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Evangelion Raising sim(s)
Thursday, July 24th, 2025 09:07 pmA while back I saw a twitter thread about an Evangelion video game with social simulation elements, like making Shinji punch a wall to lower his stats. This was both very amusing and very compelling to me, the "see, they can grow up to be anything" aspect of raising sims is an optimistic counterpoint that makes the canon downward spiral of Evangelion even more tragic. So when I found the Evangelion raising game on an abandonware site, I was excited to see what they did with it.
After several weeks of in-game play I realized I had the wrong game.
There wasn't just one Evangelion raising game, there were several. They just... kept making them? Kept iterating on them? Gainax did make the OG Princess Maker but it's still surprising to me that they took so many swings at the same concept.
In chronological order we've got:
Ayanami Raising Project, with Rei as the subject. (original release 2001, rerelease 2003 with an Asuka mode).
Neon Genesis Evangelion 2, which emphasized the "simulation" of the whole cast, not just the subject. Lets you access multiple alternate timelines, contains Deep Lore not shared in the series. This was the wall-punching one (2003)
Shinji Ikari Raising Project, with Shinji as the subject. Also offers several different timelines or takes on the source material, and works in elements from the dialogue-heavy Girlfriend of Steel game. This is the one I'm playing now (2004)
Girlfriend of Steel 2 is maybe more a dating sim than a raising sim but there's a lot of overlap anyway (2003)
This is interesting to me for a few reasons:
It forms a remarkably consistent... iterative canon? providing multiple takes on the series and providing the possibility that things could be better than they turned out in the original, they just didn't because the characters were selfish and short-sighted. The characterization in the original is strengthened through contrast.
There was another mecha student sim game, Gunparade March. Did they play it and think "this would be so cool for Eva" and tried it repeatedly? Were they trying to overtake a perceived competitor? Was Gunparade March so popular they were just trying to keep up? I dunno!
