Book Review: The Essential Evangelion Chronicle: Side A

Even though the original Evangelion series is more than 2 decades old this year, the anime's popularity just does not die down. I guess a bit has to do with the reboot series Rebuild of Evangelion. I enjoy them all, the TV series, films, everything. I'm a fan, and this book is made for fans of the original TV series.

This book covers the first 13 episodes of the TV anime series.

The Essential Evangelion Chronicle: Side A is a large 128-page paperback published by Udon Entertainment. This is an in-depth companion that features character profiles, episode breakdowns and beautiful art.

The character profiles includes the analysis of each character's personalities, motivation and history. For those who followed, the series, it's a good refresher and also elaborates of the relationships between the characters. This includes the 3 Eva pilots Shinji, Rei and Asuka, the staff in the control room, Shinji's classmate, and even Misato's pet Pen Pen, etc.

The episode breakdown has the summary, explanation of what happened, sequential screen stills and even information such as the tanks, trucks and weapons that appear in the anime. There's caption for everything, from the pods that go into the EVAs to what kind of breathable liquid that's inside.

The last few pages feature some of the merchandise, such as the DVDs and figurines, that came out over the last few years.

This book is no different from an encyclopedia essentially. It's informative and insightful.

One thing that surprised me is how well the art from the anime is reproduced. The anime is more than 20 years ago and it seems that this book has used the higher resolution screen stills. Everything appears sharp and nice.

This is a wonderful companion. Highly recommended to Evangelion fans.

The Essential Evangelion Chronicle: Side A is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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