Player Comments on Neon Genesis Evangelion

Since I'm familiar with the source material, I had more benefit than most. Still, this was a pretty confusing read. At various points you went off on tangents that could have easily been avoided. I think the worst one was the second paragraph of the 'One Week Later' page, which only needed the first two sentences; instead, you go on about the AT Fields and the Angels and etc., etc..

Add to that your problem of sounding too formal no matter what you try, and even I found myself confused at times despite knowing what all the names and words being flung around without context meant. Still, I will definitely applaud you for focusing on the story the entire time the contest was on, and Maya did a good job fixing up whatever spelling and grammar issues were there... Too bad she couldn't fix the clunky, but still grammatically correct, sentences.

I'm not going to bug you about your writing anymore because everyone else has done that for me. For the rest of this review, I'm going to focus mostly on the fanfiction aspect of this story. The biggest issue with this was that you started right at the end of it, and focused on the events shown in the End of Evangelion with the player allowed to control the story from there. If that wasn't bad enough, while you did do a good job providing background information where needed, you still assume that the player is 100% familiar with the world which you should never do if you're writing a fanfiction on a site that doesn't focus entirely on that franchise/work.

The best way to write fanfiction, as I've found, is to put it in an ambigious timeframe. Something that could fit at anytime in the series/franchise/what-have-you so you don't have to worry about an info dump, or even setting the story in an alternate universe so you have more creative freedom. You can squeeze in a reference here or there that will be enough for people to understand it, but for the most part you should try to make it work like a standalone story. Your goal here shouldn't be to cater to fans; it should be to draw in new ones by making people interested in checking the work out based off of your story.

Continuing off the thing about how the story should work as a standalone piece... Well, I hate pointing to myself for examples, but take a look at my Question fanfictions; I could take Dark Nights and just change the names of the characters so that they're just 'original characters' and the plot wouldn't suffer for it. Change the names of the characters in your story, and you're just spouting off words that the reader doesn't understand and throwing them into a plot they have no investment in. This is, again, because you chose to place the story at the end of the source material's run.

Now, I did enjoy this story. Save for the awkward writing, I imagine that most Evangelion fans would get a kick out of this, especially the ones who wanted to change the ending of the series. The characters never seem OOC, it's faithful to the established setting, and all that jazz. There were a few problems with it (mostly not being able to make Shinji jack off to Asuka's comatose body, lol), obviously, but overall I imagine this would easily be the highest rated work on an Evangelion fan site or something.

6/8

Oof.

I'm sorry Wibbons but I tried my best and this story just will not click with me. Yes you're the only one who took the contest seriously and worked steadily the whole way through and I do respect that, but...third person anime fanfic with constant POV switching would be enough of a handicap for anyone even aside from the style issues you've been struggling with.

Even with the infodumps (which are rarely a good thing to frontload the beginning of a story with anyway unless they're completely optional...) this had the usual problems with fanfic where so many times I was left with no fucking clue what was going on or what anyone was talking about. Japanese names are flying all over the place colliding with setting specific terms and offhand mentions of characters or events with zero explanation, or one that at best comes as a quick aside several pages in. The deluge of Fantasy Nouns introduced at random absolutely would not fly in a normal story; the trick with writing a fanfic on a site not centered around it is to introduce the basic fundamental concepts that need to be understood for things to make sense naturally as the story goes along, just like you would with any other story.

Even just looking at the first bit of description, before even getting to the story:

The creatures called Angels are "monsters" that intended to cause the Third Impact to destroy humanity. They would unite with the original Angel in NERV's lowest level of their base in Tokyo-3. They are not heavenly angels.

You had me until Third Impact. Like okay, it's a bad thing obviously if it can destroy humanity, but what is it exactly and what is NERV and Tokyo-3? (Impact is briefly touched on much later in the story but at that time every page is so thick with references to other things like Lilith and Instrumentality and at that point I'm still wondering about even things terms like 'First Child' and why it's capitalized and who calls them that and why. Some things can eventually be pieced together by their context, sort of, but that's a lot to put on a reader, it's like trying to mentally fill in a crossword when every other word in the clues has been replaced by gibberish.

If you are going to explain important plot things in the description than please do actually explain them, something like, 'In the year XXXX [THING HAPPENED], when [THING] did [THING]. In response an organization called NERV was created to [DO THING], using [THING].'

There is still a lot of oddity sprinkled throughout the sentence structure, although I know you did do extensive edits and were really good about taking advice from various people. I'm not going to go into detail on anything but, since it's the first sentence, just an fyi that words like 'She' are like 'They' and 'It' in that they're used to refer to someone who has already been established. Rei or even just 'the girl' would have removed that moment of floundering and trying to get the bearings in a new story. (Also not sure it that whole 'swirling of emotions' bit is something I would've recommended opening with...)

The style problem in a lot of ways is the same as it's always been. Although I can at least tell you've taken steps to improve it, every once in awhile I would still just get hit in the face with some bizarrely worded sentence that took me right out of a story I was already struggling to stay connected to. I don't understand it either, because you type sentences out on the forum or IRC all the time that are completely normal and fine and communicate information clearly and are not tortured and baffling at all. It still seems like something about switching over to story writing mode causes you to just massively overthink things and construct needlessly complicated sentences and weird metaphors and such. Don't do that. Just make the pictures happen in your head and then write them down, simply and plainly.

Anyway I caused an anime girl to kill herself and later helped end the world, apparently. Didn't ever really come across an explanation of what the Instrumentality was except for some vague implication it was bad, and then of course the world ended and there was something about Gendo's wife. Never knew he had a wife or much at all about him or had any clear idea of what he was trying to accomplish except for some vague implication that he was also bad and neglected robot girls except for when he hung around in their bedrooms at night.

To be absolutely fair to you, I'm not sure there was any writer that could have made me really get into a setting this aggressively emo and anime, but I would not call the choice of using it playing to your strengths and it probably was not a best choice for a contest, especially considering who the judges are.

I’m disappointed, Wibn. I leave you for a couple hours to get some sleep, and when I wake up, I see that you’ve made several mistakes in the description. Missing commas, a missing r in the word your and abuse of the word countless. You did a bad job, 1/8! :)

If someone sent me a page of this story and asked me if I can guess which CYS member wrote it, I’d say Wibn immediately. But, compared to your other stories (like Darius, which is painful to read), this is quite an improvement. There were times when I wanted to skip ahead, because reading about characters I didn’t yet care about being depressed just isn’t interesting. But at other times, the story was heartwarming, when the protagonists were trying to figure out how friendship works.

I suppose I can’t blame you for all that depression, you are writing a fanfic after all, the original is probably even worse. It’s better to have characters with flaws than those who can kill countless enemies without caring at all. If I understand correctly, in the anime everyone dies at the end, so it’s interesting you chose a happier ending for a sadness contest.

I’m not sure if this story will win, mainly because it’s just not all that sad. There’s a lot of depressing stuff, but you drop it on us at the start, before we can get to meet the characters, not to mention that depressing does not equal sad. A few characters die, but they are either not memorable enough for me to care, deserve to die or are happy to die to save their friends. But, with how rushed the other entries are, I doubt they’re much better in that regard.

I think you did a good job of explaining the world to those of us who never watched the anime. There are only a few short info pages, and people can understand most of the story just fine without them.

There’s a decent amount of choices. However, with there being so many one-choice pages between them, they still don’t seem to be enough. I can sort of understand that, since many of the one-choice pages would have to be heavily edited to add another one, and you can’t just stick them together because of the POV changes. It seems you’ll just have to plan better next time.

Most of the characters aren't very memorable. Even when Misato died, I didn't care about it. Maybe it's because characters sacrificing themselves to save someone else is such a overdone thing, maybe it's because Misato doesn't have enough of a personality, or maybe it's because I'm not a human and don't have emotions.

You took this contest very seriously. You started much earlier than everyone else, and while they were desperately smashing at their keyboards to avoid being shamed, you already had an almost complete story. You fixed all the mistakes very quickly, sometimes just minutes after I had found them. So, even though I had a hundred times more work with your story than with Ebon’s, because you’re as good at English as an alien that just found out about it a day ago, I still liked helping you.

Some people might not like this story because of the style, some because it’s so depressing and yet others because it’s a fanfic. But I think everyone can agree that you’re improving. Keep it up!

It was pretty good. I am not familiar with the original material, but It works without much context so it's a solid 5 in my book.

I haven't watched NGE before reading this story. I didn't know what to expect, but I must say it was worth the try.
I really loved the descriptions you did for each scene. Having a vague idea of what the anime looks like (based on various images I saw here and there) was enough for me to visualize your story in real time.

With all that said it doesn't mean I didn't have any difficulty following the story. Switching between places, characters and plots wasn't always clear, especially when it concerns characters that wasn't fully introduced to us. The same thing goes for the words related to the series universe.
I had to google a thing or two to understand what the story described me.

In any case I had a good time and was well immersed. Now I want to watch the anime more than before (just need to free some time).

Just a question stays in my mind: "Is the good ending of the fan fic the actual ending of the series ?" (better not answer this one, let's save what remains of the surprise)

Now I'm going to start of by saying that this is a decent story. I did watch a few episodes of the show before jumping into this story, so I do know the basics. Though that should never be needed of a reader. However for people who have never even heard of the show before it must have been confusing, because there were many times where you would just throw a word out there and assume that the reader knows what it means. The description did do a decent job at combating this, and you did explain thoroughly at times, but sadly a lot of the time I sat there confused to what certain terms mean. This was a major downside to the story I'm afraid.

The writing is extremely formal I'm afraid. While it is good for it to be formal under some circumstances, under most it is a bad thing. The spelling and grammar was good for the most part, though at times it was lacking. I'm glad you went through the effort of getting a beta reader to help you with this, as the final product would have suffered a lot.

I did love the ending, which I will not spoil here. I also appreciate how many words were put into this. This fact alone shows that you care a lot for the story, and your writing supports that. While the info dumps were a little much and did make the product suffer they show that you care about the story and the source material. Passion is one of the main things that separates story with amazing writing, from masterpieces. While this may be no masterpiece the passion put into it puts it above many other stories that may be better, but seem like the author does not care about their story.

Another thing is that this was for a contest. Most people got contests wait till the very last minute to rush some garbage out. It is clear from the product and other comments that this is not the approach you took. I am impressed at the effort put into this story, and that is multiplied exponentially when you consider that this is a contest entry. You could rushed out some undertale fan fiction in a day, but instead you worked throughout all of the time you had and even employed the help of beta readers to help with your spelling and grammar when the norm for contests is to ignore spelling and grammar, and use the deadline as an excuse.

In conclusion, this is not a bad game. It gave me a reason to start the show, and has a ton of words to chew through. If you are a fan of the show then read this. If not than read it anyway, provided you don't mind being confused at times and large info dumps. This is a welcome addition to the site in my eyes. If I knew nothing of the show I may have given it a 5 out of 8, but I'm giving it a 6 out of 8.

What is a neon genesis evangelion? It sounds like some kind of evangelical lion, but with neon something. I’m picturing a lion going door-to-door with a neon green shirt on, trying to convert you to some new genesisical religion. Oh, it’s a fanfic for something. So neon genesis evangelion is a real thing? Oh. Well, at least you included a lot of “things I need to know” to read the story. But I’m not sure you needed to put “monsters” in quotation marks. Most sane people would agree that anything that tries to completely destroy humanity could be considered an actual monster, without the quotation marks. There are some strange characters in that intro, though. What does “All is set to start Instrumentality” mean? Is that English? Anyway, that was a LOT of background information on that page. Clearly it’s all needed, so that’s nice to have, and it’s nice that the story doesn’t start out apologizing for being a bad story. Now on to the story!

The first page with the picture was a surprise, but nice. They are standing out of order, but whatever. I read the first paragraph four times and still didn’t get it. Someone is asking why Rei died. This person has no emotion at all. Or is that sentence about Rei? Her face is impassive and her body is motionless, so that must be Rei, the dead person. But her head is a flood of question. Wait, the dead person’s head? Clearly not, so that must be the other person. But wait, the other person’s body then lies motionless. That doesn’t make sense, so it must be about Rei. Well that doesn’t make sense, either, so I have no idea now which of the sentences apply to which person, the dead Rei or the other person.

This confusion continues nicely in the next paragraph. The subject of the first sentence is not Rei, so when the next sentence continues with “She,” clearly the “She” IS Rei…who is dead…and taking an ID card out of her pocket. And the ID card has a person staring on it. I’m guessing this is some futuristic holographic ID card. But wait, it’s more than that! The girl on the ID card, who was just staring off into space, just got up and walked over to the mirror! Hooray, holograms!

After reading the second paragraph a few more times, I THINK I get that there’s one person here. At one point I thought there were three, but that’s really quite unclear to me. And when I read on into the next paragraph, I can finally start to get the idea that there is one person here, Rei, and she died, but she’s alive. At least that’s what I think happened, I’m not completely sure. And reading through those paragraphs, because of the way the subjects and pronouns are used, it is very difficult to get to that point, and I’m still not completely sure I’ve got that right. I guess that’s part of the world that this fanfic is set in, but for those not familiar with that universe, this is really, really confusing. Switching from “her” to “Rei” to “the girl” really makes it sound like there’s more than one person here throughout this page.

I continued reading on about the different characters. There are some good details in there and good descriptions, but it is pretty hard to follow. I’m guessing a lot is simple because I’m not familiar with the setting and universe here. But also those pronouns and subjects switching around can be confusing at different times, as described above.

I appreciate the story and the clear effort that you put into the story. I wish I could understand it more, but it is fan fiction and might make a lot more sense to someone who knows the world within. Thank you for sharing this story with the site and good luck with your continued writing.