Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Evangelion sure is a well known and widely accepted work. I honestly don't why it's so well liked though because so many things in the anime are just stupid. I'm not yelling at people who like it, but I'll mention most of the problems I found. The first problem is the story. Humans fighting aliens with mechanical suits is nothing new and it was honestly quite boring to watch. It might have been a little less boring if the suits had better designs. The biggest problem though, is that so many so called "deep" philosophical ideas are thrown into theanime and a lot of them seemed liked they are forced into the story. Many of these themes could be picked out with a little bit of analysis, but it really took away from the story by throwing all these "deep" meanings in constantly. The final two episodes pretty much exist to explain the meaning of self worth and whatnot for Shinji and give some background for Rei and Asuka as well as to show them gaining some understanding of the self. I really feel like these two episodes didn't really add anything all that important though as most the idea behind this theme should pretty easily be picked out from previous episodes. I'll give the story a 3 since it is extremely boring and too bogged down with philosophical ideas, some forced and others that seem non-existent without going too deep into analysis. It's not the worst I've seen though.

The art actually is bad even for a 1997 work and the backgrounds are not at all special. There is way too many still shots for no good reason and the eva designs are not good or cool looking in the slightest, they're just dreadful; they look like poorly mutated beats rather than robots with a good design. Most of the characters just look completely awful and totally unappealing to the eye to boot. A 3.5/10 for this category.

Now, I do feel like the sound is really bad even for an early work. The opening theme is not good, but I guess it's ok for the show. Also, the rest of the music just seemed like general scores used for old anime, and they don't do a very good job at pumping you up for the fights or major arguments. A lot of it is just random music that is represents sounds from the outdoors or whatever used during still shots outside I'll give the sound a 3/10.

It's time to discuss the characters now. I'd say the character part is the worst aspect of Evangelion. A lot of people like to say that Rei, Shinji, and Asuka set the stage for their archetypes, but even if this is true, most of them do an extremely poor job at it. Take Shinji. He's just a whinny kid who doesn't let known a lot of what he's thinking, he complains about piloting Evangelion unit 1 for most of the first half, he does most of what he does just because he's afraid of people hating him, and he's almost always doubting himself. He's the worst case of a self insert/plot device character I've ever seen and he becomes cocky from the slightest bit of praise. Now, Rei and Misato are actually decent characters and i like their personalities, backstories, and mysteries surrounding them. Than there is Asuka, who's just a bitch. That's basically all she is. She's so cocky about her abilities and just wants to show them off even if it entails disregarding protocol and gets others involved in dangerous life threatening situations brought about by her arrogance. She pretty much treats everyone like shit besides for the class representative. Asuka literally almost gets Shinji killed within like 10 minutes of being introduced because she was arrogant; I'm not saying Shinji dying wouldn't have been a plus, but it would've had an equally negative effect on Asuka's character. Of course there's more horrible characters like Gendo Ikari and others, but there's no sense mentioning them since I don't have anything that good to say anyway. Overall, Shinji and Asuka are the worst characters of their archetypes that I've seen, many side characters are horrible people too, and Rei and Misato are really the only redeeming characters and there presence is keeping my character score at a 1/10 instead of a .5 or 0. I know people generally like these characters, but it's a perfect case of when being complicated doesn't make them not awful in every way.

It's obvious that I didn't enjoy Neon Genesis Evangelion much. One of my final thoughts will be that forcing "deep" philosophical and psychological meanings and ideas into an anime ,like they do in Eva, degrades its quality rather improving it. It's good to give viewers something to think about, but don't force it into your work and or make deep meanings that don't really fully exist in the anime. Also, considering that figuring out what makes up the "self" seems to be a big part of this anime, the last 2 episodes show how simple the show really is; if an idea/concept that the show is exploring can be summarized in 2 episodes when it originally took 24 episodes to get there, the idea is not as complicated to figure out as the work tries to make it; figuring out the idea of self is usually deep, but not the way it presented here. I''ll give my enjoyment a 2 and give an overall score of a 2.5/10. I do not recommend this. I know I mention this in all of my reviews so far for pre-2000 anime, but this is just another example of a bad anime from that time period that gets "pre-2000 classic protection". I know I've only seen a few anime from back than, but my experiences have been horrible. Hopefully, I'll find that one good one.