The real problem was the downwards spiral of everyones mental state as their issues never got adressed, making those later fights far far harder as Shinji increasingly hated the world and Asuka couldn't maintain her fragile Ego. Rei was the only one to come out of that arguably more complete as a person... and she still handed third impact to Shinji (presumably she has no say in it herself and has to give someone the trigger), who promptly said "Fuck everything and everyone" and started the apocalypse.
Yes,
and? Things haven't exactly changed here, Shinjiko now has new mental and physical issues and scars to replace her old canonical ones that will inevitably be picked at, hurray! Neither Rei nor Asuka are going to be in a better place than in canon either, and our metaknowledge isn't as useful as you'd think, since we can't directly act on it and we're in an AU. Not even mentioning the inevitable trauma, PTSD, death, despair, and so forth going to happen. This is Evangelion, not Sailor Moon, I'd be disappointed if everything doesn't wind up going to hell in a handbasket at some point, even if Shinjiko doesn't fall anywhere near to their canonical levels.
that's why I voted for All Four. I demand Big Chaos with our plucky little space cadet trying to Innovate her way into mutual understanding.
It'd only really work if they all used different forms of combat scaling from interpersonal, to EVA, to subterfuge, and so forth, and were much more varied than just tossing even more EVA combat at us when there's already plenty coming our way. The
concept of David v.s. Goliath is absolutely fun, but there are some core issues with 3/4 of the factions, primarily because fighting kaiju is only so interesting when they don't have any real emotion or character beyond a 2D archetype (or not at all in the case of Archons) to them to drive either the faction or foes in the faction in and of itself. Angels
already fill that niche and it runs the risk of complete oversaturation and a feeling of any conflict with the factions essentially being completely meaningless filler with nothing of substance behind them. Even the Angels in canon are more like dangerous obstacles that are used to challenge the characters and their relationships physically, emotionally and mentally, rather than true antagonists with any sort of real agenda in and of themselves. When people think of antagonists in Eva, they think SEELE, or Gendou,
not the Angels in and of themselves. Having more of the same is just meh, especially when the introduction of another faction is intended for more variation.
I'd honestly rather a human anti-NERV faction of some such, some mecha on mecha combat with human opponents with actual goals and shit, maybe using Jet Alones or stolen Evas. Add a dash of Gundam, like Zeta, to be mixed with the Eva, basically. Bonus points for added suffering from killing people too!
Something to mention @OP, I'm going to put my 2 cents to propone allowing some serious creative AT bullshit, even if it winds up turning the setting into a Gundam 00 or a straight up fantasy setting by the end. Asukaquest, for all it's flaws, did have one aspect I liked - we could pull some serious nonsense in training, but on the flipside anything we used on future Angels, or that they could see caused them to escalate in the next fight as well, even using our own AT tricks against us (as well did our human opponents). By the end we were capable of space combat, fly, could accidentally end the world with ease (and ourselves, we even did it too because of a 10/10 vote), had cloned ourselves into an AI, and all sorts of other insanity, it was fun as fuck. Sure, it
could have used some more limitation, so people weren't monofocused on !science!, much of which led nowhere, but hey!
Edit: generally, I'd say there needs to be more variety between options that are more compelling, more likely to actually mix things up, and are less traditional. Like, toss in some !AU Zentradi or something maybe, or nerfed !eldritch monstrosities ala Demonbane.
[X][THREAT] Kaiju
- [X] The Shadows
