What the bad end is for

People file Steins;Gate under "time travel" and stop there, but the architecture is the real story. The first half refuses to commit to a genre — it wanders through microwave pranks and lab-member hijinks long enough that you stop bracing for a plot. Then the plot arrives, and every previous scene turns out to have been load-bearing.

The route gate is well placed. The bad end that locks the true route behind it is a failure you have to live with for an hour before the game lets you reach back. The secondary heroine routes read as true side-trips, not gated content — they matter because they lose to the true route, not because they unlock it.