Steins;Gate Elite (visual novel)

"Steins;Gate Elite" (シュタインズ・ゲート エリート, Shutainzu Gēto Erīto) is a visual novel video game in Science Adventure series. It is developed by 5pb., and was released in September 2018 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch. Microsoft Windows (Steam) announced to be released in 2018. It is an updated version of the 2009 game Steins;Gate, and is fully animated; it uses footage from the anime adaptation of the original game, along with newly produced animation by White Fox.

The game was created as a result of how its planner, Chiyomaru Shikura, wanted to evolve the visual novel genre: he was influenced by the fully animated game series Yarudora, but as high development costs and a long production time would have prevented a full-length animated visual novel, it was decided to create a game that reused a lot of already existing animation.

The new opening song is "COSMIC LOOPER", sung by Kanako Ito.

Plot
Steins;Gate Elite is a visual novel, and an updated version of the 2009 game Steins;Gate. Unlike previous games in the Science Adventure series, it will be 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 animation is played together with the script and voiced dialogue from the original game. The player reads the on-screen text and presses a button to advance the animation and text, and thereby progresses through the story. At some points, the player makes choices which cause the story to branch into different directions, leading to different endings.

Development
Steins;Gate Elite is developed by 5pb., and is planned by Chiyomaru Shikura and produced by Tatsuya Matsubara. The new animation is produced by White Fox, the studio that produced the Steins;Gate anime series. Shikura had for a long time thought about how to evolve the visual novel genre, as he felt it had been largely stagnant. He was influenced by the Yarudora series of games, which are fully animated and voice acted, liking how fully animated visual novels would have the advantage of both containing prose describing characters' internal feelings, and showing movements and expressions that are not as easily conveyed through character sprites and prose only. He did however note that to make a full-length visual novel in that style would be difficult due to the 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.

There were still difficulties involved in incorporating the anime footage in Steins;Gate Elite: In a typical visual novel, each character only talks and acts when the player pushes a button, while multiple characters can move and talk at the same time in an anime. This resulted in the anime footage having to be deconstructed, with each character's movements in a scene separated into its own individually playable animations. Because the player can use the in-game cell phone at any time, they also had to add several animations of the player character taking out his cell phone. The user interface was also redesigned to be subtle and blend in with the animation.

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", is planned for release in 2018 in Japan for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch, with no differences between the three platforms. Although it had originally been announced for release on March 15, 2018, it was delayed in February to an unspecified date later in the year, as further improvements to the quality were deemed necessary. 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 in 2018; their release will 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 will include an HD remaster of the 2013 game Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram, while the Nintendo Switch version will include the newly developed Steins;Gate 8-bit, a Steins;Gate game in the style of Famicom adventure games from the 1980s.