This will not be a very good review of Shinseki Evangelion: Girlfriend of Steel 2. It is, objectively, not a good product. This might've been made on a hot summer weekend in a cramped sweatshop of a studio, 3 or so fellas thinking of how nice it would be to have some decent spending money for once. I picked this up with puppy-dog excitement-- its Evangelion, it's not like anything else-- and quickly patched it into English. I was not expecting anything spectacular. Many of it's shortcomings were due to my own mistakes, and it's obviously a fanservice game from it's very title. Right now, an Eva Unit-1 themed tamagotchi is sitting on my desk (unopened). It's Eva. Of course I have it.
I open up the game, and there is no music. I later learned there is sound (your favorite songs, just as you remember them, straight from your favorite show) and I just had jumbled something somewhere. But, I play the game in silence not knowing this.
I meet Asuka. She wakes me up, only for me to grumble something about having morning wood. She screams at me for being so degenerate. Everything here looks strange. The characters are certainly themselves (or at least as they were in the final episode's dream sequence, loud and chipper and living peacefully) and they are drawn in Sadamoto's style, but upon further inspection I realize that the lines feel non-committal, as if they were traced over quickly with few references at hand. The Asuka I see, and will see many times again, is a traced-over version of herself, crudely colored and out-of-proportion with the rest of this ordinary bedroom.
I can't find my way to school. Rather, I can find the school, but I can't trigger the cutscene that allows me to start my happy highschool life. Instead I wander around the empty town, spamming the "look" function until something happens. I'm approached by a pedophile. The encounter leads to nothing and my ears are filled with nothing as I return to the school. I realize I don't know where the save function is. I'm greeted by Hikari eventually, who tells me nothing before blipping out of existence in the hallway.
Something invisible to me activates, causing Misato (a traced-over version, just like everyone in the room) to announce that she is my teacher and also (I forget what else happens here, I am thinking of Misato and her scratchy voice in the English dub and how interesting it would be if Toji could be a pilot a little longer-- There he is, a simulacrum, back to square one in terms of character set with his stiffly-drawn track suit). I meet Kaworu, who comes onto me instantly. I meet Ritsuko, who comes onto me instantly. I walk into the classroom when the girls are changing, I am met with a bad ending where I am doomed to walk the earth a lonely starved idiot for my horny transgressions. I am hit yet again that I never found the save function, so it really is the end, and for some reason I sigh and start it up again.
"It's because it's-- Well, you know. It's Evangelion. It's unlike anything else."
On a bike trip, Asuka's behind in scrunched-up shorts blocks my view of the road. Ritsuko yet again comes onto me, pulling blushes from my slightly crooked virgin boy face. I do find a way to turn on the sound, and the characters begin to speak to me with these strange words that come from not them not me but some man who really wishes his paycheck was better, because the studio is too hot and the air conditioner is busted. Kaworu kisses me in an elevator. Asuka washes my back. I stand pushed up to Rei on a train, averting my eyes out of embarrassment. I know I've wasted too many words on a product that wasn't supposed to do anything for anyone when I am reminded of Kaji's hilariously small car driving past our normal-sized bicycle, calling out in a voice to say something charming but not enough so for me to remember.
You don't look up an Evangelion game because you want a good game. You look it up because you want more Evangelion. There is nothing that will ever feel like being 14 in a sweat-drenched T shirt because you're too poor to afford fans in this shitty neighborhood you're just old enough to hate, cracking open that DVD case you swiped from the public library because you keep losing your card, marathoning the whole thing while your mom is out for a few days. There is nothing that will ever feel like covering your sister's eyes at the "grown-up parts", gasping in awe as one robot rips out another's stomach, like blasting out the box TV's speakers while a summer storm forms outside. The feeling of watching Evangelion is quickly replaced with the needing Evangelion, because you have never seen anything so dazzling and foreign and violent and new as that funny robot show when you were 14. So you watch the movies, buy the merch, plaster your walls with posters and wait for the patches to come out so you can play the PSP game where the boys kiss. And you trace over those memories time and time again, wearing out their silhouettes until the things that meant so much are but weak facsimiles of good times. You are 22 and playing a game you know wont be good from a series you don't love anymore.
You don't love Evangelion, but you need it. Because Evangelion was unlike anything else. And now-- now it's everywhere.
TLDR: Don't play this game I still can't find the save function and it's kinda boring + drawings kinda wonky.
