Steins;Gate Elite

Steins;Gate Elite is a science fiction and interactive movie game, an updated version of the 2009 game Steins;Gate. Unlike previous games in the Science Adventure series, it is fully animated, using all the footage from the Steins;Gate anime series along with newly produced animation for story routes not adapted in the anime; The player reads the on-screen text and presses a button to advance the animation and text, and thereby progresses through the story. At certain points, the player makes choices which cause the story to branch, leading to different endings. ==Production==

Development Steins;Gate Elite was developed by 5pb., and was planned by Chiyomaru Shikura and produced by Tatsuya Matsubara. He did however note that making a full-length visual novel in that style would be difficult due to production costs and how long the development would take. Realizing that a project like it would have to reuse old animation to be feasible, it was decided to create a game using material from the anime adaptation of Steins;Gate, as it already contained a large portion of the story from the original game. The user interface was also redesigned to be subtle and blend in with the animation. Release performed the game's opening theme, "Cosmic Looper".|alt=A 2012 photograph of Kanako Itō The game was announced at the Chiyo-ST Live 2017 Genesis event in Tokyo in May 2017, and was showcased at Sega's booth at Tokyo Game Show 2017, with a seven-minute demo available for the public to play. The full game, which is branded as a "Full Animation Adventure", with no differences between the three platforms. In March 2018, Spike Chunsoft's newly established American subsidiary announced that they would publish the game in North America and Europe for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Microsoft Windows: they were released on February 19, 2019. The English versions use the script from the English release of the original Steins;Gate, along with Japanese audio. The PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Microsoft Windows versions include an HD remaster of the 2013 game Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram, while the Nintendo Switch version includes the newly developed 8-bit ADV Steins;Gate, a Steins;Gate game in the style of 1980s adventure games for the Famicom console. 8-bit ADV Steins;Gate was developed to be as true to Famicom games of the time as possible, and so the development team made use of older tools to produce it, such as using the 6502CPU to assemble assets and the 2A03 sound chip to compose the sound. ==Reception==

Pre-release Reviewing the game's Tokyo Game Show demo, Famitsu wrote that they thought the game felt fresh despite how they had already played the original game and watched the anime. Because of the added animations, they thought the game gave a greater feeling of urgency than the original Steins;Gate, and described it as feeling like they were moving the animation due to how it waits for the player to press a button before moving. Dengeki PlayStation were initially negative towards the idea of remaking Steins;Gate using material from the anime, but were positively surprised when they played the demo. Post-release The PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita versions of the game were the second, fourth and twentieth best-selling physical video games in Japan during their debut week, selling a combined total of 30,442 copies. The PC version was among the best-selling new releases of the month on Steam. Steins;Gate Elite was well received by critics according to the review aggregator platform Metacritic, Famitsu enjoyed the combination of reading the visual novel script and watching the animation, and liked the newly produced animated sequences. ==Related media==

The game's opening theme, "Cosmic Looper", the insert songs "Technovision", "Sky Clad Observer" and "A.R." as well as the first ending theme "Another Heaven" are performed by Kanako Itō. The second ending theme, , as well as the insert song "Masquerade" are performed by Yui Sakakibara. Both the opening and second ending themes were released on singles on September 19, 2018. The full Steins;Gate Elite Original Soundtrack album was released by Mages on March 18, 2020. Steins;Gate 0 Elite, a follow-up which updates the sequel Steins;Gate 0 in the same manner as Steins;Gate Elite did with Steins;Gate, was announced at the annual Science Adventure Live event in January 2020, and is in development by Mages. ==Notes==