I’ve recently begun watching a lot of Evangelion, for multiple reason. For one, I hadn’t seen it in its entirety until now; Adult Swim loved to only air the last three episodes over and over, and prior to that, I just never bothered pursuing other methods, legal or otherwise, to sit down and watch it. Not much in the way of local anime shops in my area, and I was too busy downloading music and porn off of peer-to-peer networks instead of downloading fansubs like I should have been. Also my whole period from ages 19-35 of not being able to watch a movie or TV show by myself didn’t help. But now I have righted that wrong! I watched the original 26 episodes, The End of Evangelion, and the first two Rebuilds. So now I can finally understand the other 50% of what my fellow fucked up, burned out, never logged off gender freaks with Neocities pages are talking about, instead of merely nodding my head in acknowledgement until the conversation goes back to Serial Experiments Lain. Real quick Eva review: kicking myself for not being motivated enough to get into this series much earlier. Especially since, like a lot of things in my life, I spent a lot of time reading about the show in old issues of Gamefan and I should have jumped at the opportunity to check it out like I did for so many obscure import games.
The other reason I’ve been watching so much Eva is so that I can finally get all the context I need for this PSP game I played many years ago. The game I will be writing about today: Evangelion 3nd Impact.
So what is 3nd Impact? Well, let me just get this bit out of the way now: “3nd” is not me or the game misspelling anything. 3nd is a play on words. It is a reference to the 3rd Impact, the cataclysmic event that NERV and the Eva pilots are trying to prevent. 3 is pronounced “San” in Japanese. So you take these two things and you get “San-nd Impact,” which when spoken with a Japanese accent gives you “Sound Impact.” The “sound” aspect to the title is because it is a rhythm game. An Evangelion rhythm game. That sounds unusual at first, until you sit down and remember that Evangelion games as a whole are unusual. Most Eva games tend to be visual novels where Shinji gets a girlfriend, which, as someone who watched End of Evangelion only a couple days before writing this, Shinji being with a girl seems like a terrible idea. Rarely do you get a game that either follows the action elements of the series, or the internal emotional strife and external drama of the characters. You still don’t get that here. This is a game where music plays and you have to press buttons in time with it, like Parappa the Rapper if Parappa had to freestyle about self-loathing and existentialism.
3nd Impact was a game I played quite a bit of way back when; it was one of the first games I put onto my PSP after PSP modding became simple enough for an idiot like me to figure out. Despite my lack of Eva knowledge at the time, I still had to play it, because it was a rhythm game developed by Grasshopper Manufacture, with the music being arranged and remixed by Akira Yamaoka. I had to play it! This game is…well, the game is fine. It is perfectly okay. I had a fun time with it, and I’ll probably come back to it to get higher scores.
I admit that I had higher expectations for this game. Hearing “Suda51” and “Neon Genesis Evangelion” in the same sentence these days gets your mind racing. Giving Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture a license where stylish characters are existential and geopolitics are involved seems like something that could have been an all-timer, rather than a game that’s just kind of fun for a little while. But then I remember that this was not modern day Grasshopper, or the Grasshopper that delivered Killer7 or No More Heroes 1. This was 2011 Grasshopper Manufacture. This was when Grasshopper was going through it. This was “let’s make a licensed PSP game so we can make money and stay alive because EA is fucking us” Grasshopper Manufacture. Suda had one foot out the door at this point, and by the time he got pulled back in, No More Heroes became the vessel for his feelings rather than Evangelion.
Or maybe this was one of those times Grasshopper’s marketing team just put Suda’s name on the box so it would sell more, like Hideo Kojima. They do that sometimes! There are games in that company’s catalogue where Suda’s involvement was beta testing, then his name gets put out into the universe and then he has to do a bunch of interviews giving credit to the actual creative teams.
I bring all this up because the game is pretty formulaic. And yes, I am fully aware that Evangelion itself is pretty formulaic, but at least the series handled its repetition in a unique way; no two Angel fights were alike. 3nd Impact plays as such: The first level of each playlist has the Angel of the week come to Earth, where UN forces struggle in vain to shoot it down, represented by you playing a rhythm game against the Angels’ AT field. The second level is set to a montage of one of the Eva pilots where you continue to press buttons to a beat. Then the third level is the actual Angel fight, where you do your rhythm game stuff set to an FMV of the fight taken directly from the movies. You do this over and over again until you get to the 8th Angel battle.
The fight against Sahaquiel is where the game gets a little more creative. This is the Angel that is set to crash land on Earth kamikaze-style, so the EVA’s have to physically run out and intercept it with an AT Field. Instead of the standard three-level set up, it gets doubled to six. The first one is the standard fight with the UN forces, then the next three have you playing as the individual EVA units as they rendezvous to intercept the Angel, avoiding obstacles like power lines and protective walls along the way. I liked these levels the most because they were actually thematic to the movie, and because you had to time your jumps in time with the music, I felt it did a much better job of being an Evangelion rhythm game that simply pressing the circle button when a hexagon overlaps with another hexagon.
Then sadly, the game goes back to the standard three level setup, though it does add a fourth level at the end where Mari induces Berserker mode in Unit-02. Playing the Sahaquiel fight made me wonder how much better the game would be if it used its rhythm game design to fit in more with the Angel encounters. Like, for example, using rhythm to counteract the Coriolis Effect and steady Shinji’s sniper rifle in the fight against Ramiel. Or maybe having to get your synch ratio to a specific point before a timer runs out, because you’re fighting against Samshel. Little things like that. Like a lot of what-if’s in games, I’m sure the answer is time and budget. But maybe someday Suda and Grasshopper could get another shot at an Evangelion game, with a little more freedom in the development process. As it is, they made a fine game that looks nice, plays well, and sounds good, but I was just hoping for a little bit more.
I will add one more thing: 3nd Impact is a pretty harsh judge. Getting a five-star rank in a level requires you to be as close to human perfection as possible. I guess in that sense, Grasshopper nailed the spirit of Evangelion, because getting praise from Gendo Ikari is a complete fucking miracle.
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