If you like animé, over-thinking things, and plain out weirdness, 1) you’re a Heroine Sheik reader and 2) you probably know a show called Neon Genesis Evangelion.

A giant robot animé with an existential twist, “Eva” follows a high-school boy named Shinji as he saves his post-apocalyptic world from destruction–despite his detachment from the people in it. Though the show came out in the mid-90′s, and its complicated symbolism can sometimes make it hard to follow, Eva still comes off as an amazingly thought-provoking, well-written, and contemporary series even today, thirteen years after it was made. What’s more, it makes viewers question the very point of living. Yeah, it’s not a happy show.

Proper Eva dorks like myself (looking through the archives, I see I’ve somehow managed to avoid ranting about this–ever. How is that possible?) can babble for hours about the meaning of Eva terms like “instrumentality” and “third impact”–but mostly its the depth and sadness of Eva’s characters that make the show stand out. Like Requiem for a Dream, it’s somehow wonderful and horribly depressing at the same time.

Which brings us to Petit Eva: Evangelion @ High School. Petit Eva is a new Nintendo DS game that uses the Evangelion characters, taking them out of their sad, existential world and plopping them down in the middle of a high school comedy, complete with playground bullying from the Evas (the robotos) themselves. Of course, the character design has been changed. Now all the sad, lonely saps Eva fans knew and loved have been transformed into super deformed–and super adorable–wide-eyed teens. It’s not the first time Eva’s good name has been used for something ridiculous, and needless to say the merchandise is both equally cute and equally ready to fly off the virtual shelves.

My first reaction to Petit Eva was, “What the heck?” But when I took a second look at the game, I began to realize, ridiculous as it looked, I wanted to play it. Why is that?

Fellow Eva dorks will know that, in one of the final episodes of the show, there’s a five-or-so minute scene which I like to call “happy Eva.” After sitting through hours of depressing subplots filled with characters who can’t connect, love, or admit how much they need each other, we the viewers get this one scene to see what life would be like for the Eva cast if their world was a happy place. They wake up, they eat breakfast, they run off to school: they bicker and laugh like normal children. This poignant scene, totally mundane in any other context, temporarily lifts our viewing sadness, but also deepens it by showing us how easy it could’ve been to connect, to be happy. In that bittersweet way, it’s a very enjoyable moment–but a fleeting one.

What Petit Eva does then is two-fold. On the one hand, it’s taking a serious show and recreates it as a cute high school game, which will be bought non-Eva fans and collect-’em-all die-hards alike. In short, it makes money off a dormant series. On the other hand, it also provides a peculiar opportunity for fans like me to extend that happy, goofy, oddly compelling five minutes of into an entire play experience. Sure, the novelty of “happy Eva” might wear off quick without the backdrop of existential crisis, but it’s strangely comforting to know that somewhere Shinji, Rei, and Asuka are living out semi-normal lives.