Why the hell is the Vita Steins;gate getting a limited edition US release THIS MONTH when the “normal” edition game released physical and digital over 4 months ago?
1 Like
Because Western Vita owners are a disturbed and desperate breed
I mean, they bought Vitas, after all
1 Like
I ain’t starting an old thread so Hi me from the past.
I just wrote 3000 words about Steins;Gate the end.
2 Likes
I said I was probably gonna wait until I was done with the game before just putting up a single spoiler’d rant in the “games you played” thread just yesterday but the game bothered me today to the point that I had to just save and put it away for a couple days, so it feels like rant time is now. I even came up with a good topic name, “Steins;Gate Irri;tate”, but then I remembered we actually had topic for the game already.
Late game (I hope) spoilers, I didn’t read the rest of the thread, etc.
Skipping all the previous stupidity and issues for now, our gang has finally finished transforming their time machine (that can only send short emails to the past) into a time leap machine (that can send your memories to you in that past via cell phone) and were holding a party to celebrate. Eventually a bomb threat freezes Akihabara and out of nowhere armed terrorists hired by SERN kick down the door to your lab/apartment and threaten you all with death if you don’t come with them/hand over the time machine. Things happen, your childhood friend gets shot in the head and eventually you manage to under a hail of bullets quickly send your thoughts back in time 3 hours.
Upon said thoughts arriving in the past 3 hours earlier, despite all the time lines getting messed up nonsense you have seen up until this point and the knowledge that you have a time leap machine that does something exactly like sending your memories back in time 3 hours… you decide it was just a dream (despite you not recently sleeping) and do absolutely nothing different, resulting in the exact same thing happening again.
Like I said before, the game is written like the characters are all absolute idiots.
Anyways, you leap back again once more under an imminent threat of death, again just 3 hours into the past. You realize that it is not a dream this time but decide that telling the other people present that any of this is happening or that their lives may be in imminent danger would simply take too much time, so you just shout at them to leave for no good reason. You then run around like mad trying to find your childhood friend, have no clue where she is and end up waiting around at your place for her to show up.
I neglected to mention earlier that the bomb threat was with the trains, and that the leader of the terrorists told you she had people stationed all around town. I assume you can tell where this is going already. Despite going through this scenario twice previously in just the past half day you grab your friend and run to the train station, which is of course shut down and of course is swimming with SERN agents. Long story short you try to run, childhood friend gets killed again, you get away and with no time pressure get to leap back again.
…You once again leap back just 3 hours, and I swear that I almost screamed at my tv. The game goes a bit Groundhog’s Day on you at this point as your childhood friend keeps dying in more and more random ways (my fave being a little child she knows startling her, causing her to fall in front of an oncoming train).
The next time you leap back 5 hours…
…and then 6 hours…
and I just had to turn it off to prevent myself from shouting that time travel isn’t limited to a single day you fucking moron! They mentioned some risk with going back way too far, but the in-game theoretical risk between 6 hours and 6 days, likely even 6 months would be minimal.
Also at this point he has yet to tell anyone about any of the threats or deaths or previous future occurrences because I have no clue.
*deep breath
…I assume the reason she keeps dying is because there was a tossed away notion earlier from John Titor (yes, probably that one) about how if you don’t diverge more than 1% from your current worldline most things will still happen the way they do, and if you can go further than 1% you become the messiah maybe. The thing is that another character was killed in the first 30 minutes of the game i.e. 2-3 weeks back in-game, time lines likely got jumbled although amazingly they never really examine this, and she has lived without issue ever since. There is also a hint that you may have saved another character’s father’s life (if not life then major life event) via time traveling email a decade or so in the past, which changed the entire financial make-up of the city while not affecting anything else. I mean that quite literally, the entire city is different but virtually no aspect of any of the characters lives is all that different aside from how you met one of them and where someone works.
That last example you made a deal with someone where they’d look for something for you if you let them send a time traveling email. You are the only character who remembers what happened on the other world lines as had been established several times. You make the deal regardless. The sent email and deal do not exist on the new world line and no one has any recollection of it. The person still is looking for the item in this time line because I don’t know, you could have asked again but that is never seen and…
…I’m just gonna stop now. I’m not even gonna re-read that to see if there are any spelling or grammatical errors, or if I skipped over something. I just needed to vent.
1 Like
I will counter and agree later but will say I mean giving a leaping limit is perfectly reasonable rule in a time travel story.
1 Like
Still spoilers
A leaping limit is more than fair but you kinda have to establish it as some point. I mean they actually did already, you can only leap to when you already had a cell phone due to the in-game science of the thing but even leaving that to the side I think they specifically said earlier that the limiting factor of… I think personality and consciousnesses was good for at least a week at a minimum. I swear all the examples we went through involved a period of a single week. The fact they mentioned it so much kinda made me think that was what they were setting up and still might get to at some point…
Anyways, if you know that there is seemingly dozens of highly trained agents actively looking for and likely willing to kill you in town right now and you keep using your time leaping machine to go back to earlier in the same day several times in a row as opposed to say a couple days earlier when they might not be, much less the two or so weeks before you even started talking to their leader, despite watching your childhood friend repeatedly die violently… I think it is fair to call you a schmuck.
…Also TBH the fact said character has been sooooo annoying throughout and the pacing has been so slow throughout (especially running the same scene twice in the row with little alteration) likely isn’t conducive to me cutting things much slack at this point.
My great hope for the game is that the whole Okabe/Hououin deal is because it turns out that in the future the latter guy exists and time leapt into a younger version of the former, because the big reveal being that the main guy basically has brain damage and that’s why he acts the way he does would be rather satisfying.
It took about 22 hours but I finally stumbled upon an actual choice in the game, so naturally I picked the lesser option and ended up with the main character pondering raping and murdering his friends for a bit (it’s not as bad as it sounds written out) before bumping into an ending, but likely not the ending.
Of course now that I saw how the game handles choice (credit to it, it disguises it a bit in a way that makes some sense) I kinda wonder if there have been periodic choices throughout that I’ve just missed or never noticed.
In better news the main character has suffered a great deal recently and that has broken down his spirit enough that he isn’t nearly as annoying as he once was.
Oh yeah the choice system is bullshit. You got a BAD END and open a guide if want to start aiming for a good ending.
You seem to be getting negative pleasure in all ways from the game what is pushing you to play/read it?
After a certain point of time into something I just have to know how it ends. I am stubborn in that way, which is probably a fault. Of course this was initially combined with no grasp as to how long the game actually is, if I’d have known at the 5 hour mark that there was 20-30 hours left I’d have run to the hills.
Also TBF I think sometimes one has to try something they might not like and commit to giving it a real shot. As ill as this may speak of my tastes I gave the same chance to 999/Virtue’s Last Reward and after some initial issues I did get enough out of both to be worth my time, sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t.
That and I’m likely letting my PS+ sub expire soon with little interest in renewing it so all those somewhat interesting games I got and haven’t played from the service have been put into a bit of a “now or never” scenario. If you see me bitching about Knack in the near future, this is why.
As te steins;gate fan here if you don’t like the characters or the time travel plot it is not going to do a magical 180 of opinion at the end.
I will say the Elite does correct one of the more blatant plotholes in the thing.
this is a good game, it’s good okay, just, it’s good
1 Like
The final challenge in 999 is one of my favorite gaming moments and I won’t hear any arguments against that.
TBF to Steins;Gate I do think the last couple of chapters (back half of 6 and 7) have been notably better for the most part, and while I attribute it mostly to it being less Hououin and more Okabe (if we were to split those two into different characters Hououin might be my least favorite character I’ve come across in 30+ years of gaming), the fact that actual stakes and goals have been put into place more solidly is likely also playing a role. The pacing is still a problem but for perhaps the first time all game it has some momentum, and momentum always helps.
My first post here and the one in the “games you’re playing” topic where basically me boiling over a bit after not letting anything out over the previous 15 or so hours, which probably was not helping things (those first 15 hours have… a lot of issues). I’ve actually been getting along better with the game over the past couple of days, sometimes one just has to yell for a bit. The game itself improving has helped too.
BTW for the record the game did bother to put in a usable time leaping limit shortly after when I posted about it above, it was amazingly arbitrary but putting it in writing helps. As to why they bothered to mention it after the first several leaps which were confusing as hell without said limits in place rather than beforehand… yeah that was likely a mistake on their part.
Also according to the internet I’ve missed out on accessing the best ending ages ago somehow, so I’ll just check a flow chart whenever I have to deal with the phone now to at least try and avoid the outright bad endings.
1 Like
You’ve seen the best bad ending but I think the others are worth seeing if you are in this far. Maybe just don’t aim for them since you are going to get to the penultimate chapter and then have to restart fast forward to see the real ending.
…wait, really? I didn’t look too deeply as I’m trying to avoid spoilers but I figured there was like a good ending, a best ending and a few badish ones. Is the final chapter really locked out because I did some text messages wrong?
I was just gonna youtube the best ending to see how different it was, if it’s a whole chapter I can just go back now. I didn’t grasp the difference between quick saves and actual saves and hence have an extra 20 or so of lying around.
*shakes fist at game
…I saw the Faris ending as well as if left a choice I will always pick the wrong one, hence why I’m now using a flow chart. It was fine (the previous one was better), I do appreciate that even though they are unideal endings it isn’t needlessly grim and rubbing your nose in failure.
So I didn’t get to play much over the past few days but I got around to playing through chapter 8 and checked out the luka bad ending and… I gotta ask something.
Spoilers and such.
At the very start of the chapter you are allowed to run things to the end of the available time period and you see that the bad men who want to capture you and your time machine still show up and Mayuri still dies, so you jump back earlier and go about the work of reversing changes and seeing if the next worldline doesn’t involve her death. All this is fine.
At the end of the chapter you get the option to make the worldline change or not, and seemingly choosing no always leads to a bad ending which I keep choosing because this playthrough ain’t ending ideally regardless so I want to see their digressions (the digressions are mostly okay). In this one you decide that you can’t keep destroying the memories/lives of others to try and fight off this one girl’s death so you just give up. She still dies at the given time because that’s what happens… but from natural causes and not the bad guys who kill her and are trying to kidnap you and your other friends along with stealing the time machine.
The story continues for at least another 5 days past this point and as far as I can tell not only do the bad folks never show up there is no real worry that they will and I can’t for the life of me figure out the how or why of it. The game mentions the butterfly effect and plays really fast and loose with it (the previous bad ending was particularly odd with it) but given that the worldline never changed I for the life of me can’t come up with a reason for them to not show up.
I don’t know if I missed something, if it is a legit plot hole or even just a nitpick, but I can’t play a time travel game and not notice stuff like this. This isn’t a big game/story ruining deal or anything (especially given that it’s not canon) but it does feel kinda sloppy.
Yeah it is basically a plothole or what have you but you encounter plenty of other timelines that end with Mayuri dying for all kinds of reasons.
Not to drive you absolutely insane but like every complaint you’ve had is responded to in Zero (which is GREAT.) There has been a lot of biting my tongue towards direct responses because my answer was you should play this bad game all the way through then you get to experience this great game. That’s a terrible thing to say to anyone. I will say that Zero is great almost immediately.
You are the part where Okabe has to take responsibility for what’s happened and is having continious PTSD and break down from the continued stress.
They maybe don’t deal with it enough in S;G (but do in zero) that Okabe hasn’t actually slept or taken a break in who knows how many weeks.
1 Like
Good news! I got to a real, actual ending. It leaves me with some major questions but there is that whole better/true ending out there.
Bad news! While I stumbled upon the basics of the getting the true ending before, I just looked up the specifics of how to get it and like… fuck you game. I’d explain but I assume it is just me and Rudie at this point and he’s probably nodding along right now so… yeah.
Time to go back to chapter 4, I might time how long it takes to fast forward back to this point.
1 Like
Told you! Honk!
I got the true ending and I can stop now and yay.
I can also now read past the opening post in this thread, also yay.
I’ll write up some actual thoughts later.
They never addressed the direct line from the lab to SERN/the large hadron collider and perhaps of all things that is my biggest pet peeve at the moment.
1 Like