Steins;Gate #01 — DRINK DR. PEPPER

April 3rd, 2011

 

Yes, my corporate masters.

This was a special ‘broadcast’ on Nico’s live stream (hence the super awesome low res widescreen within 4:3 res caps because that’s how NicoNico rolls… like a cube) that didn’t include the OP or ED. The first real broadcast is April 5th.

Impressions:

This was… talky. And very very white. The whole thing was basically a never ending monologue out of Rintarou Kyouma with barely enough space given most of the time to even take a breath. But the problem is that very little of what he was going on about was interesting in the slightest. About 75% of it was random technobabble and another 15% was his delusions of grandeur. The little bit that was left was lost in the wasteland. This was further hurt by extremely uninspired direction, particularly with the sound. Random shots of backgrounds, buildings, the backs of people’s heads, etc are rampant. I guess the art looks good, but they really needed to do a lot more to make suitably different from an audio tape. There’s barely even any music in the episode at all. It’s literally about 20 minutes of just listening to him rant.

The poor direction hurts the thriller side of it too. There’s a murder, people are randomly disappearing, bananas are being turned green in the microwave, crazy stuff be going down, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the production at all. They could be using the almost monochrome art to good use by highlighting strange things with color, and that’s what I thought they were doing with the bright blood. But then the next vividly colored thing was a llama on TV and after that, the time bananas. I suppose setting the contrast knob way too high does a good decent job of hiding its relatively low production by making everything hard to even see.

All in all, this was very boring. I’m really not sure what it’s trying to be yet. If it wants to be a decent thriller, it needs to do a much better job creating atmosphere. If it wanted to just be some guy ranting for 20 minutes, then they should have given it to Shaft. Yeah, I know, the fact that I don’t like a talky show is a shock, but this really needed to do something… anything… to actually present it in an interesting way. So far, all we have are bright green bananas.

Posted in Anime | 12 Comments »

12 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Anon says:

    That’s what the VN generally was – talky. Plot isn’t very strong overall, and its focus is scattered till the later chapters.

    Seeing as this will be 26 episodes, there will be a lot more talking, and unless you enjoy seeing HOOOUIN KYOUMA and his antics, you likely won’t enjoy the show.

  • Keith 'The Skies of the Rising Half-moon' Kurogane says:

    If you don’t like talky shows Aroduc, I highly suggest you drop it now. Believe me, I asked my friends about the Steins;Gate VN and all they say its filled with techno-babble and whatnot…

    • Aroduc says:

      All VNs by their intrinsic nature are talky. The difference comes in adaptation of that. BakaTest, for example, had an extremely talky first episode, spending almost a third of it just flat out explaining the school, but it kept it interesting visually. At least Shaft has its assorted bag of tricks to try to fool you visually into thinking that something’s happening, but this doesn’t even feel like it’s trying.

      • Sterling01 says:

        BakaTest wasn’t a VN

      • Aroduc says:

        My point was that it was exceedingly talky. If you want VN examples, go with Kanon, Clannad, Utawarerumono, ef, Higurashi, etc. Hell, even Princess Lover would qualify.

  • alex says:

    why do you put Bananas into a Microwave ?
    ChaosHead had at least girls

    • Keith 'The Skies of the Rising Half-moon' Kurogane says:

      The Bananas are part of the plot of Steins;Gate…

  • chad001 says:

    I think I’ll just skip this one, and only watch the badass ending…

    • Keith 'Azure Grimoire' Kurogane says:

      You’ll be left with more questions than answers if you do that…

  • John W. says:

    Reminds you of NHK doesn’t it? The raving Okarin is Sato, and even looks the same, Mayuri the innocent Misaki with more than meets the eye, Daru the otaku Yamazaki.

    Except the conspiracy IS real this time.

  • Forte says:

    The beginning had me confused, and the middle only made it worse, since it didn’t seem to resolve anything. The pacing felt a bit rushed.

    However, I did find it was pretty interesting.

    I want to see more.

  • Todd says:

    I love this show because I’m not smart enough to understand what’s going on.