Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Neon Genesis Evangelion is an apocalyptic anime set in the year 2015 where extraterrestrial beings called Angels appear and attack on Earth and the organization called NERV protects humans against them with the help of robots called EVAs. I expected this to be a great anime given the number of positive reviews and high sales it has. But, it was a big let down for me. The story wasn't too good considering the potential it had. For the first few episodes, it went quite nicely. The mecha genre made it much more interesting and there were a lot of awesome action scenes too. However, it was completelyboring and pointless towards the end. They shifted more towards fanservice and psychology towards the end. And unfortunately, I hate both. Moreover, they left many things either unexplained or gave very little reasoning for them towards the end.

The art and sound was very nice considering the year when it was made. It had very nicely detailed designs for all the EVAs and the angels. The NERV HQ was also quite well designed. The scenes of the battles between the EVA and the angels were the best part. The graphics and sound in those made the quite realistic.

However, the main flaw with this series were the characters. There wasn't a single 'likeable' character in this series. The protagonist, Ikari Shinji spent more time crying and running away than piloting the EVA(which he was really good at). The second pilot, Asuka kept lamenting on losing to Ikari Shinji in terms of skills with piloting the EVA. The 3rd pilot, Ayanami Rei, never spoke. And when she did, it was always, "Who am I? What am I? Who are you?" and stuff like that. Among the older characters, Misato and Ritsuko were again lamenting about the past almost 40% of the time. The only sane characters out there were probably Ikari Gendou and Kozo Fuyutsuki.

Since the last few episodes were just soliloquies of the characters and that those where they just kept wondering "Who am I? Who are you? Why am I alive? What is Eva?", the series became very very boring.

Overall, unless you are a die-hard fan of mecha or you like psychological stuff , there is absolutely no reason to waste your time watching this when there are many better animes out there.