Haha, it was the other way around for me. I don't particularly care about giant robots (although technically there were no robots in Evangelion, all of the giants are biological). The bit I found fascinating was the way it wove in Judeo-Christian mythology and then ended on a giant psychological headfuck. I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

Big O for me.

Oh, yea. I forgot about that. Evangelion is officially less interesting.

BUMPY BUMP

What is this? Some kind of road in the Balkans?

Sing along with me:

It's a scoobie oobie doobie, scoobie doobie melody!

BLIMP

Maybe we should reach out to the people on the old "to-contact list when there's a new game".

Some of them must be willing. It's like 20 to 30 people strong.

It's easy to be disappointed if something is built up, but I had no particular expectations.

I had no particular expectations but watching Evangelion.... but I had an issue with the fact that there's this fourteen year old kid with feelings of inadequacy due to having been neglected and abandoned in the past, who is forced into the Evangelion program by his father where he is repeatedly abused.

To make matters worse, everyone I knew at the time that watched Evangelion all hated Shinji for just being ordinary kid and not the perfect hero they wanted.

Oh, it's absolutely horrendous the way all of the kids are treated, but I don't think the programme is at all sympathetic to those responsible. That is to say I think it's possible to depict horrible things without excusing or being sympathetic to those things.

I imagine those friends of yours were expecting some manner of shonen anime where the hero is obsessed with getting stronger and beating the newest seemingly unbeatable foe. It's definitely not that.

I find myself stepping into the role of defence here but Evangelion is not particularly a favourite of mine, I'm just contrary and will play devil's advocate. I concede Vitek is right about it being pretentious (the ending specifically, although apparently it was a result of running out of money for animation).

To clarify, it is a shonen anime, just not a totally braindead shonen anime.

Sure, it doesn't stick to the tropes certainly.

Probably but they also knew about X/1999, which is pretty violent considering that it's shojo. I'm not referring to the fact that almost all the characters are dead by the end, but that some of the deaths were a bit gruesome for what is technically girl manga/anime. They'd know that not everything followed the tropes of its assigned genre.