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Product:
  Neon Genesis Evangelion Wafers Chap. 8

Product Type:  Snack

Manufacturer:  Bandai

Suggested Retail Price (SRP):  ¥105

Purchased from:  Family Mart, Osaka Bay, Osaka

Rarity:  Uncommon

Reviewer:  Rich (Webmaster)

 

Anime food is not as common in Japan as you would hope, and most of the time you find any it is generally sweets, cakes and biscuits.

These Evangelion wafers are a very typical example of the kind of anime branded food you can pick up in convenience stores across Japan.  The packet contains a thin, European-style wafer biscuit measuring about 5cm by 7cm which consists of a few layers of wafer with thin chocolate layers sandwiched in between.  The packaging itself comes in two designs, which you may think would mean different flavours, but in fact the content of both types is the same.  The wafer itself tastes pretty much like any wafer biscuits you can pick up in Aldi or Lidl, sweet and tasty enough but ultimately insubstantial and a bit unsatisfying.  It's not even Evangelion themed, would it really have been that hard to put a character or logo on the wafer itself?
 

The lack of branding on the wafer itself does however tell you an important thing - it's not the wafer that is the main selling point.  The Evangelion branding on the packet will draw people in but it's the collectable plastic card inside that people will actually want.  The plastic art cards are a little smaller than the wafer, which makes them slightly larger than a normal playing card, and appears to feature a mix of new and well known Evangelion character art.  The wafer I bought contained the card of Shigeru Aoba shown in the picture on the right, I was quite impressed that it was a lesser known Evangelion character and that the image was one I had not seen before, but I did kind of wonder what the point was.
 

These cards don't really have any purpose, they're too small to display but too big to fit in a normal cardwallet.  There's a small box of stats, but it's nothing that can be used in a card game either.  This made the whole thing seem a bit odd, they may have been cheap but for your cash you got a wafer which was pretty underwhelming and a pretty but rather pointless card.  I'm sure there are collectors of these cards in Japan, but unlike phonecards (which had entire shops devoted to the collector's market) there seemed to be little sell-on value or demand for them.

I'm sure most Western fans would buy these in an instant much like we did, but to be honest there are nicer Japanese snacks to eat and better budget Evangelion merchandise available.  Have a bit of a look around and you will find other items which are much more deserving of your money.

Extras:

A difficult one, as it's not entirely clear if it is the card or the wafer that is the extra item in these.  However, we'll assume the card is the extra, as such it's nice enough and it's impressive that it's not just the usual Rei & Asuka pics, but it's nothing special.

Ratings

Feature:   Extras:
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