Things you want to hear at Anime Expo are announcements about new anime titles, new anime seasons, new licenses, etc. Unfortunately, Spike Chunsoft delivered the news that Steins;Gate Elite will be delayed in North America and Europe until early 2019. This comes as a disappointment after the announcement came that they planned to launch the game in the West during the 2018 calendar year. The game is still slated to release in Japan on September 20.
The game, for the West, will be released on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. The PlayStation 4 and PC versions of the game will come with the Linear Bounded Phenogram bonus content while the Nintendo Switch version will come with the 8-bit Steins;Gate content. All versions of the game will feature all of their regular scenes replaced with scenes from the anime. In fact, the game will even include scenes that didn’t originally appear in the television anime. All scenes are being provided by White Fox, the studio behind the Steins;Gate anime.
MyAnimeList.net describes Steins;Gate 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.
Of course, if you don’t want to wait until 2019 for the game, I suppose you could always just hook your phone up to your microwave.
