Vivy: Time Travel vs. Robots with Feelings

[@natsuno420]

You da man

[@baka-raptor]

I am in no position to disagree

[@warcheef]

I guess the most accurate review of this would be "Well it wasn't quite Steins;Gate (which is a minus), but it also wasn't Steins;Gate Zero (which is a huge plus)".

[@baka-raptor]

Agreed that Vivy falls in between those two, but those two are closer than many are willing to admit.

[@warcheef]

​@@baka-raptor I agree. Actually, there is a rather simple reason and a semi-interesting story behind the weird fluctuation in the quality of Steins;Gate Zero. As you know it is based on a visual novel, just as the original was, but unlike Steins;Gate Zero the original has a plot structure that is not necessarily common to most visual novels - it has no real branching plot with vastly different and contradicting endings which contain plot elements absolutely necessary for understanding the overarching narrative of the whole novel. The "routes" in Steins;Gate can barely be called routes - they are very very brief branches from the true route which are more of a "what if the main character gave up/changed his mind about his priority at point x". What this means practically is that the original Steins;Gate visual novel is vastly easier to adapt into a show than most visual novels because all you have to do is present the true route in its entirety without additions or rewrites and you get the complete story with pretty much no omissions. Steins;Gate Zero on the other hand has real branching routes and a true route that absolutely requires you to read the other routes for context, while the events of those routes are in direct contraction. But Steins;Gate Zero goes even further - the actual information, to be more specific, the identity of certain characters is contradictory in different routes as well! While it is possible to explain these really bizarre contradictions with some very dodgy logic, one would have to ask why would anyone even write it like that - and that's where the semi-interesting story comes in. The thing is that the Steins;Gate Zero visual novel is not the source material for its own plot - it's an adaptation of a 3 volume Steins;Gate Zero light novel. But to make it more marketable, by adding more content and making it fit better with the visual novel medium, the plot of the light novels was only adapted into one of the two main branching routes of the visual novel and an additional completely new route with a completely new plot and direction was written for it. I think a lot of the character development, mystery, concepts, and ideas in Steins;Gate Zero was in no way inferior to the original, and I won't go into details but all of that comes from the light novels while the new scenario added for the visual novel is, to put it mildly, very bad, sappy and overdramatic. It contradicts a lot of things from the novels and feels like whoever wrote it wanted to tell a completely different new story but was forced to work within the confines of the light novels to an extent and was not very happy about it. It's basically overdramatized nonsense with nothing smart about it and is responsible for all the plot holes which can be barely explained with extremely convoluted and dodgy reasoning. So to conclude - the Steins;Gate Zero anime had to both rewrite, reorganize, and combine what is structurally a typical visual novel plot unlike the original which was a very straightforward adaptation, and to grapple with a visual novel that has two main routes which are essential but at the same time contradictory on a few levels and have a vast difference in quality plotwise. It had a lot of really interesting ideas and concepts and a lot of potential but after hearing all that info, I'd be surprised if it wasn't a complete mess.

[@LordMoridin]

SPOILERS BELOW I really disliked it because I felt that she barely changed anything in her whole journey. History went most of the same way as before since the Super AI just fixed it during the time skip. In addition, the AI war happening had nothing to do with any of the events she changed. The war happened because the Super AI wanted it to happen, both in the original and new timelines. And the whole thing was resolved by her blowing up the Super AI anyway!! All the robots in the world were mind controlled to go against their own purposes when AI trying to fulfil their own purpose was supposed to be a huge part of their identity!

[@baka-raptor]

These days when something in anime doesn't make sense to me, my first instinct is to assume I simply didn't understand the Japanese. I've read some plausible explanations, but without rewatching I'm unwilling to throw my weight behind any of them.