See The End of Evangelion for the 'proper' episode 25 and 26.

are you kiddin'? i love this stuff! i just can't get enough of it! my fave manga of all time is Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaaki. he was interviewed in Otaku USA recently. i also like Trigun, Gurren Lagann, Rave Master, Casshan: Robot Hunter, Akira, Galaxy Express 999, El Hazard, ANYTHING by Osamu Tezuka, ANYTHING by Leiji Matsumoto, and about fifty gajillion bajillion other animes that are just too numerous to name.

I'd highly recommend reading the manga for Gantz, it's way better, and is still ongoing.
As for NGE... blech, but thats just my opinion.

I've been reading Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's manga version of NGE, and while I find it a little more palatable than the what I've seen of the anime, I can definitely understand why so many people hated Gainax for what they did with it. I'm not too fond of them myself because they made the ending so damn confusing. And now they're doing a "remake"...
I've always been drawn to the more thoughtful anime shows/movies out there (I'm working my way through both GITS: SAC and Paranoia Agent and I'm loving it) - my other favorite movies are Patlabor 1/2, Metropolis, and Paprika. The Wings of Honneamise (and it's a travesty that more people don't know about this film) is one of my all time favorite films, along with Tekkon Kinkreet (yes, I know the manga is supposed to be a lot better than the movie). Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and the Macross Plus OVA was really good, too. I kinda like the original GITS and Akira, but in both cases I found the ending to both sort of disappointing (any opinions on GITS 2: Innocence?).
My opinion of this is mixed; I for one really liked the new plot arc with Mello and Near, but I was disappointed that they didn't give any of them nearly as much attention as L, which I didn't think was fair since both characters could have been just as interesting as L was. Before episode 25, the show felt balanced between Light and L; afterward it felt like Mello and Near were just dropped into the show just to give Light someone new to fight. It all came across as being way too rushed.
And I have to confess, my guilty pleasure is Macross Frontier. It's loud and mindless, but I have to forgive its many sins for the sheer awesomeness in episode 7 and in episode 25. On that note, I really like Macross Zero, too - the first episode is especially a really cool intro to how modern fighter aircraft would compare to a Valkyrie.

I second that. It's not a bad series (though I think even the remade ending is kinda meh), but with growing up I've really lost every kind of empathy I ever had with the characters. I have no interest in watching depressed and/or mentally ill people for fun, no matter how well executed they are.