Neon Genesis Evangelion Battle Orchestra is a very exciting fighting game. The controls are easy to manage, it takes no time for a total beginner to become and expert. The weapons in the anime are implemented into the fight sequences, and gamers can unlock rare weapons like the Longinus Spear when the battle gage reaches a certain point. When the character's level of synchronization with the Eva goes past a certain point, all hell breaks lose! The Evas are not the only controllable characters, the players can choose to control the Angels as well.
The best feature of this game is that it allows a maximum of four players to the fight simultaneously. The players can either play a game of two against two, a battle royale that only the fittest can win, or fight against a group of angels together. Make use of the specific items during the battle and plan a winning strategy.
Use the story mode when playing alone. Adventure scenes of the characters are inserted between battles. These scenes are fully voiced and the plots include not only the canon characters like Shinji, Rei and Asuka, but the minor characters like Keisuke too. The original scenes lead to original endings, view the endings for every character and find out all of their fates.
Laggy, Frustrating Disaster While the PS2 version wasn't a masterpiece by any means, the PSP version is even worse. What were once briskly-paced battles are sluggish ordeals, made worse by the tiny screen; when combatants separate, it zooms out to show them all, making it virtually impossible to spot anything or anyone. This is just bad design, and evidently no-one saw fit to point this out before its release.
What's worse, the game lags horrendously when there are more than two characters on-screen, rendering already difficult three-on-one battles unreasonably complicated and frustrating. Naturally if you try to pick up an item -- which is enormously difficult -- you will do it slowly enough that enemies can travel across an entire stage and beat the stuffing out of you, and you are of course defenceless to stop them. 'Normal' difficulty would be more accurately termed 'infuriatingly hard', whereas 'hard' should be called 'impossible' in this game, thanks to a lack of quality control or, apparently, any playtesting at all.
The fighting dynamic is actually worse here than in the lacking PS2 version, where a foe can just pummel you continuously from the start of the fight to its finish, giving you no opportunity whatsoever to extract yourself from the melee. It's cheap, it's poorly-programmed, and it is something that should never see the light of day in any fighting game that calls itself a finished product.
There are more characters in the PSP version than the PS2 one...but good luck unlocking them. It also has more modes, but they're not really that fun, especially considering that most of the stages in the new 'Mission Mode' are exercises in either tedium or the same laggy frustration that can be seen in the other stages of the game.
That this would ever be sold for more than a value price is a complete travesty. It is little more than a momentary dalliance, even for the most hardcore fans of this series. It's an unfortunately shallow cash-in that could have been truly fun, but came out as badly as possible.
Save your money. If you must have this game, get the PS2 version. It is at least playable, even if not great.
InfernalMonkey(54) on 04, Aug. 2009 15:11 (HKT)
Wuh oh Absolutely terrible Smash Bros. style fighting game. Hardly any moves, useless items and brain dead opponents that just seem to jump around at random.
The frame rate also seems to struggle badly, which is pretty amusing considering nothing much happens on-screen.
