I'm so glad that I finished the first game before playing this, considering Zero spoils most of the true ending of the first game in the first five seconds.
Saying that, I get it. In the true ending of STEINS;Gate, Rintaro gets encouraged by Mayuri, and a message from the future Rintaro who devises a plan to 'trick reality' and force things onto the STEINS;Gate worldline. But that future Rintaro had to have come from a timeline who didn't have any future Rintaro to help him out. He would have been on his own, having to stumble through things after the first and only failed attempt to go back with Suzuha and save Kurisu. SGZ is the story of how that future Rintaro developed from present Rintaro into somebody who would save the past. He just has to go through...a brutal amount of hardship and development to get there.
Like having to prevent the Third World War, yeah.
In a way, I kind of wish the game's setting had taken place a decade later than it did. I think STEINS;Gate was set in July/August 2009, and 0 bounces around the year following. In the first game, it's not too bad, and it takes place just prior to the public activation of the LHC in 2010. However, with the high-tech A.I., uploading memories into a database, downloading memories from data into a brain, and implied brainwashing, it feels more like it would work in 2019 instead of 2009.
I'm not much of a fan of the character art in this game compared to the original. They just look very off. Faris I think had the worst transition, and Daru is the second-worst but shows up more often. The new characters in this game are better off because I don't have past character art to compare to in my head. Rintaro probably also looks good, because there were very few times he actually shows on-screen in the first game, mostly CGs. Now, I see him more often, because there's three character PoVs to flip around, and I get to see him several times from the other two.
Speaking of character PoVs, I'm pleasantly surprised the writing team actually decided to break hard from the original game and have three separate viewpoints. STEINS;Gate was entirely from the point of view of Rintaro (maybe I forgot a segment or two, but I'm very certain that's true), which definitely helps broaden the story. It also means character development for all three of them. Poor Rintaro. He's fallen into a huge funk and just really isn't the same person as he was in the first game. Suzuha isn't even the same Suzuha as the first game either, so hers is an interesting change of pace, along with Mahu.
Anyways. With VNs like this, where there's any actual choice to be made, my first playthrough is always a blind run where I get whatever ending I stumble into. Again, it's interesting that they switched things around from the original. With the original SV, the game story was fairly straightfoward, going through one long section of story, with a few choices that would instantly split off to character-specific (romance) endings that would be done in an hour or less. Zero is a more traditional Visual Novel, with actual multiple choices that gives you a different route each time. Well, by multiple, I mean two. It's pivotal to realise what those choices represent in the context of the endings, I think.
So the first ending I got was Gehenna's Stigma. Now. Jesus. That was extremely brutal. Hardcore brutal. That's just downright depressing. I'm a sucker for the original 999 game and I love the outline for Distrust, the prototype for the Danganronpa series that was far more brutal than what Danganronpa became, so I can jive with endings like this. But damn, I'm sure that probably threw a lot of people off hard.
Also, Suzuha's scene wrestling with Kagari after she got out of the shower. Nice