United Kingdom-based retailer Rice Digital announced that PQube, a game distribution company, plans to release Steins;Gate 0 in North America and Europe on the Playstation 4 and Playstation Vita systems later this year. A release date for the English release has not been made available as of yet.
The game was released in Japan in December for the Playstation 3, Playstation 4 and Playstation Vita systems, and an anime adaptation of the visual novel has already been green-lit. The original anime aired in 2011 and featured 24 episodes, which were followed by an OVA and a movie as sequels. A rebroadcast of the anime aired last year in Japan where the final episodes took a different route leading up to Steins;Gate 0.
The story of Steins;Gate is described as follows:
The self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintarou Okabe rents out a room in a rickety old building in Akihabara, where he indulges himself in his hobby of inventing prospective “future gadgets” with fellow lab members: Mayuri Shiina, his air-headed childhood friend, and Hashida Itaru, a perverted hacker nicknamed “Daru.” The three pass the time by tinkering with their most promising contraption yet, a machine dubbed the “Phone Microwave,” which performs the strange function of morphing bananas into piles of green gel.
Though miraculous in itself, the phenomenon doesn’t provide anything concrete in Okabe’s search for a scientific breakthrough; that is, until the lab members are spurred into action by a string of mysterious happenings before stumbling upon an unexpected success—the Phone Microwave can send emails to the past, altering the flow of history.
Adapted from the critically acclaimed visual novel by 5pb. and Nitroplus, Steins;Gate takes Okabe through the depths of scientific theory and practicality. Forced across the diverging threads of past and present, Okabe must shoulder the burdens that come with holding the key to the realm of time.
Steins;Gate 0‘s story is described as:
An alternate ending to Steins;Gate that leads with the eccentric mad scientist Okabe, struggling to recover from a failed attempt at rescuing Kurisu. He decides to give up and abandons his lively scientist alter ego, in pursuit to forget the past. When all seems to be normal, he is seemingly pulled back into the past by meeting an acquaintance of Kurisu, who tells him that they have begun testing a device that stores the memory of a human and creates a simulation of them with their characteristics and personalities. Okabe begins testing and finds out that the simulation of Kurisu has brought back anguish and some new unexpected tragedies…
Thanks to MyAnimeList for the story synopsis for each series.
