Shinseiki Evangelion: Gakuen Datenroku
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse

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Nobody has written a review for Neon Genesis Gakuen Datenroku yet???? What the heaaallll......

Story
All right, for the people who has already watched the original N.G.E, I have to tell you, the story isn't that great. Its the type of plots where the protagonist and his friend have to fight the antagonists in their school uniforms. Basically, the ANGELS are invading the earth and there has to be a counteract against it, so teenage students are given the job of exterminating them. They are Asuka, Rei, Shinji, and pretty boy Kaworu. Sounds like the original anime/manga eh? But the thing is, they fight with weapons in ... their school uniforms instead of huge gigantic robots. The story is enough to keep you entertained. I give it a 7/10 (Good)

Art
I must say, I enjoyed the art. Everyone looks so much sexier, especially Rei (in my opinion). Shinji also looks more handsome. Excuse me, everyone looks a whole lot better. My point being, the art is something to look forward to. 10/10 (Great) For those of you who already read the manga and is reading my review, I give the art a 10 probably because I am comparing it to the original. It really is THAT much better.

Character
FINALLY!!! Let me tell you guys this. In the original N.G.E, Shinji was the biggest crybaby retard I HAVE EVER SEEN. Everytime I saw this guy saying "No No I dont wantz 2 do it bcuz I am too short and am i am a poosy," I wanted to deck this guy in the face. I mean, he has everything right; big gigantic robot with a cool suit. But here, he has a HANDGUN. A MOTHERFCKIN HANDGUN. He looks so good with that, especially with the help of the great art. He is NOT that big of a crybaby in this manga, so you will like Shinji A LOT better. As for everyone else, Rei opens up and starts to actually have feelings for Shinji, Asuka is a tsundere to Shinji, and Kaworu is gay for Shinji and vice versa. 8/10 (Very Good)

Enjoyment
Honestly, the scanlators took too long to scanlate this, so it took me about like 4 months to actually finish reading the whole manga. I dont blame them; they have their own lives too. Im just saying that the big gap had an impact on my interest for this manga. But when I originally read it, I was so excited. So I give this a 8/10 (Very Good)

Overall
Overall, this manga is probably going to be more enjoyable to those who already watched the original NGE. Youre going to see a lot of familiarities between them, and I found that to be pretty cool. There are also many new characters in this manga, like a cute little girl who likes Shinji and her brother who hates Shinji. That guy is quite the player here. Anyway, this manga would probably take a good 45 minutes to finish (on average).

Remember reading this a year ago and feeling empty due to how disappointing it is
I actually like the concept and up for a reimagining of the anime's story but the way they did it was lack luster at best
It for one is far to short and started to feel rushed towards the half way point
The abrupt as hell ending is probably the worse part of all of this as if the auithor gave up and slapped it on
The highlight here is the art style witch i found my self drawing some of the characters in it
over all this is a missed opportunity It ... would be better if the writing was moar thought out and had moar chapters to pad it out

tl;dr: A complete mess of a spin off that is a bit fun at first due to how different it is but that becomes a slog once the novelty wears off.

This is a reimagining of the well renowned Neon Genesis Evangelion. However, it isn’t clear at all why this exists. The basic premise seems to be the same characters going through a similar plot line with a lot of the same terminology, but instead of being a futuristic mecha series it’s a urban fantasy action series, which is a pretty interesting concept. However, it feels like the mangaka completely missed the point of NGE, or ... at the minimum had absolutely no ability to recapture any of it in their own writing. The characters in this are superficial facsimiles that are essentially nonfunctional from the point of view of storytelling. For example, Shinji is still indecisive and has issues regarding his father, but the writing completely misses the point in conveying why he’s like that. The same applies to Asuka, Rei, and Kaworu, where it uses the same broad archetypes and some plot points, but fails to capture how that gave the characters depth. It tries to show them going through similar character arcs to those in NGE, but it doesn’t work at all.

The plot is complete nonsense. It seems to want to use a lot of concepts from NGE in a new context, such as NERV in this being the name of the high school the cast attends or Evas in this being weapons that children can summon in order to fight angels, with Shinji’s weapon for example being a gun. However, this is really half assed and there’s no sense of thematic cohesion to anything. The original elements of the plot line are even worse, being a bunch of random events thrown around with a terrible sense of pacing with no sense of direction, leading to a completely underwhelming conclusion. Ultimately, underneath the use of NGE elements, it isn’t clear at all what type of story the mangaka was trying to tell or why they were using NGE as a foundation to tell it. Well, I suppose I can understand why the mangaka would want to use NGE seeing how popular it is. But I don’t understand why they were allowed to use it seeing as it doesn’t really build on NGE at all.

Furthermore, the official translation is pretty bad. It’s incredibly stiff and unnatural to the point of being hard to follow at times. It also thrown in random Japanese words for no reason when using English terms would suffice, which makes it feel really amateurish. The manga is also unnecessarily text heavy, which makes these issues in the translation feel a lot more damaging than they would in most manga. Art wise this is one of the rare manga where I feel the art got worse as the manga progressed. The first volume is actually pretty good art wise, but the art in the last volume felt pretty weak. I feel part of that comes down to how the first volume has pretty good flow in terms of paneling and such while the last volume is a mess in that regard, so even if the style was pretty much the same things come across significantly better in the first volume.