In late 2019 and 2022 respectively, Western SciADV fans were finally rewarded with English-language ports of Steins;Gate 0 and Chaos;Child for the Nintendo Switch. These were two integral series sequels—to Steins;Gate and Chaos;Head NoAH respectively—and naturally, their arrival on Switch was more than welcome. It meant that after a long few years of being exclusive to PC and PlayStation, more Science Adventure goodness was now available to more fans—and importantly, they were now more portable than ever before.
…Hold on. 2022? 2019? Has it really been that long?
Uh… Better late than never to cover them, I guess?
It’s kind of funny to look back on these games so late in the Switch’s lifespan, because nowadays, it doesn’t seem like so much of a big deal. So what if you can buy them on Switch? It’s just another platform to play visual novels on, like PC and PlayStation—right?
It wasn’t always that way, though. I’ll never forget the sheer exhilaration I felt some years back when I bought a Switch and played my first visual novel on it: Planetarian, a short sci-fi story by Key of CLANNAD fame. I remember thinking, this was it—this was the ultimate visual novel device. You could play in bed, away from home, really anywhere and anytime. (Okay, maybe not while you’re standing trial.) Back then, you couldn’t do that with a PC or a PlayStation, not easily. There was always some concession, like a laptop being too bulky, the Vita being on the verge of death, or the GPD Win, although a cool device, being a little too niche to drop big bucks on.
There weren’t many visual novels on the Switch when I first bought one, but when I looked at its portable form factor, I strongly felt that visual novel developers would be smart to buy in on the platform and start dumping games on it like their lives were at stake. I’m exaggerating, of course, but many devs evidently saw the same light I did, because today the Switch is the de facto home of visual novels. I mean, just look at MAGES. The last time they didn’t release a visual novel on Switch was 2017, and they even developed modern versions of Famicom Detective Club exclusively for the device under Nintendo’s direction.
But I’m getting off topic. Chaos;Child and Steins;Gate 0 are two fairly important, fairly dramatic sequels in the SciADV series. Right from the start, their stakes are high.
So many years have passed since I first played these games that, to be honest, I don’t quite feel the same spark of excitement I once did whenever I think about them—but back in the day, things were way different. When Steins;Gate 0 and Chaos;Child were first getting localized for PlayStation 4 and Vita in 2016 and 2017, I remember being so pumped for them to come out, I could hardly stand the wait. I would watch Steins;Gate 0’s opening movie on loop every single day, and for Chaos;Child, I’d read and reread the only English-language write-up on the game at the time, building my hype up to impossible levels. Hey, they were the sequels to my two favorite stories of all time—and their premises just sounded so cool.
Time and retrospect have tempered my feelings a bit. I would still argue Chaos;Child and Steins;Gate 0 are great stories, but I’m not quite the biggest fan of some of the trade-offs they make compared to their predecessors; I feel that some of what these follow-ups chose to sacrifice were big parts of why I enjoyed their prequels to begin with.
Chaos;Head NoAH, for example, is very much a denpa thriller—you watch Takumi’s mental state degrade in real time as he’s cornered at every turn by bizarre spectacles of horror, gore, and fantasy. It’s cathartic to see him finally rise above it all, seizing control of his life and triumphing over the hell he’s been through. Chaos;Child does share many of these traits, but it also often takes the opposite approach: whereas the mystery in NoAH takes something of a backseat to focus on Takumi’s thrill ride of terror, Chaos;Child is instead geared toward those who prefer the investigations and puzzling together the pieces of the mystery—it’s better appreciated by those readers who might have wished Ban Yasuji’s perspective played a bigger part in NoAH.
And if you are a bigger fan of mystery than thriller, then Chaos;Child absolutely is for you. While Takumi is reticent and would sooner run away than tackle a crime scene head-on, Takuru is quite the opposite, even willing to throw himself into the path of danger just to get to the bottom of the overarching murder mystery.
Steins;Gate 0, meanwhile, trades the highly focused setting of 2010 Akihabara for a wider net of perspectives, locales, and global stakes. It feels as though it wants to surpass its predecessor by upping the ante and exploring the greater consequences of Okabe’s actions—such as by showing you other characters’ PoVs during the plot. But these expansions can also feel fairly underdeveloped. While Steins;Gate had the entire span of the game to focus on how Okabe overcame personal crises localized to his corner of the world, Steins;Gate 0 struggles to fit in years-long, globe-spanning plot points that are harder to care about because, well, the game hardly has the time to detail them or root them in the cast’s lives.
On the other hand, Steins;Gate 0 is a treat for the soul when it does choose to focus on the characters. It’s fascinating to witness how badly Okabe’s mental state has degraded—he’s been utterly shattered by what happened in the first game, and it comes through in how muted his narration is compared to his over-the-top performances in the original story. His eventual revival, of course, becomes that much more cathartic as a result. You know it has to happen eventually, and when it does… well, you’ll want to see it for yourself.
Mayuri also gets a chance to shine like a star in 0—she finally gets a bit of agency during a crucial turning point in the story, something she rather sorely lacked in the original game. Her arc in this game is beautiful, one of my favorites of the series, and it absolutely cements her as best girl—sorry, Kurisu.
Let me be clear: although I’ve been a little critical, Steins;Gate 0 and Chaos;Child are still really good stories. The character writing, the plotlines, the adventure—they may not be perfect, but they’re still strong in their own right, and they bring fascinating new ideas to the table. Unsurprisingly, retrospect gave the writers a stronger grasp of how to write great moments with Steins;Gate 0’s returning cast or Chaos;Child’s returning mechanics—so while not every scene is consistently great, there are plenty of standout moments in these games that easily surpass the peaks of their predecessors. This is why I can confidently say that if you’re coming off of Chaos;Head NoAH and Steins;Gate and looking for more, picking up Chaos;Child and Steins;Gate 0 is a no-brainer. Despite some of my qualms, I’d still give them three or four stars out of five.
Since you’re here, you’re probably wondering how the Nintendo Switch ports in particular measure up. Well, unfortunately, they have a number of issues.
Let’s start with some positives, though. Although some slowdowns and hitches are present—after activating the Delusion Trigger in Chaos;Child, for example—they’re not deal-breakers in the long run. The visuals in both games also look pretty all right on Switch, although I did notice a bit of blurriness with some sprites in Chaos;Child. Ultimately, you’re trading some fidelity for a different draw: portability. I can totally imagine binging a route of Steins;Gate 0 on a long road trip, or hiding under the covers at night and anxiously pushing through a particularly creepy segment of Chaos;Child.
Curiously, Chaos;Child’s Switch port has a small advantage over other English releases of the game: its in-game map is translated into English. And seeing that Takuru frequently references the map during the game, this is a pretty big win; the map is where he pins all the clues related to the mystery, and he often references specific locations while doing so, offering a visual idea of where murders and suspicious events went down.
And yeah, before the Switch version came out, the map wasn’t translated into English in any official release, so you couldn’t actually read the location names (unless you knew Japanese). I wish Spike Chunsoft and MAGES. would have at least updated their 2019 Steam release to bring the translated map over. Regardless, if you’re playing on Switch, you’re at a slight advantage—no more getting locked out of continuing the game past Hana’s route because you can’t read Japanese. On the other hand, some of Takuru’s map notes (like the one shown above) are in an extremely small font, which can be unreadable in handheld mode. Ironically, this was also a problem in the then-five-year-old Vita version of the game.
It’d be nice if that were all. Unfortunately, the disadvantages keep coming. Weirdly, the English release fails to render the em dash, or the — character, which is used fairly often in English to connect clauses or show that a spoken line is cut off. Every single instance of the em dash in the game is now blank, making it seem as though there’s a big space there instead. This even sometimes happens with ellipses.
Another distracting error: games in this series show the characters’ mouths moving as they speak, which builds immersion; it creates a stronger illusion that a character is speaking in real time. That’s all well and good, but there’s an odd bug in the Switch release of Chaos;Child where the characters’ mouths will stop moving before they’re finished speaking or continue moving even after they’ve finished speaking. This doesn’t build immersion—it breaks it. It creates the same kind of discomfort you might feel watching a video where the audio is desynced from the video.
I suppose you could get used to these bugs in the end, but they stink of a severe lack of quality assurance. Not to mention, the game’s font is thin, ugly, and rather small—it’s not suited to long periods of reading. Many of these problems didn’t come up in previous releases of the game, either, and are new to the Switch release. It’s baffling.
Steins;Gate 0 fares better, but it still has a lot of room for improvement. The font, though better than Chaos;Child’s, still isn’t particularly good—especially compared to, say, the more recent English release of Ever17. It’s clear MAGES. wasn’t yet considering font readability a priority, which is a really strange oversight from a company that develops reading games.
Moreover, Steins;Gate 0 on Switch specifically suffers from a bug where messages on Okabe’s phone get cut off partway, with no other way to read the full text. Once again, this wasn’t a problem in previous releases, and with better quality assurance, I imagine this bug would have been squashed fairly quickly. Instead, Switch players get the short end of the stick; while I haven’t fully completed this version of Steins;Gate 0, I have beaten it on the Vita, and I recall that many of the phone conversations were funny or relevant to the story. It’s a fairly critical issue to have flown under the radar.
These problems altogether hamper what would have otherwise been dream releases of these games, given the sheer convenience of the Switch. If you have a computer or a Steam Deck, I’m not sure I would recommend Steins;Gate 0 or Chaos;Child on Switch, because on PC, fans have already patched out the mediocre fonts, untranslated map, and various other issues—including translation errors. Over the years, MAGES. never did go back and officially update the translation, meaning the more egregious mistakes, like the nigh-nonsensical “Women’s in riding suit,” have been carried over to Switch.
Steins;Gate 0 and Chaos;Child are must-plays for SciADV series fans, though I doubt I have to say as much—their reputations precede them. It’s more a problem of where you decide to play them. The Nintendo Switch versions of the games are highly convenient and frequently go on sale, but they’re weighed down by strange issues that never should have made it to release.
These visual novels may still ultimately be enjoyable on Nintendo’s portable platform—but you have to ask yourself how much of the “ideal experience” you’re willing to sacrifice for handheld convenience. All things considered, I would highly recommend pursuing the PC versions of these games instead, if possible—because fanmade improvement patches have made them the best versions on offer by far.
Verdict: Mixed
Chaos;Child and Steins;Gate 0 are must-play visual novels, offering highly enjoyable—if somewhat flawed—follow-ups to the first two SciADV entries. They’re critical to the overall series narrative, so you won’t want to skip them.
On the other hand, a range of issues like poor fonts, text display problems, and yet-to-be-addressed translation mistakes mean the Switch versions of these games aren’t the best on offer—not if you’re open to playing on PC with fanmade improvement patches.
Chaos;Child and Steins;Gate 0 are available digitally on Nintendo Switch; a double-pack release of both Chaos;Head NoAH and Chaos;Child is also available digitally and physically.
A special thanks to Spike Chunsoft, Inc., the Western publisher, who provided review copies of these games. Please note that this provision has not influenced the opinions expressed herein in any way.
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