb. was the producer and Tosō Pehara from Nitroplus was the art director.[5] The music was composed by Takeshi Abo of 5pb. and Toshimichi Isoe of Zizz Studio.[5] Shikura, Hayashi, Matsuhara, Abo, and Isoe had all previously worked on Chaos;Head. The title "Steins;Gate" had no specific meaning, being coined from the German word "Stein" meaning stone, and tying in with famous physicist Albert Einstein.[38] Matsuhara, who came up with the concept of the phone trigger system, stated that he initially wanted to incorporate the player's own mobile phone into the system. However, the idea was abandoned due to concerns that it might clash with Japan's privacy laws. When asked if the phone trigger system would be used in a possible sequel to the game, Hayashi stated that he hoped this would not be the case and recalled saying "who thought of this system!" while writing the contents of the text messages. While Shikura did not directly contribute to the script itself, Hayashi stated that Shikura helped with the overall plot and provided assistance with the second half of the story. In particular, Shikura helped a lot with the time-traveling aspects of the story. Hayashi stated that while he did not want the script to repeat the same text over and over again, it was ultimately unavoidable due to the player having to travel back in time so he tried to emphasize the overall tempo of the plot's development and how the plot unfolded. With regards to the theme of time traveling, Hayashi had felt that it seemed like an overdone topic and expressed concern over it when he first heard the idea from Shikura.[38]

Prior to the game's announcement, a teaser site was featured on 5pb.'s website that simply referred to the game as Project S;G and stating that it was going to be a collaboration between 5pb. and Nitroplus.[39] Nitroplus's website had also hinted at this on its 10th anniversary website.[40] Matsuhara, who was also the producer for Chaos;Head, had previously stated that the game would be centred on Akihabara and that the project with Nitroplus would be the second part in a series around the theme "Science Novels (科学ノベル, Kagaku Noberu)".[41] On June 12, 2009, the countdown expired and the name Steins;Gate was revealed.[36] Kana Hanazawa stated that she was happy to have been selected to be in Steins;Gate as she felt that it was not common to be able to play a part in a serious game. She also thought that the game gives the player more of a thrilling sensation rather than a frightening one and it entices the player to continue reading.[42]

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