Steins;Gate 08 - The Ripple Effect


We finally got into the main plot of things. It seems that Ookarin can't travel back in time; he can just distort the reality around him while the date doesn't change. This makes you wonder how he changed the fate of Kurisu in the first episode from death. Many unanswered questions arise as we learn more.

Some non-screencap art instead.

One thing I noticed was the animation for this anime. I noticed from the first episode that was webcast but, as the episodes go by, it feels worse. The colour schemes are all very dull, with reoccurring backgrounds; it is hard to find good screencaps. Almost everything blends together with the dull colour schemes, which isn't a very good way to go.

The realization that you have been trolled.

It is an interesting school of thought that is being touched with our messiah, Ookarin. The concept that, even if you built a time machine, it would be extremely hard to test it works. If your memories are altered as history changes, you would never have performed such an experiment and you would think that your machine can't time travel. You would need to maintain your memories to prove that time travel could be accomplished. Still, it would make sense why Ookarin would be considered a messiah, if he could really perceive time changing around him.

No problem~ It's a simple way to check.

I guess the second main point to touch on is the trap finally turning into a girl. There is a subtle difference of Mayuri changing the suffix from -kun to -chan. Also, there's the difference in response of her looking cute in something, when he didn't want to be considered cute before. So, eating more vegetables really does affect the child turning into a girl? I really hope that they've got a better reason than that. D: We can clearly see the ripple effect here. A small change like eating more fruit will probably have a huge effect on history when dating so many years in the past. All their changes have always been only a week in the past, where it doesn't get a chance to ripple outwards too greatly. I am very interested to see just how big of a ripple this change has created.


Each episode solidifies more and more that the part-timer is probably John Titor. She knows way too much about him and rather than asking what he said, she was curious of what he thought of him. It kind of implies that she already knew what was said and wanted more insight from him. I guess the real question at this point is just what is Kurisu's role in all of this? Is she really a spy as Ookarin deduced from the beginning?


Overall, it was not a bad episode. We got another two time jumps. I love to see the effect of small changes on history and how well it weaves into the story. I guess I am a sucker for stories about time travel, mainly to see if it is flawed logic. I really wonder how things will weave together; at this point, we are still being introduced to things for the purpose of setting up. We still don't have a main antagonist or goal for our protagonist. I just wonder how this will all pan out; they have plenty of time, with 24-ish episodes.

~Pearz