Strategic Focus

Strategic Focus, shortened to Stratfor, is an antagonistic group found in Steins;Gate Zero that takes up a role analogous to that of SERN in the original story. A private intelligence agency, nicknamed the "Shadow CIA" by conspiracy theorists, is it well-renowned among them for its crucial and under-documented role in recent world politics, most notably in the Gulf and Iraq wars.

Stratfor's very existence is unknown to the player throughout most of the story ; however, depending on the route taken by the player in the visual novel, they are eventually revealed to either be after Kagari Shiina, as she is a potential receptor of or has already acquired a copy of Makise Kurisu's memories - or after patients of "New Encephalitis" which is actually widespread Reading Steiner. Both operations are shown to be led by Dr. Alexis Leskinen, and both aim to reconstruct a working time travel theory and sell it to governments around the whole world, which eventually results in the Third World War.

Much like SERN is an orthographical modification of the real-world CERN, Strategic Focus is the in-game equivalent of real-life Strategic Forecasting ; hence the short name "Stratfor". In Japanese, the latter is pronounced "Suturatofou", the R being silent, which gives "Focus" and "Forecasting" the same abbreviation and entertains the ambiguity, as the S and C homophony did in the previous game.