I believe that many friends should be like me, watching "Evangelion New Theater Edition: The End" last weekend.
Without spoilers to summarize the plot, it is probably from "can not escape, can not escape..." finally changed to "a short escape although shameful but very useful", in the sight of the real heirs rare grandfathers once, must make the "old father" very moved, 61-year-old Hideaki Anno finally reconciled with the world, and after seeing the first machine and the thirteenth machine in the fight to break the background, high-rise buildings have become set props on the set of the special shooting, but you can still feel his unique secondary taste as a special chef, Make people laugh.
It's a good ending (and big-breasted beauty), which is my final assessment of the theatrical version.
Many friends should have such a question after watching it, as an animation that is enough to be engraved into the times, EVA has also achieved great success in business, and BD, handmade, model and other peripheral commodities have blossomed in many lines, so why did this IP not give birth to a game that is familiar enough?
The standard answer to this question should be "EVA adapted games a lot, but most of them are small in size and small cost", if you want to continue to expand, explore whether EVA is worthy of an adapted masterpiece? , then I have to briefly talk about the history of the development of games that produced TV versions and two theatrical versions, and once held the EVA copyright of GAINAX.
In 1984, Okada Doujio, Yasuhiro Takeda, Takami Akai, Hiroyuki Yamaga, Hideaki Anno, and Akiji Murahama jointly established GAINAX, and prepared to do a large number of votes and directly do theatrical animation.
Unfortunately, the first work of these young people " Wang Li Cosmic Army" has become an extremely failed gamble, although it won the 19th Nebula Award, now people talk about this work is always holding a posture of admiration, "Wang Li Cosmic Army" has a total investment of 800 million yen, the box office is only about 340 million yen, but also let this original plan to complete the animation to dissolve the "small and medium-sized fandom" is facing a huge debt to repay, had to continue to maintain the daily operation of GAINAX.
After careful market research, GAINAX identified the OVA animation field with low episode number and low cost and faster return, and launched "Leap peak", which contains popular elements such as beautiful girls, gymnastics suits, cosmic monsters, huge robots, etc., coupled with the simple science fiction setting, this hardcore and soft animation has finally achieved commercial success.
But... "Leap to the Top" is still losing money, making more money, investing more, even the last word is not colored, and even the Earth Alliance is fighting a decisive battle to protect the black hole bomb and hundreds of millions of cosmic monsters, and the part that should have become the climax of the unanimous vote can only be shown in black and white line storyboards and numbers, and it has not been unable to stop loss.
▲ This is also the debut of the leper as a supervisor, and the tradition of "fooling" people with line drafts without money has existed at that time
For GAINSAX at that time, what they needed was not to make a name for themselves and realize their self-worth, in fact, two acclaimed but not successful commercial works were enough to make this small studio that had only been established for a few years famous in the industry, whether it was good or bad, their demands were more realistic - lack of money to pay off debts, GAINAX needed a channel that could be quickly monetized.
At this time, Takami Akai, who was in charge of the art department of GAINAX, proposed a plan - or let's make a game, the first game theme will be chosen... The little butter is good.
When Takami Akai came to Taiwan as a tottori Prefectural Tourism Ambassador in 2017 to give a lecture in Taiwan, he also mentioned the reason for leading GAINAX into the "butter market" - for GAINAX, which has only been founded for a few years and is in huge debt, the inner volume is already very intense at that time, and there is no shortage of games such as "Dragon Quest" and "Super Mario" is an African continent full of lions, elephants, and bison, if you can choose a continent, GAINAX will definitely choose the most ferocious animal is the wild dog of Australia!
At that time, the production cost was very low, only a few inferior illustrations and a small amount of text can form a game, but often can have tens of thousands of copies of sales, investment and return rate far more than the traditional masterpiece of butter is the game circle worthy of the name of the "Australian continent", in fact, with a wealth of art resources GAINAX entry did cause a "dimensionality reduction blow" to the butter market at that time, look at the first 12+ butter "Computer Academy" they launched with "Q&A + undressing" as the main gameplay, Compared with "Lance 1: In Search of Small Light" produced by Alicesoft in the same year, you should be able to feel the gap of the times.
Because of its "high quality," Computer Gakuen 2 was classified as a harmful book by Miyazaki Prefecture in 1990 because of the Youth Protection Ordinance, and THE UNsatisfied GAINAX filed several appeals and brought the lawsuit to the Supreme Court, but in 1999 the lawsuit ended with GAINSAX losing.
But this does not affect in 1989 and 1990 in the two years, "Computer Academy" launched 3 works at a speed of half a year, of which the third one even took GAINAX's own work "Leap to the Peak" in The Tall House Noriko, Kazumi Amano, Jung Floyd as the heroine, perhaps because the audience is a bunch of simple otaku who love fantasy, there are not so many characters to talk about the problem of "OOC (human design)", the reputation and sales of the work are very good.
The great success of this series also allowed GAINAX to taste the joy of "hunting docile marsupials in the Australian continent", and also experienced how popular the small butter with "official authorization" was in the fan base, and when the claws were extended to their own animation heroines, they were more psychologically stressed, became more and more skilled, and established this set of "open source throttling" combination punches.
Low cost does not mean low quality, GAINAX also launched the experience of the animation-like text adventure game "Magic Circle City", and "Princess Maker" with free cultivation as the main gameplay.
In 1995, the finished "Evangelion" became a phenomenon-level work, EVA-related spin-off games were also put on the agenda by GAINAX, and at the beginning there were some small fights, after the launch of "Shinji and Happy Partners", "EVA and Happy Partners, Stripping Up Plan" such as spider cards, Monopoly, strip mahjong as the gameplay game, the "masterpiece" came.
In 1997, Evangelion: Iron Girlfriend was released.
If you want to make an analogy in terms of gameplay, it is closer to "Magic Circle City", which looks like an ordinary text adventure game, but a lot of exquisite static painting and mature storyboarding, plus a small number of looping GIFs, "EVA: Girlfriend of Steel" with a weekly flow of less than 2 hours is like watching an original EVA animation.
The plot of "Iron Girlfriend" is original, the story takes place between episodes 8 and 9 of the anime, the third new Tokyo city suffers from enigmatic bombardment, but strangely, NERV did not order EVA to move, the next morning, a beautiful girl transfer student Kirishima Real Name transferred to the third new Tokyo Municipal First Junior High School 2 year A class, she has a very special affection for Shinji, and in the process of enjoying the beautiful girl upside down and another beautiful girl (Asuka) for you to eat jealousy, Shinji's less "everyday" campus routine began...
Yes, "Iron Girlfriend" also adds a new heroine, and unlike Ayapoli's mouthless and Asuka's arrogance, her real name should be the kind of "ideal girlfriend of most otaku" who combines enthusiasm and gentleness. When "EVA" announced the new theatrical version, it was said that there would be new characters to join, and many people speculated whether it would be Kirishima's real name, but in the end it became a "big-breasted beauty" Majibo whose character and background story were very close.
The popularity of the real name is not high, the real name party does not have the scale of the three-legged party with the Xiang Dang Li Party, probably because the screenwriter of the game has made a mistake, all the normal options of the game will lead to BE, self-abandonment and random selection is TE, the game experience makes people love and hate, and "Iron Girlfriend" has only been released in Japanese.
In 2001, integrating the stripping/dress-up gameplay of Computer Academy and the cultivation gameplay of Pretty Girl DreamWorks, Evangelion: Ayapolis Incubation Program was registered on the PC platform.
In the game you need to play a 20-year-old young teacher with brown hair and a general appearance, after seeing the impact of the second impact on humanity, you understand that a "teaching can't save the earthlings", so you volunteer to join NERV, you are assigned to the NERV branch of the third new Tokyo city, the class is the third lieutenant, and taking care of the first qualified person Ayapoli is your first task after taking office.
In the game, Ayapolis will have basic attributes such as intelligence, physical strength, morality, synchronization rate, favorability, etc., and arranging a trip for Li from Monday to Saturday will affect one of her attributes, and special events will be triggered at Christmas and the Gakuen Festival, even if NERV sends you 20,000 yen per month for parenting, you can still use this money to buy Li a beautiful little dress, provided that she has enough affection for you and is willing to wear it.
You can also make Ayabori less mouthless by typing words by hand.
Although "Ayabori Breeding Plan" still has to escape the knife ending of "Ayabori and the protagonist are dead", at least in the end it gives the player a space to imagine - if Ayabori grows up according to her own ideas, what kind of person will she become?
This is the biggest fun of "Ayabori's Parenting Plan", according to the attributes of Ayapolis and the choice of key plot points, the game has up to 20 endings, including Ayapolis becoming a "crazy scientist", "crappy actor", "Internet idol" such a full of otaku fantasy ending, and can also be the same as the new theater version without EVA and apostle ending, so that Ling Boli becomes a "small town policewoman", "tennis player (partner is Asuka)", "field nurse" ordinary but more humane women.
This also makes "Ayabori Cultivation Plan" a work that can make up for regrets, after all, looking at the protagonist Shinji at that time from the current perspective, timid and humble and awkward, adding a little bit of secondary two diseases, and also engaging in "air defense exercises" against Asuka lying on the hospital bed, should not make all fans feel empathy, right?
In the 2003 PS2 version, the series also surprisingly added a new route "Asuka Completion Plan", and played as Miri Katsugi to cultivate Shinji, and also added the control of EVA for turn-based combat, and the gameplay has been infinitely close to an RPG's "Makoto Breeding Plan".
▲ Of course, the rather nostalgic painting style may dissuade most EVA chefs
The Ayapolis Incubation Program series is indeed the most well-known and recognized EVA spin-off game among EVA fans today, but the volume of the cultivation game determines the upper limit of this series' sales.
If you want to talk about the "most lying money" project in EVA, it should be from 2004 until now, the EVA Bo Qingge machine is still being launched, but there is still controversy about whether Bai Qingge should be classified as a "derivative game", so today's article will not talk about it.
The original goal is not so ambitious GAINAX, relying on the EVA copyright license out of the financial crisis, has also lost the ambition to further expand the game market, of course, although there is no lion, elephant and bison in the Australian continent, there is no competition, GAINAX also has no momentum for progress, and finally the elders left and fell into financial crisis again.
But the good news is that EVA's game will not disappear with the decline of GAINAX, as the old lepers separated and took away the copyright of EVA, he handed over the licensing-related business to GroundWorks founded by Yasuhiro Kamura, the original copyright director of GAINAX, and after determining that the image of EVA would not be licensed to serious fields such as education, finance, insurance, and employment, this IP opened the era of "everything can EVA" copyright.
Don't we still have anime adaptation game giant Bandai Namco? "EVA Ultimate Storm" may already be on the way.
In a recent interview with Hideaki Anno, the 61-year-old old leper also said meaningfully, "I don't think it's okay to not see Shinji and other characters for a short time." But it's not that you don't want to see each other again, maybe there will always be a reunion day. ”
So, (this time only temporarily) goodbye, all Evangelion.