Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

[CONTAINS SPOILERS] Oh boy, this is gonna be a long one. Where do I start? I was going into this expecting to have one of the best watching experiences of my life because of the popularity of this anime. My expectations were high and maybe that is why I am so disappointed, first of all, the story. The story starts very dynamically with sinji being asked to pilot the Eva. So right off the bat, there is action so the viewer gets hooked right away. The problem is that for most of the later episodes all we see are battles between the Evas and the angels, withoutany character development or anything else taking place, it is JUST battles (again, for the most part). All the interesting stuff takes place in the first and last episodes where we finally get some background information on everything and things start to make sense. The ending was also very disappointing for me. We see sinji fight with his inner thoughts and struggles and how he achieves to finally love himself but to me, it seems like he comes to loving himself without any buildup. There is no train of thought that leads him to finally achieving self-love. Also, personally, the Human Instrumentality thing just doesn't make sense to me. I find it very anticlimatic how after all these battles the anime ends with just a computer program

Now the characters. Sinji to me has some very relatable aspects so for that I think he is a good protagonist but he is also SUCH a crybaby. The problem with that is that his actions become so predictable sometimes. For example every time he says he will go away, we all knew that he was going to come back not even an episode later. His constant denial becomes insufferable.

Then Asuka, in the beginning, I hated her because she just contributed nothing to the story, she is just useless, she literally could not be there and nothing would have changed but then I thought about it a little and I realized that her being useless is one of the main aspects of her character. All of her personality revolves around her wanting to be useful and be seen by others but she just never seems to achieve that. That is why I find her to be a brilliant character. We also get some background information on her and her story and it becomes clear why she reacts the way that she does. Such a well-written character I wish they did the same with all the others.

Next Rei is one of the worst main characters I have seen. She has no personality, she just exists to obey orders for Ikari and nothing else. She hardly has her own thoughts. She is just a puppet. The only interesting thing she did was to start questioning her existence but that didn't last more than 5 minutes. I don't find her personality interesting at all as she does not have one.

I don't have anything much to say about the other characters as I did not find anything really special about them, they are good characters for the plot I guess.

So except for Asuka, I don't like the characters so much. I feel like they could have made all the battling a little shorter and focused a bit more on developing the characters and making them interesting. And I know this is supposed to be an action-driven anime but that doesn't mean that there should be only fighting going on. The battles were also mediocre as I did not find myself surprised or in agony over anything that happened during the battles. I would even say that Nagisa being an enemy was very predictable from the start.

What I like about the anime though is the symbolism that it contains. I think every character plays its role when they all come together as one, each one of them representing a part of human existence. Asuka represents the side of us that wants attention,sinji our insecurities, and Rei our fight to understand human nature and ourselves. I just think that they could have done the same and also done a better job at everything I mentioned earlier

Overall I liked the symbolism of the anime but I think they could have done a way better job at, well, everything