Yeah. I don't get that one at all. I know I've suggested before that I think it's pretty much #1 on my all-time most overrated anime list.
I remember this really hit the States about the same time as the Xenogears video game and the two were compared ad nauseam. I never really understood this.
Certainly they both were mecha based and revolved around heavy pseudo-religious stories, and Xenogears was presented anime style (and even contained about a half-hour to 45 minutes of anime scenes), but the content and presentation of the stories was so much different.
For starters, NGE's religious content was mostly relegated to the background where one really had to pay attention to pick-up on it, whereas Xenogears wore it on it's sleeve. (So much so that there was an outcry from various Christian organizations and it was even blacklisted from Wal-Mart for a short while.)
But the significant difference is in the substance. Yes, both are greatly mired in their own gobbledygook and nonsense and got extremely convoluted at times, but where NGE's ball of plot threads rolled out of control, Xenogears's at least had enough dangling threads to pull at to unravel it a bit. There was at least enough there to invoke some thought and emotion, all NGE manages to invoke are migraines.
But, despite all that, NGE's biggest problem is it's ending. It's a complete disaster. I laugh how all the apologists (fan-boys) continue to use the same old excuses over and over, yet are unwilling to acknowledge the most obvious: Anno and Sadamoto painted (Wrote?) themselves into a corner and didn't know what to do. So they just throw things out there left and right. Sometimes I almost think that they did this just confuse viewers and hope they wouldn't notice because I think that's what happened.
People, preach on and on about how deep and thought provoking it is, but really, I think they just say that because they don't understand it. It's like that science teacher everyone had in high school. You can BS your way through a paper, but as long as he doesn't understand it, he'll give you and "A."Same difference.
Also, I hate how the show is dour and dark just for the sake of being dour and dark. It bugs me to no end when writers do this and it seems to be more and more common. (nuBSG anyone?) It bugs me even more that people continue to fall for it because it's usually just cover-up for poor writing.
Speaking of Xenogears, it's too bad the Xenosaga anime was never done to completion. Had it been, it'd be my answer to the topic at hand.
Yep, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. There's a difference between something that is orchestrated to be complicated and something made to be profound or meaningful. It does have some deeper meaning you can get out of it though. For instance that Hideki Anno is sort of nuts and has/had some serious daddy issues. In fact, it's one of the themes of the series, shitty parenting, it's prolific in this series to the point of overkill.
