Top 10 Favorite Giant Robots

Alex is a programmer at BounsXP, and most definitely a big fan of big robots.

By Alex Swaim  

If you somehow haven’t heard yet, we’re making a game about exploratory resource mining called Servo! It also features controlling armies of robot minions headlined by giant piloted mechs that you get to build from an assortment of gear and weapons.

I couldn’t be happier about that. I’ve been a fan of giant robots and mecha since as far back as I can remember. The first video I rented as a kid – which, wow, I’ve forgotten video rental used to be a thing – had the first 4 episodes of Robotech and it’s been all on a roll from there.

To celebrate this, I’ve made a list of my top 10 giant robots.

(Some ground rules: anything is fair game, piloted or not, so long as it is sufficiently giant, mechanized, and vaguely humanoid. Sorry Tachikomas.)

10) Giant Robo One of the first major giant robot genre shows – right after Tetsujin-28/Gigantor – was the classic Giant Robo. It featured the titular machine, a sentient and heroic robot who is will only listen to his 12-year-old best friend, Johnny Sokko. It’s fantastically corny. I’m going with the late-90′s sort-of-reboot. The design is much cooler, and the show has benefitted from 30 years of refinement in the genre to use 70′s cornyness to poke fun at the serious mecha shows from the 90′s.
9) SDF-1 from Macross/Robotech It is a giant space battleship that transforms into a humongous giant robot, with arms that are really smaller space battleships. Why does it need to transform? In the show they give some arcane technical reasons. But we all know it’s because you don’t name something a Super Dimensional Fortress without letting it turn into a giant robot.
8) Escaflowne Almost all mecha/giant robot media is set in the future, where technology has enabled humans to build huge war machines. There are a few, like Escaflowne, that dip into magic instead of technology as the source of power instead, and give a fantasy bent to the tropes of the giant robot genre. The Escaflowne wins amongst those because it turns into a dragon and has a cape.
7) Gypsy Danger from Pacific Rim I cannot describe how much I enjoyed getting the big-budget Hollywood action flick treatment applied to a giant-robot-versus-monster story and having it come out the other side mostly intact.
6) The gears from Heavy Gear Coming from the tabletop tradition, there’s a lot to like about them. But mostly I love they bolted-together feel. They’re tools, built to be adaptable and tough, and it comes through.
5) Optimus Prime from Transformers It’s hard to have a list of best giant robots without a transformer on it. And I wasn’t picking Rodimus Prime, that’s for sure.
4) Hygogg from Gundam 0080 I could have filled most of this list with mecha from Gundam if I’d let myself, but I capped myself to two. This one is in because… look at it. It’s funky, with the long arms but then you see it in motion and…yeah. Gundam has some of my favorite weird mech designs.
3) VF-1S Valkyrie from Macross/Robotech It’s a plane! It’s a robot! It’s… something in between?! Whatever it is, its cool factor is was hardwired into my brain during my childhood. This is the standard by which all other transforming mechs are judged. Sorry Starscream, you’re just not good enough.
2) The Iron Giant An alient war machine goes rogue to be friends with a small boy. It’s like somebody took Giant Robo and replaced all the cornyness with heartwarming adventure.
1) Gouf Custom from Gundam: 08th MS Team It was in half an episode of a single show, but what a half an episode it had. It was tasked with holding off an entire enemy regiment long enough for them to finish evacuating the base and instead it methodically took out most of the enemy force. It’s another mecha from Gundam that shows up better in motion: GIF1, GIF2, GIF3 Excellent.