Anime Like Steins;Gate: 10 Shows About Undoing a Mistake

What would you change if a text message could reach last Tuesday? Steins;Gate lets Okabe Rintaro and his friends answer that like students who have found a new toy: a lottery number, a bet on a sure thing, a small humiliation quietly undone. For its first stretch the show is mostly a hangout comedy in a cramped Akihabara flat above a shop selling old cathode-ray televisions, full of bananas turning to green jelly in a microwave and Okabe announcing himself as a mad scientist to anyone who will listen. You need all of that. The second half runs on how much you have come to like the room.

Steins;Gate is 24 episodes and ends properly. Steins;Gate 0 is a separate 23-episode series from 2018, set in a branch of the story that splits off near the end, so it belongs after the original and never before it. The 2013 film is a coda set a year later. Once you have run out of all three, the shows below are grouped by the part of Steins;Gate you miss most: the loop that punishes whoever uses it, or the lab and its long, odd conversations.

Summer Time Rendering, for a loop with rules to crack

The closest mechanism Summer Time Rendering

• 25 episodes
• adapts the finished manga
• complete

A funeral on a small island, a rumour that the drowned girl was strangled, and a young man who keeps waking up on the day he came home.

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Shinpei Ajiro has been away in Tokyo for two years when he comes back to Hitogashima, a small island off Wakayama, for the funeral of Ushio Kofune, the girl he grew up with. The official story is that she drowned saving a child. At the funeral he hears there were marks on her neck. Before long he has seen someone who should be dead walking around the island, and soon after that he dies himself and wakes up again on the day he arrived, with everything he learned still in his head.

This is the closest match on the page to how Steins;Gate plays once it turns. Shinpei has to treat each repeat as an experiment, test what changes, and hide what he knows from friends who would think he had lost his mind. The rules of the loop arrive a piece at a time and every one of them matters, so you can follow the logic and try to get ahead of the show.

The mismatch is the comedy. There is some, mostly from Shinpei’s old friends, but nothing like the lab’s running jokes, and the back half trades some of its island dread for large set-piece fights. The payoff is closure: 25 episodes adapt a manga that has finished, and the anime reaches the real ending. Content note: repeated violent deaths, including the lead’s own.

ERASED, for the one person you could still save

For the stakes ERASED

• 12 episodes
• complete
• the ending compresses the manga

A failed manga artist is thrown back eighteen years into his eleven-year-old body, weeks before a classmate goes missing.

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Satoru Fujinuma is 29, delivers pizza, and has a condition he calls Revival: now and then he is jolted a few minutes back in time, just before something terrible happens, and has to work out what to stop. Then his mother is killed, and Revival throws him back to the winter of 1988 in a small Hokkaido town, in his own eleven-year-old body, weeks before his classmate Kayo Hinazuki vanishes.

The best episodes are small ones. An adult mind in a child’s body tries to get a lonely girl to walk home with him through the snow, sits next to her in class, and pays close attention to what her mother does to her. It has exactly the thing that makes Steins;Gate hurt: someone who knows what is coming, acting ordinary in front of people who have no idea, with one person’s future resting on whether he gets a conversation right.

Twelve episodes finish it, which makes this the easiest recommendation here. The price is the ending. The last two episodes race through material the manga takes its time over, and the solution feels thinner than the set-up earned. Content note: sustained child abuse on screen and a killer who targets children. The mystery guide has more in this register.

Re:ZERO, for what repeating does to the person

For the cost Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-

• 25-episode first season
• three more seasons, the fourth airing in 2026
• story ongoing

A shut-in in a tracksuit lands in a fantasy kingdom with one ability: when he dies, he wakes up earlier and only he remembers.

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Subaru Natsuki walks out of a convenience store and into a fantasy capital, still holding his shopping bag. He has no magic, no sword skill, and nothing to offer except a loud mouth. Within hours he has been killed, and he wakes up in front of the fruit stall where the day started, the only person who knows it happened.

Steins;Gate lets you watch Okabe fray across many repeats. Re:ZERO makes the fraying its entire subject. Subaru cannot tell anyone about his power, he is often wrong about what needs fixing, and the show lets him be unbearable for long stretches before he earns anything. The second arc, which restarts again and again inside one mansion with the same twin maids, Rem and Ram, greeting a guest they have never met, is the show’s best argument for its method.

It is an isekai, and it carries that genre’s baggage: a cast built around a boy and several girls who like him, and opening episodes that look generic. The commitment is heavy. The first season is 25 episodes, three more seasons follow with a fourth airing in 2026, and the story is far from finished. Content note: graphic, repeated deaths of the lead, including suicide used as a reset.

The Tatami Galaxy, for the lab and the talking

For the first half The Tatami Galaxy

• 11 episodes
• complete

A Kyoto student relives his first two years of university, joining a different club each time, sure the right one would have made him happy.

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The narrator has no name. He is a third-year at a university in Kyoto, he has spent two years achieving nothing, and he blames the club he picked as a fresher. Each episode he picks a different one, a tennis circle, a film society, a softball club, and each episode ends with time folding back to that first spring. His friend Ozu, who looks like a yokai and ruins every version of his life, is always there. So is Akashi, the engineering student who is terrified of moths.

This is the Steins;Gate pick for people whose favourite episodes were the early ones, when the lab was Okabe, Daru and Mayuri eating instant noodles and arguing about nothing. The narrator is a close cousin of Okabe: self-dramatising, lonely, and far more articulate about his own greatness than about what he wants. Masaaki Yuasa’s direction is fast, flat-coloured and full of photographic collage.

Nothing is at stake beyond one young man’s happiness, and the middle episodes can feel like the same joke told well several times. Stay for the last two, which break the pattern and make the repetition the point. Eleven episodes and done. If you want more afterwards, The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is a 2017 film from the same director and novelist, set in the same corner of Kyoto.

More, briefly

For a wish with a price Puella Magi Madoka Magica

• 12 episodes
• complete
• films continue it

A kind schoolgirl is offered any wish she likes, in exchange for fighting witches.

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Same year as Steins;Gate, and the same hunger for a rule that closes like a trap. Madoka Kaname is offered a contract by Kyubey, a white creature with a fixed smile, while the silent transfer student Homura Akemi warns her away from it. The bright, round designs are a deliberate lie, and the third episode is where most people find out what kind of show this is. Its later episodes rewire earlier ones in the way Steins;Gate fans enjoy. Content note: the violent deaths of young teenage girls.

For a mission across a century Vivy -Fluorite Eye's Song-

• 13 episodes
• original story
• complete

The first autonomous AI is a theme-park singer. An AI from a hundred years ahead asks her to stop a war between machines and people.

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Vivy sings at a park called NiaLand and wants to make people happy with her heart, whatever that means for a machine. Then Matsumoto, an AI who has sent himself back from a century ahead and borrows the body of a teddy bear, tells her the war starts with events she can still change. The show jumps years between missions while Vivy stays the same age. It was co-written by Tappei Nagatsuki, who created Re:ZERO, and it shares that series’ interest in failure you have to live through. Thirteen episodes finish it.

For a plot that fits together ODDTAXI

• 13 episodes
• complete
• a 2022 film revisits it

A walrus taxi driver, a missing schoolgirl, and a city full of passengers who each know part of what happened.

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No time travel at all. ODDTAXI earns its place with Steins;Gate’s other trick, the way a first half full of idle chat turns out to have been laying every piece of the second. Hiroshi Odokawa is a 41-year-old walrus who drives a taxi in Tokyo, dislikes most people, and talks to his passengers anyway: a nurse, a comedy duo going nowhere, a student desperate to go viral. The last minutes of the final episode justify every one before them. Content note: yakuza violence with guns.

For the delinquent version Tokyo Revengers

• 24-episode first season
• a second season of 13 + 13
• story continues

A 26-year-old nobody learns his middle-school girlfriend has died in a gang conflict, and wakes up twelve years earlier.

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Takemichi Hanagaki’s life has gone nowhere by 26, and the news tells him that Hinata Tachibana, the only girlfriend he ever had, has died because of a gang war. Pushed in front of a train, he wakes up in middle school, and a handshake with Hina’s younger brother Naoto becomes the switch for going back and forth. What follows is a delinquent drama about the Tokyo Manji Gang, its childlike and frightening leader Mikey and his steadier deputy Draken. It borrows more from ERASED than from Steins;Gate, and it shouts a great deal. The anime stops short of the finished manga, and a further season has been announced. Content note: gang beatings and stabbings.

For two hours instead of twenty-four Your Name.

• 106-minute film
• complete

A girl in a mountain town and a boy in Tokyo wake up in each other's bodies, and leave notes about what they did.

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Mitsuha is bored of her small town, Taki is a busy Tokyo student, and on random mornings they wake up in each other’s bodies, live through the other’s day, and leave messages on each other’s phones. For the first half it is a comedy of manners. Then the film turns at its midpoint into something closer to Steins;Gate than its poster suggests. If the love story is what stays with you, our guide to romance anime where the relationship moves forward picks up that thread. Content note: disaster imagery.

For the internet-age ancestor Serial Experiments Lain

• 13 episodes
• complete

A withdrawn schoolgirl gets an email from a classmate who died days earlier.

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Steins;Gate lives on message boards, conspiracy theories and a stranger online who claims to be from the future. Lain got to that anxiety first, in 1998. Lain Iwakura is fourteen, quiet and uninterested in computers until a dead classmate writes to say she has only given up her body and now lives in the Wired. Power lines hum through every scene, the pace is slow, and the show declines to explain itself. Thirteen episodes, complete. Content note: a suicide in the first episode.

If it was the science

If what held you was the physics, the microwave and the worldline talk, the science-fiction guide is organised around the questions each show asks. If it was Okabe trying to outthink an organisation far bigger than him, anime like Death Note covers the mind games.

For the catalogue’s own suggestions, open the Finder with Steins;Gate selected and read the one-line reason under each card before you give it a weekend.