Many thanks, OP

What stood out to me is that it's not really "time travel" in the usual sense.

It's closer to a system where:

* each world-line is a fully fixed history * only one is active at a time * changes correspond to switching between consistent states

So instead of modifying causality, it's more like constrained state selection.

That framing avoids paradoxes almost entirely, which is pretty elegant.

It also feels surprisingly similar to how some physical models separate:

* underlying structure (fixed) * observed history (projection-dependent)

Curious if others interpret it this way.

Steins;Gate works really well as a standalone entry (and I didn't even realise it wasn't a standalone thing until a year or two back) but it's part of a loose overarching canon.

Most of the games have various errors but there's a translation group called Committee of Zero who not only retranslate all of the games (sometimes from the ground up) but also do a lot of technical work. They've been doing essentially a reimplementation of the entire engine as well, although I don't know that it'd be accurate to say it's a clean room implementation or anything like that.

For those interested, you can see the various patches here (https://sonome.dareno.me/projects/) and this guide should give you an idea of the ideal playthrough order (https://old.reddit.com/r/steinsgate/comments/13cjnui/kurisus...)

I will mention that the first entry, Chaos;Head NoAH takes a while to get going (like a few hours) and gets quite gruesome towards the end (to the point that I wanted to quit) but once you get past it, the rest is all a lot tamer in comparison.

The whole series is a very long time investment as far as VNs go but I personally got really into the series and spent a few months(!) just getting through the mainline entries which culminated with the most recent entry: Anonymous;Code.

Without going into any details, there's a loose canon across the series that Anonymous;Code finally digs into and makes you look at the entire series from a new angle. It's a bit controversial but I appreciated it.

It's not really that clear what the future of the series is as there's a remake coming up called Steins;??? where it appears to be a remake but there's a bunch of fans hoping that it's more in the vein of Final Fantasy 7 Remake where there's really more going on under the hood.

There are also the anime adaptions but I wouldn't recommend them. I've seen most of them, and I'm really not a snob about this sort of stuff but just due to the medium of VNs (with multiple routes and that), they aren't able to successfully replicate a lot of the twists and turns at all which take time to build up.

It's pretty bizarre to me to have even stuck with a VN let alone played through like 6 over the span of like half a year or more? Honestly, I'm not even sure if SciADV is actually "good" or if it's just one of the first franchises in a long time where I haven't ruined it for myself by reading Wikipedia in advance. I think it's pretty good though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series)