Steins;Gate is one of the most popular science-fiction anime among fans, and now even more interested anime-goers can see it than ever now that Funimation is offering the entire series for free.
The entire 24 episode series can be found in Japanese with English subtitles for free on Funimation’s YouTube page (which you can find at the link here).
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There are some caveats with this free offering, however, as each episode available is only in 480p resolution and that could potentially be a deal breaker for some fans. It’s hard to argue against the price of absolutely free, however, and this will be a great way for many fans who haven’t seen the series yet to access it.
Funimation has also made several other anime series available on YouTube for free such as heavy hitters like A Certain Magical Index (which you can find here), Black Lagoon (which you can find here), FLCL (which you can find here), and Samurai Champloo (link here) among many other popular series.
This free offering is a good way to break into these popular series, and revisiting Steins;Gate would be an ever better idea than ever now that it’s sequel series, Steins;Gate 0, has finished its run as well. You could even have a packed Steins;Gate marathon if you desired.
Steins;Gate started life as a visual novel game developed by 5pb and Nitroplus for the Xbox 360 in 2009. An anime adaptation was produced by White Fox in 2011, and follows a so-called ‘mad scientist’ named Rintaro Okabe who runs a laboratory in Tokyo. The man’s life turns upside down after he stumbles across the dead body of a well-known scientist named Kurisu Makise. He texts a colleague about the incident only to discover that his message reached his friend before the murder was actually committed. It turns out that Okabe’s phone is part of an experimental time-traveling project that actually worked, giving him the ability to send text messages through time.
Steins;Gate is currently available to stream on Crunchyroll and Funimation, and they describe the series as such:
“Steins; Gate follows an eclectic group of individuals who have the ability to send text messages to the past. However throughout their experimentation process, an organization named SERN who has been doing their own research on time travel tracks them down. Now it’s a careful game of cat and mouse to not get caught and moreover, try to survive”
