Also, the review is more so for people who've finished it anyway, so beware of some spoilers ahead!
Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the most universally praised, influential, popular, and overall beloved anime of all time. Almost everyone I know, as well as the majority of users on this website seem to praise it as a MASTERPIECE, or at least a very good show.
I'm gonna be blunt. NGE is one of the biggest pieces of crap to ever become a mainstream anime, in my opinion.
Let's start with what is actually good, because a lot of the aspects of this anime are actually salvageable, which makes it all the more tragic at how grandiously it failed.
Art - 7/10
NGE looks a lot better than most TV anime of the nineties. It's well-drawn, has a good use of colors, and stills of it look really good, but the animation itself fits the pacing - that is to say, it's not moving sometimes for near a whole minute at a time.
Sound - 7/10
Cruel Angel's Thesis is a great opening and Fly Me To The Moon is a good ending. The voice acting and voice direction was ok, not great, just ok.
The concept for the anime was great. It presents itself like a battle sci-fi at the beginning, and it makes you interested in finding out what the "angels" actually are, where they came from, and what the government is doing exactly.
Now onto the trash fire:
Characters - 2/10
The characters are terrible. You've probably already heard the criticism that Shinji is a boring, whiney wuss, who is unable to stand up for himself and isn't a strong enough character to be a protagonist, let alone an interesting one. I am inclined to agree to that, but Shinji is nowhere near the worst character in the show, and he's still a simpathetic boy for the most part. Asuka is the worst and most overrated anime character I've ever seen. She's whiney, annoying, bratty, scummy, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why people like her other than her aesthetic. (fyi she's not legal) Asuka is somehow meant to be a deconstruction of the tsundere archetype in anime, somehow. Yet, instead of deconstructing the stereotypical portrayal of cold-on-the inside females (which I don't necessarily dislike), she shows the absolute worst aspects of being one with none of the positives. "Tsundere"s are supposed to only put their brattyness on the outside, but be nice people. That's how they can become beloved characters. In Asuka's case, however, besides a few moments where she shows some humility, she's generally just a b*tch. If one of your main "good guys" goes so far as to show amusement at her crewmate suffering, like when Shinji was close to dying to an Angel and she was braging about how he was asking for it and they should have let HER do the job, because she's apparently a perfect pilot (she's a terrible pilot btw, wastes ammo and gets herself into trouble all the time), then you know something is wrong with your character writing. (SPOILER) If I was Shinji, I would have probably at least attempted to strangle her as well.
Other than that, there is Rei, who is probably the most decent character out of all of them, but still boring nonetheless. Misato is okay, but being a thot is ingrained into her character. Shinji's dad is a horrible, neglectful person, and Shinji himself goes insane towards the end and does things that make it impossible to root for him, so there is literally no one left.
What happened to great, strong, badass protagonists, with resolve, like Kenshiro and Jotaro?! It's often mentioned that NGE changed the landscape of the anime industry completely, and as true as that is, not all change is for the better. Shinji is the reason why pathetic excuses for protagonists like Kirito clone #55 and unironic Kazuma #14 dominate the anime landscape today, unlike the afformentioned badasses. Who said protagonists have to act like real life people when put into hard situations? It's anime, it's MEANT to be exaggerated and idealised. Real people suck most of the time anyway. It is said that NGE put more psychological and "deep" elements in mecha shows. Who cares??? If it was a generic mecha #119 I would have enjoyed it more. To me, it doesn't just stand out from the rest, it stands out at how bad it is. It is also said that NGE made female characters more three dimentional. And so what??? Regardless of whether Asuka is 2D, 3D, or even a 4D tesseract, she's still a bratty sis. (still not legal btw)
Story - at least 8/10 for premise and 2/10 for execution
As I mentioned before, the show starts out very promising. It almost looks like a battle shonen from the way it invites the viewer into an interesting distopian setting and makes you wanna see more action and discover the truth behind the Angels' invasion. After that it just goes nuts. Instead of answering questions, it only poses more. It tricks the audience that they are gonna watch something cool, but instead it it partially abandons the original premise a few episodes in and focuses on overdone, cliche (even for 1995) teenage drama, and then completely abandons the original plot in the last third where the show, and the director, go INSANE. First off, it's ironic that fans of the show overanalyse every little detail and can talk for hours about how deep it is, when the dynamic between the three children is on the same level of depth as The Jersey Shore.
The reason why there are so many open-to-interpretation bizarre sequences is not that Eva has something deeply profound to say, that is hard to express with words, but that the people behind it didn't know what they were doing. The show is a disjointed mess that doesn't know what it wants to be.
It's a sci-fi action mecha, but not really. It's a psychological thriller, but not really. It's a drama about growing up with some comedic elements, but not really. It's a study of the minds of some seriously messed up kids, but not really. It's a bad hallucinogenic trip, but not really. It goes from a quirky show where some woman drinks six packs of 100% alcohol "beer" and her penguin eats toast and takes baths like a human, to an apocalyptic existential nightmare. The tonal shift isn't commendable like the slow-burn, mindblowing tonal shift in Adventure Time, or the sudden and unexpected one in Made in Abyss. It's a disaster, where the production was started while the script was still ongoing and the ending (if you can even call it that) was an afterthought. You know how everyone hates the talk no jutsu in Naruto, because the creator put it just because he felt like it after a session with his psychologist? That's exactly how EVERYTHING towards the end of Evangelion (the series, not the movie) works. The director became depressed and not only wanted the series to reflect that, it feels like he wanted the fans to suffer as he does, for some reason. I've heard he even admitted that Evangelion's plot makes no sense, but I cannot find a source for that. Either way, the lack of consistency in the writing is even reflected in the animation and general production. It's the same negligence that caused Gainax to blow all their budget prematurely and animate the last episode with what appears to be crayons.
You see, Evangelion's ending is not so much bad......as it is NON-EXISTENT. Evangelion is the reason why people make fun of how studio Gainax ends their shows, even though it's not really true for all their shows. Gurren Lagann has, in my opinion, one of the greatest endings of all time, but people still prefer to talk more about the bad. I like every other Gainax anime I've seen more than Eva and it really tarnishes the reputation of the studio for me, just as it tarnished the reputation of their ability to write and produce a good ending.
Enjoyment - 3/10
Once again, the show was interesting at first, but about 10 episodes in I was already sick of its repetitiveness. Every angel attack felt the same, but even then that's still the best part of the plot. I was sick of Asuka and the rest of the cast. The pacing has been extremely flawed from the start, but it felt slower and slower the further I got into it. It's really boring to watch, and the whole pretentiousness doesn't help. The weird sequences and Christian symbolism make no sense. Don't even try to make sense of them. The creators didn't have any comment to make on religion or using religious symbolism, they just like adding things they thought look cool, and if you, like me, don't think it looks that cool, then a large portion of the anime will be a waste of time for you. (SPOILER) Apparently Rei is a clone of Shinji's mom because his dad loved her too much to let her go. WTF?.....Okay, whatever. The EVA unit going berserk was supposed to be the climax of the series? That was disappointing. A great show like Kill la Kill could probably make Ryuko mowing her lawn more intense than that. The show is pretentious. It has nothing to teach you, it has no deep meanings. It's just a hodgepodge of random things the creative producers and director thought would be kinda cool. Worst of all, it's boring. It feels even slower than the average 90's show, and it never fails to be anticlimactic.
Despite it's roaring commercial success, I still consider "Neon Genesis Evangelion" a massive FAILURE of storytelling and entertainment.
