Forum - View topic

ANNCast - Staff Infection II: Outbreak!

http://revolutionofevangelion.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Video_game_spinoffs


Neon Genesis Evangelion: Girlfriend of Steel (Sega Saturn, PC 1997) - AKA "Iron Maiden". Easily the most popular of the Eva video games, frequently re-released. Subsequently ported over to PC, Mac, and PlayStation 2 versions. Re-released on PlayStation Portable (PSP) as recently as April 9, 2009 (in Japan). Girlfriend of Steel is presented almost as a..."lost episode" of the series. It is a "visual novel" in which "gameplay" consists of moving from one in-game video to the next. It has original animation by Gainax for the in-game videos, and a complete episode-worth of new dialogue by the original Japanese voice cast.

In certain ways...it's Evangelion's version of the Star Wars Holiday Special: it has the original cast members, is made by the same production team, and has all of the same sets and props (Gainax animated the in-game videos). Physically, it looks, sounds, and feels like "Evangelion".

Storyline-wise...it is actually more mature than most manga, but could never possibly be part of the actual series, playing up the romance parts of the storyline far more than they would ever really have gone. The basic plot is that similar to the "Jet Alone" robots from episode 7, a rival defense contractor makes fully-mechanical robots, still piloted by 14 year olds, to compete with the Evangelion units, and Shinji ends up falling in love with the new female pilot of one of them.

This pilot, "Mana Kirishima"...is the living embodiment of "Mary Sue character". Look up "Mary Sue" in a dictionary and you'll see a picture of Mana. She is designed to be the "ultimate girlfriend" for Shinji: she's literally a combination of Rei and Asuka. Rei is very introverted, Asuka is very extroverted: Mana balances this out perfectly. She even looks like a physical merging of Rei and Asuka: she has Rei's haircut but Asuka's hair color.

She's sickeningly too perfect, the sort of unrealistic super-girlfriend that only a complete shut-in basement dweller would conceive of as the idealized perfect woman, right next to the green-skinned alien woman who wants to learn about this human thing called "kissing". Unsurprisingly, the fanboys in Japan have developed a large cult around Mana, to the point that her popularity in Japan nearly rivals that of actual cast members.

Fans are seriously afraid that the promised "new character" in Rebuild of Evangelion, Mari Illustrious Makinami, will be "god-damned Girlfriend of Steel all over again".

http://revolutionofevangelion.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Video_game_spinoffs

Most of the early Evangelion video games, released right after the TV series in the late 1990's when its popularity was at its peak, were for the Sega Saturn console (though some later got transferred to other consoles). Sega Saturn did moderately well in Japan, but in North America it came dead last in the console war against PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64.

The reason for this is that originally, Sega Saturn and PlayStation 1 were supposed to both come out in September 1995. Then in May 1995, four months before the big launch, the president of Sega of America appeared at E3 (this was the first E3) and announced that in a surprise move, Sega Saturn was being launched *immediately* (as in at the end of his speech) at select retailers across the USA, to try to get a four month lead on PlayStation.

This backfired in spectacular fashion: only a handful of games were actually ready, mostly from Sega's in-house development team. The third-party game developers had been developing their titles for the September launch, and felt that Sega had betrayed them to try to boost sales for their in-house studio.

Further, only some retailer chains were included in the surprise early launch...but not major chains Wal-Mart or KB Toys. The result was that most third-party game developers stopped working with Sega, while Wal-Mart and KB Toys refused to sell the Sega Saturn at all, and started actively removing Sega products from their shelves in retaliation.

Finally, an early release only benefited PlayStation: they had advance warning of what price Sega Saturn was being sold for, and had ample time to slash their own prices to 25% cheaper. Sega Saturn thus lost the format war of its generation, with sales distantly trailing behind PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64, and it was terribly unsuccessful in North America.

The result is that most Evangelion video games never got a North American, English-release version, and now exist only on a console that has been out of print for a decade and didn't have widespread popularity in the first place.

The reason people get into Panty and Stockings is because they talk to themselves into thinking that it's some brilliant attack against moe, and it's not.

Yeah... so it's clear no one watched Panty & Stocking past the first two episodes, because the show changed significantly. Sure there's still inappropriate humor, but there's actual delivery and the animation is great.

Yeah... so it's clear no one watched Panty & Stocking past the first two episodes, because the show changed significantly. Sure there's still inappropriate humor, but there's actual delivery and the animation is great.

v1cious wrote:

Yeah... so it's clear no one watched Panty & Stocking past the first two episodes, because the show changed significantly. Sure there's still inappropriate humor, but there's actual delivery and the animation is great.

Screw that... dude... episode six. The battle. The GODDAMN battle. That was freaking amazing. The moves, the animation, the angles... it was freaking awesome. And I am so happy Japan is loving this anime, means we might just get 26 episodes.

And the music.

Yeah... so it's clear no one watched Panty & Stocking past the first two episodes, because of the show changed significantly.

claiming that episode 1 is really the only bad episode doesn't help your cause because episode 2 was barely better since nearly the entire thing was "Panty is a slut and that's hilarious"