Just a reminder that Anima 4 and 5 come out later tonight/tomorrow depending on your time zone!

Edit: and they're now available digitally if that's your jam!

The ending of volume 5 features a new version of Unit 01 I've never seen before:

That new Unit 01 looks like some major super robot nonsense if I've ever seen some. Floating armor extensions, really?

It's a bio-mechanical god at this point, IINM. I'm not surprised in the least.

It looks like it went Super Saiyan... da fuk?

Here are two more views of it:

I'm really not sure what this form is. It shows up in the very last pages of the story.

Some translation stuffs...



名ナシの赤子
Baby with no name

最後の最後で新しいＥＶＡ出すとか
Unveil a new Eva at the very end?

渦巻く
最終号機
サギ擬感
Swirling
Final Eva-01
False Doubt

戦闘が終り機体も安定し拘束を
解いて観測用の感覚器を増強した
戦後復興国連月泥棒計画仕様
The battle over, the unit even stabilizes, and the restraints unbind and observational sense organs are enhanced.
Postwar Reconstruction U.N. Lunar Theft Project Specifications
[NOTE: This is not all of Yamashita's comment, just the most interesting part.]


まっさらなエヴァが生まれた
この滅びる世界に。
A brand-new Eva was born in this ruined world.

冬月がうめき、加持が「そうか―」答えに辿り着く。
Fuyutsuki groaning, Kaji at length responds with, "I see...".


ココカラ彼ラノ新生紀
Their newborn century begins here
["Newborn century" = shinseiki (新生紀), a play on shinseiki (新世紀) as in "new century".]

I discovered something interesting: the first volume of the Anima tankouban, while corresponding the first chapter (or "season") of the story in serialized form, is actually written completely from scratch. None of the serialized episodes for Chapter 1 appear in the tankouban, and accordingly the serialized Chapter 1 will not be translated by Seven Seas!

The reason for this insanity is mentioned in the Visual Book, where the tankouban's redone first chapter (confusingly, the "episodes" are instead called "chapters" in the five tankouban...) makes its debut. The serialized Chapter ("Season") 1 was written not by Yamashita, but by his "sensei" Takuma Kageyama, a novelist and sci-fi enthusiast, as a favor. I'm guessing the redo was done for the sake of consistency if nothing else. It's easy to find complaints about Yamashita's writing style in the Japanosphere, so this makes me wonder... whose Chapter 1 is better? Will some gallant sucker ever translate them, knowing an alternate version is going to be translated anyway? Hopefully, one day, this mystery that I only just learned about in the past 24 hours can be resolved...

I've also asked Seven Seas if they are planning on localizing the Visual Book as well; hopefully I get a useful reply.

On a final note -- I wonder if the remaining scans for Chapter 3 will ever turn up...? It would be nice to see how the content between the serialized and tankouban versions differs -- and have the original Japanese at my fingertips if I wanted to translate something not included in the tankoubans. I'm not really in any position right now to import any number of bulky magazines, so perhaps some angel out there will hear my prayers.

I have some additional bits and bobs translated, but I'm going to wait for the clarification about Visual Book for the moment. I didn't pay much attention to Anima before, but now that I'm looking more closely, it's much as I suspected -- simultaneously fascinating and inane.

I've made my way through 3 and a half of the original Kageyama episodes, and they're... bad. It's hard to succinctly describe just how bad they really are.

Episode 1, which is about the battle against the MP Evas and you'd THINK would have a really easy time being a great read, wastes a significant amount of time blathering about bullshit like predictive computer modeling. Kageyama, sadly, cannot make any of his technology porn asides feel even a little relevant or interesting. (Contrast with, say, Michael Crichton, who could babble on for pages about some topic you know nothing about, and make it not only interesting but suspenseful.) A sense of time and place is poorly established. Pacing is stilted. There's SOME interesting and cool stuff in the prose, but the ideas aren't really developed at all.

Episode 2 fares quite a bit better. I actually liked this one; I got through it easily. This is the one about Eva-Quatre crashing from orbit for ~REASONS UNKNOWN~. It spends a some time at the start with a classroom scene where Rei is telecommunicating with her clones in orbit -- yes, she's doing this at school for some reason -- and broadcasting through a robot cat named Nyankichi (I can't make this shit up). Meanwhile, Asuka is staring at her and contemplating Rei's beauty and humanity. It's weirdly shippy. Then Rei starts seizing or something, and Asuka has to give medical treatment according to Nyankichi's instructions. Rest of the episode is about Eva-01 trying to intercept the falling Eva-Quatre and trying to stop its S2 engine from going haywire, like some weird fusion of Sahaquiel and Jet Alone.

Episode 3 is bad. It is so bad. It reads like a rough draft or something. Starts off... FINE, with plans for Eva-01's renovation into "Super Eva" (lol what a shitty name) getting discussed. Then the first Angel Carrier shows up and it turns to total shit. This is supposed to be a really important battle that sets up Anima's whole "Shinji is Eva-01 now!" thing, but somehow Kageyama makes Eva-01 getting double-teamed by a zombie MP Eva and a possessed partly-disassembled prototype vague and tedious. How quickly it ends once Eva-02 gets there really rubs it in how few shits Kageyama gives. The final scenes taking place at Nerv HQ are weirdly truncated, breezing past some awfully strange developments like they're nothing at all.

Episode 4, I'm still working on, but get this: it breaks continuity with #3 so badly that not only is the end of the previous episode retconned, important events anticipated at the end of #3 are COMPLETELY SKIPPED OVER. Starting the episode, you're left with effectively no idea of what is actually going on anymore. Something rather alarming seems to be happening, but nobody is treating it as something alarming, instead rambling on for countless paragraphs with technojargon that takes forever to get to the point. It makes one YEARN for the bridge crew's overdramatic reactions in the anime. Eventually we get to a sequence introducing Rei Quatre, which is ... better than what came before.

Even though Seven Seas isn't publishing the Kageyama episodes, I'd feel uncomfortable posting them somewhere in Google's reach for the moment. I'm not sure how many more I'll do. From what I've seen of Yamashita's rewrite, it's better in almost every way. He seems to totally skip past the MP Eva battle, which is a shame IMO, as he could have written a better version easily. I get the vague sense that he's transposed the best moments from Kageyama Episode 1 into the Angel Carrier battles, though, so maybe nothing has really been lost.

I also ended up translating most of the Final Episode/Chapter/Whatever, because BlueBasilisk got me curious about what the deal with that new Eva-01 was and I didn't want to wait over a year to find out. I'm clearly insane.

BlueBasilisk wrote:Here are two more views of it:

SPOILER: Show

I'm really not sure what this form is. It shows up in the very last pages of the story.

There are more images of this form in the book?

Everything that exists was already posted on this page of the thread.

https://www.facebook.com/PlanetManga/ph ... =3&theater

ANIMA is being translated into italian too.

Question!
In the opinion of those that follow this story: is it worth it?
I've seen a lot of figures of this series released but I'm not really into these "alternate universe" stories... The figures look kinda cool and that spiked my curiosity, but I'd rather have the opinion of someone else before I jump into reading them.

Thanks!

SEELE-01 wrote:Question!
In the opinion of those that follow this story: is it worth it?
I've seen a lot of figures of this series released but I'm not really into these "alternate universe" stories... The figures look kinda cool and that spiked my curiosity, but I'd rather have the opinion of someone else before I jump into reading them.

Thanks!

Basically, the story is a complete mess beyond your wildest fever dreams, but it somehow manages to be quite endearing in a strange, stockholm syndrome-y way

Blockio wrote:Basically, the story is a complete mess beyond your wildest fever dreams, but it somehow manages to be quite endearing in a strange, stockholm syndrome-y way

Daaaamn

Blockio wrote:Basically, the story is a complete mess beyond your wildest fever dreams, but it somehow manages to be quite endearing in a strange, stockholm syndrome-y way

This should be on the cover of one of the volumes.

FYI, this is out a full 2 months early on digital platforms.

Blockio wrote:Basically, the story is a complete mess beyond your wildest fever dreams, but it somehow manages to be quite endearing in a strange, stockholm syndrome-y way

At what point does the timeline branch off? Are there any contradictions with the main series?

Tumbling Down wrote:At what point does the timeline branch off? Are there any contradictions with the main series?

IT differs from the original in quite a few things, but as far as I'm aware it's all described in the story.

-Please no spoilers here, I'm only on chapter 5 and I'm sure there are others like me who opted to wait for the official translation by Seven Seas-

So how does Seven Seas' localization/translation hold up compared to the original? Any weird differences you've noticed so far in vol 1? I just want to make sure I'm getting the best experience, after my initial viewings of NGE and EoE left me angry and confused, and I didn't know why until I found fansubs instead of watching ADV and ESPECIALLY Manga Entertainment's botched dubs.

Also, does anyone else find it weird how sequences are paced? Yamashita seems to hold off on some environmental and technical details until they're needed for context in an action scene, and breaks the pacing and flow to explain it. Does this improve as it goes?

I have not read it myself, but have absorbed enough through Reichu and BlueBasilisk to tell you that your feeling of anger and confusion will not change regardless of the version. Anima has some interesting concepts, but the overall story (especially in the later volumes) is a complete and utter mess.
When Bluebasilisk gave me a rundown of the story a while back, he repeatedly stated that he was not paraphrasing or making fun of the events - there is some mind-bogglingly insane shit in there