I am currently playing through Steins;Gate 0 (I’d recon I’m 75-80% through?) and to echo what I said in the S;G topic here, I think the first VN had a better story than this one but told remarkably worse. If I go through the story of the original in terms of A-to-B-to-C it seems fine and at points clever, and I do think well enough of its last third or so, but its first half-plus is borderline sabotaged by the pacing/padding to a degree that I don’t believe I could actually recommend it to people. All of the notable characters have personality… let’s say quirks that are somewhat annoying but are meant to become endearing, but the initial 60ish percent of it is so stretched out that they keep hitting on these quirks repeatedly to the degree that it basically turns one against the characters to a degree which is a problem once that back third hits. I think said back third still works in part due to how long you were stuck around all these characters beforehand, but it’d have likely worked better if one hadn’t started to resent them first.
Part of me wonders if the anime adaption (or Elite) manages to fix this, but I ain’t gonna risk that many hours checking on the off chance it does.