Neon Genesis Evangelion: ANIMA

If your favourite part of Evangelion was the religious imagery and lore, then you're in luck, because Anima certainly delivers in that aspect. Due to being in a novel format, Anima has the freedom to have lots of intriguing ideas that an anime wouldn't have the time to flesh out. The lore and mysteries of the original series (such as what exactly SEELE is) are expanded on in a way that feels consistent with Evangelion as a whole. The Christian references are more involved, prominent, and meaningful (though still fairly aesthetic and surface-level), and the global impact of the events is explored -- something theoriginal series merely alluded to. As is the case with the Rebuilds, the psychological drama and existential angst of the original series are toned down in Anima, which works in Anima's favour because there can be a greater focus on action and lore. The ending is not all-out happy (after all, this is Evangelion), but it's not depressing and dark either. A bigger issue is that the ending feels rushed, and there's very little payoff (of any kind) and catharsis for the reader, which furthers the point that Anima is meant to be read for more Evangelion action and lore -- and more of that is never a bad thing. If you love Evangelion and want more Evangelion between the manga, original series, and Rebuilds, Anima fills this niche. It feels like a natural extension of the original series and Rebuilds, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

tl;dr: A novel series that’s somewhat of a sequel to Neon Genesis Evangelion that does better in some areas and worse in others, but overall manages to be just as insane. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Anima is a semi-sequel to the main series in that it takes place in an alternate timeline where Shinji stopped the attack on NERV HQ and the Human Instrumentality Project was a resounding failure. As a result, it seems Lilith retreated into an impenetrable time locked chronosphere, pulling along those that were with, mainly Gendou and Ritsuko. The story picks up three years later, where the main trio of Shinji, Asuka, andRei are now attending high school, but are also still serving as Eva pilots. Misato has become the head of NERV Japan, Maya has become the lead scientist, and Kanji is off doing spy things as usual. The world had been at peace for three years, but things start going wildly off track when an Evangelion like entity that comes to be known as Armaros appears. From the perspective of Armaros, the purpose of humanity is to achieve the Human Instrumentality Project. However, as that has failed, there is no purpose to humanity. As such, his goal is resetting the world and humanity such that the Human Instrumentality Project may be attempted once more. Or to put it more simply, Armaros is a harbinger of the apocalypse. I found the apocalyptic aspect of the setting really interesting. Most apocalyptic fiction involves civilization quickly collapsing once things get going. However, here even as forces far beyond their control cause the world to fall apart disastrously, the governments and world scale entities of the world very much remain intact. It doesn’t spend a good deal of time on this, but it does deal with things like the effect the world falling apart has on supply chains and communication networks and how to deal with them from a world scale organization’s perspective. As such, it has a very unique apocalyptic feel. A civilized apocalypse if you will. Though that did feel pretty strange at times as well. Mainly in how school stayed open despite everything. The core of the plot involves the cast investigating Armaros, who he is, where he came from, how he functions, and what specifically he’s trying to do in order to stop him. At first, there’s a good sense of mystery to things and as things are slowly revealed a lot of interesting concepts and mechanics are introduced. However, in the final two books of the series it feels like it’s exhausted most of its idea, and though there still are some pretty cool elements added here and there, it feels like it’s getting pretty repetitive. A large part of that comes down to how there aren’t that many new enemies. There’s Armaros and his two minions who operate wildly differently from Angels and thus result in some pretty interesting fights. However they’re in too many fights without changing all that much, and thus things start getting dull. Beyond that, there’s very heavy reuse of Angels from the main series. There are some interesting twists on things at times, but for the most part it didn’t really feel like it was treading new ground. Like the main series, there’s a lot of wild use of psuedoscience and Judeo/Christian religious concepts. I would say both of those have been cranked up immensely, for better or worse. The excess of psuedoscience was cumbersome and made it hard to follow along at times. It made some of the action that relied heavily on it especially painful to read through at times. The increase in the use of religious concepts I think was handled much better. The main series I always felt threw in a bunch of random terms, but was very superficial about things and didn’t use them all that well and in the end. There was a lot that just plain made no sense. Here it feels like it uses things much more concretely, wherein the religious subject matter is not just window dressing but actually a critical part of how things play out. It’s also explained more clearly so the overarching plot makes much more sense. I would like to say that it actually makes the original series make more sense as well, though I’m not sure how canon this is to it. I should note however, that despite things being clearer, that doesn’t make them any less insane. I think this series goes very much toe to toe with the original for how bizarre it gets. The ending unfortunately isn’t an instance of that though. The ending to the series is incredibly generic and the climax doesn’t leave all that strong of an impression. However, similar to the main series, it has a very abrupt ending where once things are over, the story just ends with essentially no falling phase or epilogue. That worked well with what the ending to the original series was trying to do, but here it just feels dissatisfying. This series also doesn’t really handle characters as well as the main series and doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much of a focus as it was in the original series. It mentions that Shinji has grown from how he was in the original series in that he doesn’t just push people away anymore. However, it wasn’t all that well written and felt more like it was just telling and not showing. With Asuka it tried to convey that deep down Asuka has a very different personality as compared to what she shows on the surface, but that too wasn’t really fleshed out all that well. With both of them it kind of felt like it was just glossing over their traumas. Rei got the most development as she essentially got multiple overlapping character arcs that were all decently well handled, so she stood out from the crowd as the best written character(s). Toji and Kensuke changed into pretty much completely different characters over the time skip, but as it didn’t really develop the process much it didn’t really feel like they went through character arcs. The same applies to Maya. Everyone else felt pretty much the same as in the main series. There’s also some light romance here, with Shinji/Asuka/Rei and Misato/Kanji, but it was handled pretty badly and didn’t leave all that good an impression. The translation’s prose was decent enough I guess, but it felt really bogged down by technobabble at times. It also felt like there were a lot of obvious blatant mistakes, such as saying Ritsuko instead of Maya or getting the wrong Eva or Ayanami numbers. At times I felt like it was trying to do something interesting in using the wrong names to mean something, but others make absolutely no sense whatsoever so I think I was just reading too much into things. There were also some grammatical mistakes and such here and there. The art is great with mechs but not all that good with people. Some of the illustrations also felt somewhat low effort in the last volume.