YMMV / Steins;Gate 0

• Accidental Innuendo: Mayuri's ideas for advertising Okabe's father's fruit and vegetables business include gems such as: "Mr. Matsutake is thick and sturdy! Why not take him home tonight, ma'am?" and "Try my juicy ripe melons!" Okabe then asks her whether Daru's brainwashed her, but she remains completely oblivious.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening theme, "Amadeus".
  • The new vocal version of Gates of Steiner, that plays during the credits for the Golden Ending.
  • The first anime ending theme, "LAST GAME", is this, due to its brooding nuance of the Darker and Edgier nature of the series which befits it so well.
  • The game's title theme and a recurring Leitmotif for awesome moments overall, "Messenger."
• Complete Monster:
  • Dr. Judy Reyes is an immoral agent who will do anything to unlock the secrets of the brain for her own use. As the main antagonist of two of the games' routes, Reyes was an agent of DURPA sent to infiltrate Stratfor to gather the data of their brain experiments and the memory data of Amadeus, even helping Stratfor's unethical experiments. In her mission, Reyes sent her men to raid and threaten numerous key figures, including burning down Kurisu's home and trying to kidnap Maho and Kagari at gunpoint. Whenever her men fail, they commit suicide out of fear of what Reyes and DURPA would do to them. In "Twin Automata", Reyes tried to kidnap Hiyajo Maho and Alexis Leskinen to unlock Amadeus's memory data, and when Leskinen did so Reyes immediately executes him before threatening Maho for the access keys. In "The Promised Rinascimento", Reyes managed to kidnap Kagari and demanded Rintaro Okabe to meet her, otherwise she'll kill her. During the meeting, Reyes reveals that she killed all the scientists working on the Amadeus and reveal her motivation was to unlock the secrets of memory implanting to create a series of deadly soldiers under DURPA's will before demanding Okabe to join her.
  • Alexis Leskinen is a Mad Scientist who will callously damn the world to conduct his experiments to understand Time Travel. In the Beta world line, Leskinen caused the deaths of billions in his avaricious need to beat the Russians in their advancement. When Okabe and his resistance group try to build a time machine of their own, Leskinen attacks them and tortures Okabe into a coma. Sending messages to his past self and brainwashing another time traveler into helping that version of him, Leskinen from the past moves towards stealing a time machine, uncaring that doing so may cause a paradox and destroy the universe. Though stopped, Leskinen of the past repeats the original history and starts World War III anew.
• Contested Sequel: There are numerous fans who didn't like the Zero anime as much as the original, as examplified by their scores on the popular website myanimelist: during Fall 2018, after Zero ended its run, its score was around 8.6 to 8.7, while the original was still around 9.1 to 9.2. Often cited issues of Zero are the storyline and inferior animation.
• Fan Nickname: 0kabe, for the pre-video message Beta worldline Okabe the game centers around.
• Franchise Original Sin: Being the sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed visual novels of all time, it's not surprising that there were many plot elements that were contested, especially in the anime. However, many of these more contentious plot points had their basis in the original:
  • One of the biggest criticisms of the anime adaptation was the non-linear nature of the game making it impossible to construct a coherent narrative in the anime. However, the first visual novel was, at its core, the story of time traveling, and featured a significant amount of non-linearity. Despite this, the story was linear enough that it was possible to adapt to a non-interactive medium without losing much plot-relevant content. In contrast, 0, which has wildly divergent storylines and a Multiple Route Mystery, can't focus on one specific route without removing a lot of relevant information.
  • The anime was notorious for cramming as many named characters as possible into scenes where they contribute little to nothing in order to make sure each got as much screentime as possible to please their fans. However, the original also had characters that contributed little to the main plot, notably Ruka and Faris. The difference with them is that they, despite not being narratively relevant, were still the focal point of their own arcs, received Character Development, and were used to explore Okabe's character as well as their own. This is in stark contrast to 0's Crowded Cast Shots, where many of the characters function as barely more than Living Props. This is especially noticeable with Kagari, who is supposed to be a character with connection to the overall mythos, but whose arc ends up being an extended red herring.
  • The treatment of the villains: Leskinen's reveal as the Big Bad is an Ass Pull in the anime and Reyes's reveal as a villain is even more so, and both promptly become irrelevant after the episode this is revealed in. However, in the original, Mr. Braun's reveal as a bad guy is just as much of an Ass Pull as the above two examples, and SERN remain The Unfought throughout the series. The difference is that the original had an active villain in the form of Moeka Kiryuu who was both relevant for multiple episodes and confronted and defeated by the protagonists. 0 not only does not have that, but has differing villains for the different routes that the anime didn't adapt, making characters' reveals come out of nowhere in the anime.
  • Daru and Yuki's relationship raised accusations of Strangled by the Red String, but it was even worse in the original, where she never appears and the entire justification for their relationship seemed to be because their Kid from the Future exists. However, the lack of information about their relationship actually did work in the original: it was stated that Daru of the future was a significantly different person and fans could fill in the gaps however they pleased. However, when 0 aired and showed that relationship developed, fans were not pleased because Daru hadn't gone through the same Character Development as his future self, Yuki proved herself to be a Satellite Love Interest of the highest degree, and the justification for their relationship is, even if lampshaded, still that their Kid from the Future exists.
• He Really Can Act: Even amidst the plentiful number of famous and experienced voice actors such as Mamoru Miyano and Kana Hanazawa, Tomokazu Seki received a lot of widespread praise due to his seriously angered voice acting as Daru in episode 16, where Daru punched Okabe across his face to get him back to his senses after Okabe accidentally insulting Maho and his efforts to rebuild the Time Leap Machine in order to help Okabe.
  • On the same episode, Kana Hanazawa also marked the anime's most emotional moments due to her utterly heartrending voice acting as Mayuri cried on Okabe due to him continuously sidelined her from being capable of helping Okabe by any means possible and her saddened Love Confession for Okabe in episode 17, gaining her yet another praise amidst her equally acclaimed voice acting as Shirase Kobuchizawa in A Place Further than the Universe on the Winter 2018 season and Red Blood Cell in Cells at Work! on the Summer 2018 season, among many others.
• Love to Hate: Leskinen is a cunning and ruthless Mad Scientist who has no qualms performing experiments on human guinea pigs so he can utilize brainwashing especially on Kagari who was one of them for his own selfish ambitions to model every worldline with the time machine for himself regardless if he's gonna turn planet earth into an immersive shit-hole with World War III in the future but his friendly impression on everyone especially Okabe and his weird and unusual obsession with Shaman Girls makes us love the despicable bastard more.
• Memetic Mutation: Leskinen is a walking fountain of them.
  • Dr. Leskinen wants to know where those JAPANESES SHAMAN GIRLS are at.
  • LINTAHLO ^ExplanationHis way of pronouncing Rintaro.
  • Legal lolis! Much to Maho's dismay, of course.
• Padding: Some scenes get replayed in route splits, such as the one that happens whether you choose to answer Amadeus' phone call at the cosplay shop. Despite them being identical, you aren't able to skip ones you've already seen without turning on the "skip all" function in the options.
• Special Effects Failure: For some reason poor Okabe's face tends to have a real number done on it in many of the CGs, marring otherwise dramatic moments.
  • The anime adaptation suffers this mostly in the rooftop fight scene in episode 18, where said scene borders into narm territory due to Off-Model animation scenes and conspicuous technical decisions made in said episode.
• The Woobie: Okabe, BIG TIME, even more so than he was already in the original series.
• Tough Act to Follow: Many fans considered the anime is this when compared to the original, despite that the anime adaptation of 0 earned a lot of praise for a more active involvement of the other characters than Okabe and a hefty of tearjerking moments that contends up to the ones in the original anime (especially in episode 8, 16 and 17), the anime's technical decisions and fidelities doesn't quite live up to the original anime's reputation which hampers the experience for the fans, and the more non-linear storyline nature of 0 makes it harder for the animators to make a thoroughly made linear story from start to finish, to say the least.