Steins Gate

     

     Steins Gate is an anime about dealing with death, friendship, love, and preventing World War III through the power of time travel. The anime is 24 episodes long and was released in the summer of 2011, so its a pretty recent anime. Also, its made by Funimation so you know its going to be a great anime. The story revolves around Rintarō Okabe, a self-proclaimed mad scientist and eccentric, who has these delusional ideas that the government is out to get him. He often refers to himself under an alias known as Kyōma Hōōin, which is basically his mad scientist name and name he uses to introduce himself to other people within the anime. Okabe is the founder of the 'Future Gadget Laboratory', where he spends all of his free time working with his other lab members, Itaru "Daru" Hashida and Mayuri Shiina. Other lab members are added later but at first it just starts off as just these three working together on inventions and just hanging out at the lab. Okabe always talks about the 'Organization' to his phone, and often bursts out with maniacal laughter. He always wore a lab coat except for one episode where he went out on a date. In addition, he always gave off the attitude of an arrogant personality. Once he begins time traveling, he realizes he's the only one who can remember the past time lines, which he calls 'Reading Steiner' ability. He's the most interesting character in the whole show, and is really a cool guy, despite being on the arrogant side. Deep down, everything about him is a lie, and near the end he realizes it but still decides to go through time traveling.
     First of all, the anime begins with Okabe and Mayuri going off to a scientific presentation on the theory of time machines. After Okabe causes an uproar and disrupts the guy giving the speech, calling all of his theories hogwash, he finds Kurisu Makise dead in a pool of blood upstairs in the building. He quickly runs out, not saying anything about what just happened. And then time starts to distort and he finds himself confused. Then, somehow he meets Kurisu, and she agrees to become a lab member and help him create gadgets and eventually a time machine. Well, they don't create a real time machine for a long time, but they do create a system where they can send emails through the microwave, and the emails are sent into the past, therefore changing things that happen in the future. So they send what they call 'D-mails' to the past and drastic things happen. Ruka Urushibara, a male that wants to turn male sends an email that somehow changes him to be a female in a different timeline. She even goes out on a date with Okabe because she realized she had feeling for him. This is kind of lgbt part of the anime because Rukkako could've been transgender in the first timeline but we don't know for sure. He looked like a girl, has a feminine personality, but is a guy. In another email sent by Faris Nyannyan, her dad who died comes back to life. Faris becomes another lab member and works at a maid cafe. So yeah all this stuff happens in the first part of the anime and it's really exciting seeing how them sending emails can change the future.
     But it really starts to get interesting where at the end of about three weeks and after Okabe has discovered SERN, the 'Organization' that in the future controls the world. Okabe, with the help from Daru and an IBN 5100 computer (super haxor!) hack into SERN and read their files to see that they've already created a time machine and attempts to leap through time have left people killed. Eventually, somehow, with Kurisu's help, they actually build a time machine. Once Okabe reveals that they will show their time machine to the press, somehow Moeka Kiryu raids the lab, and attempts to capture everyone there. But instead of of capturing Mayuri, Moeka kills her instead. Then Okabe uses the time machine to go back in time to try to prevent Mayuri's death, thus beginning dozens and dozens of time leaps, all of which all end with Mayuri's death. The first time he was shocked, but eventually he becomes numb to the pain. He realizes the only way to save Mayuri is to get back to the original beta lines, but in order to do that he has to undo each D-mail that was sent, no easy task saying since some of them he didn't know what the emails said. So there's that. Once that's taken care of Okabe has a love scene with Kurisu, where he tells her that he loves her. But she doesn't say he loves her back until just before he time leaps again, this time to prevent Kurisu from dying in the original beta line.
     Some time later, Suzuha appears before Rintarō, having arrived in a time machine from the future. She tells Okabe 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 present to SERN.  However, this operation ends in a disaster as Rintarō ends up killing Kurisu himself by mistake^. After this failure, Rintarō 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 the 'Steins Gate'^. Returning to the past again, Rintarō 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. Returning to the Steins Gate world line, safe from the threat of SERN, Rintarō and Kurisu manage to reunite by chance (or by fate) in the streets of Akihabara. (Wikipedia) 
     So in the very end of the show, Okabe gets to save the world from SERN and World War III, and also reunite by chance with his love from all those blurred world lines he traveled through. The ending is too good to be true because how would he suddenly meet Kurisu again when she was from America? Anyways, its great to see a refreshing anime that isn't focused on fighting and calling out the name of your attack as your doing it. The relationship Okabe had with Mayuri, a childhood friend of his, was just beautiful. At first, I thought he was in love with Mayuri because he kept time leaping to prevent her death, never accepting it. But in the end it was Kirisu who he truly loved. Maybe he loved both of these girls though. It wouldn't be implausible to say that. They all had a beautiful relationship with each other and their friendships crossed across world lines, as they all remembered their scattered memories across the different worlds. This anime was great, and I'd recommend it to any anime fans who want a break from the fighting and school stuff. Also, Okabe and Kirisu both like Dr.Pepper, just like me.