The Evangelion of Video Games?

[komos90]

What video game would you consider the Evangelion of video games?
i.e.
A video game who's plot, symbolism and every little detail can be discussed and argued about.
A video game that get's really trippy.
A video game that is a complete mindfuck.

I'm just wondering what games remind you of Evangelion and why

[NemZ]

before you get flooded with MGS nonsense I'd like to throw out To The Moon.

• great charecterization covering a wide emotional range
  
• trippy narrative with lots of twists and turns
  
• crazy sci-fi tech enabling a sort of instrumentality
  
• very focused on human drama despite all the weirdness
  
• deals with abnormal psychology, specifically autism

I mean to be perfectly honest it has much more in common with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind then eva (no mechas, no generational conflict, no vast conspiracy, no religious symbolism) but it's a great game and deserves more attention.

[Monk Ed]

Oh interesting, I bought To the Moon ages ago and have yet to touch it. Now I have a reason to.

[NemZ]

Of course (and I can't believe I didn't immediately jump to this), Xenogears is pretty damn clearly the closest thing to eva as a game you're going to get outside of the officially licensed stuff.

All those things I said To The Moon lacks? Yeah, it's in Xenogears all over the place. It even has trouble staying narratively coherent towards the end when the time crunch and/or budget became a problem.

[Monk Ed]

Xenogears, start to finish, never had any of the same impact on me as Evangelion, or even other games I would fall far short of calling "the Evangelion of video games". I beat it only a few years ago and yet I struggle even to remember several characters' names. I don't find it as worthy of analysis or interpretation, either. I really don't want to know its deep secrets, but that likely goes back to the part where I never became emotionally invested in the characters. It's not the lack of voice-acting or anything like that either -- the exact same happened to me with Xenosaga, which I recently beat and have had no interest in seeing the sequels of.

[Tankred]

What video game would you consider the Evangelion of video games?

Big Rigs.

[The Eva Monkey]

Off the cuff, I would say Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation. Yeah, it may not have had a heap of symbolism or anything like that, but like Evangelion, it redefined what a video game could be for me, particularly in terms of narrative and story.

[SimplyMason0]

Off the cuff, I would say Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation. Yeah, it may not have had a heap of symbolism or anything like that, but like Evangelion, it redefined what a video game could be for me, particularly in terms of narrative and story.

I replayed MGS1 and it dose show how much potential video games in stories could be. It wraps every subplot nice and perfectly.

MGS2 did the trippy effect though memes and the hype surrounding it. It also satirize the idea of sequels doing similar things each game. To fully understand it, you have to understand the hype for this game and ignore all the sequels after it(as they were never planned). It also gets ignored due to the reaction of Raiden in the west and people taking it to face value with MGS4.

I don't think the other games really measure that much compared to those 2. They're great but not as great as MGS1 and MGS2.

[Stryker]

Bastion.

[Ænimal]

Tetris

[CJD]

MGS2 seems to be the most common answer to this question. I'd also nominate both the original Deus Ex and Planescape: Torment. A more recent example that I'd be remiss not to mention as a candidate would be Spec Ops: The Line.

I also feel like I'm forgetting something, but that's what comes to mind at the moment.

[SimplyMason0]

Was Spec Ops really that deep? I thought that was a joke or exaggeration.

[hui43210]

Big Rigs.

LOL!

[NemZ]

Can we stop with the obvious trolling and title-only replies? If you're going to list something make the effort to say why you think it qualifies.

[Atropos]

Chrono Cross. The linked article has a pretty good exploration of its ideas and its flawed execution, along with the information that the game's creator actually worked at Gainax before leaving in the early '90s!

[CJD]

Was Spec Ops really that deep? I thought that was a joke or exaggeration.

Spec Ops had a surprising amount of depth believe it or not. On the surface it's just a generic third person military shooter, but the deeper you dig the more you find to it. On one level it's a criticism of American foreign policy in recent times, the idea that we're some form of "world police" with the duty to protect people. But really, to fully appreciate Spec Ops you need to have some understanding of the modern video game industry, and how fascinated both it and consumers are with violent military shooters.

If you play the game and want to read more, there was a book written on the title: Killing Is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line.

It's definitely a title I've only come to appreciate more and more as time goes by.

[NemZ]

Chrono Cross.

I seriously HATE that game. The plot was fubared and gave the original cast off-screen weaksauce deaths, the new charecters far too numerous and generally forgettable, the element system was tedious while completely losing every scrap of what made Chrono Trigger so charming, and simply by existing it cut off the possibility of there ever being a true sequel to the original.

Utter and complete failure of a game. -10/10, would not recommend even as a joke.

Chrono Cross: not even once.

[Dream]

I don't have much experience with videogames, but...

I would nominate Silent Hill 2 for the title of "most Evangelion game".

Aside from being the pinnacle of the Silent Hill series, the unique and profoundly emotional story (as well as it's structure) and it's reliance on psychological uncanity makes it very reminiscent of Eva for me.

Couple that with very broken characters, failures and miscomunication/misunderstandings being a major element of the game, high amounts of body horror, and an unrivaled integration of story and gameplay and i think you could see why i nominate it for this.

[Shinoyami65]

I would nominate Silent Hill 2 for the title of "most Evangelion game".

Seconded to hell and back. Evangelion and Silent Hill 2 have many similarities, such as an unconventional and insecure protagonist; frequent metaphorical representations of the characters' emotional insecurities, sexuality and troubled pasts and similar themes such as miscommunication, flawed relationships, religious imagery and sexual anxiety.

The other Silent Hill games have similar themes, but none delve as deeply into the psyche of the main protagonist as Silent Hill 2. The original, third and fourth games all focus more on the antagonists than on the insecurities of the main protagonist, whereas SH2 delves deep into James's own dark past in a similar manner to Evangelion's psychoanalysis of Shinji throughout the series. Like Evangelion, SH2 also becomes darker as you go on. I would also consider SH2 the most Evangelion game because its endings can be considered more ambiguous and not necessarily good or bad (much like how EoE and EoTV are not necessarily good or evil, and can be debated upon). Most of the other SH games have a much clearer distinction between whether an ending is good or bad.

Silent Hill 3 does have similar themes to Evangelion such as motherhood, teenage sexual anxiety and child/parent relationships, but I consider it to be more dissimilar to Evangelion than SH2 simply because it's pointed in a different direction in terms of character development and overall tone. The idea of religion and creating a God is prevalent in both SH3 and Evangelion, though, as is the metaphorical symbolism of the monsters (this is prevalent in SH1, SH2 and SH4 as well). Some sequences such as Heather confronting Dark Alessa (a more violent interpretation of Rei talking to Armisael!Rei?) and the contrast between Claudia's dogmatic ideals compared to Vincent's mysterious-yet-realistic knowledge also did remind me of Evangelion somewhat. Much like Evangelion, the Silent Hill protagonists are generally thrown into danger without any explanation, and have to rely on more knowledgeable characters for guidance. They often are forced to explore their own psyche and the minds of others through trippy phenomenae, similar to the Evangelion characters (although while Evangelion does this through introspective metaphysical sequences Silent Hill makes its metaphors part of the environment as physical enemies or items).

[Fireball]

The usual suspects have already been named with Xenogears and MGS2 but looking at it from the angle of unreasonable huge fanbase that has remaind relevant 15 later and how it influenced the industry and countless of other games I'd say Final Fantasy VII.