Metal Monsters: Mechs From Gundam to Pacific Rim

[JonB]

Alright, everyone, point any bother at me. Steven assuredly wrote about your favorite, various important mech and mecha games and series, as well as talked about semantics re: mech and mecha, along with boatloads of other history in earlier drafts.

I am the evil editor that threw completeness under the bus in the name of readability and word count.

In short: Sorry, not sorry.

 

[SAMAS]

Snip

Hi there!

Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately, when writing my article there was a lot of stuff I had to cut. I ended up going with what I deemed was the most popular, highest quality, and/or most influential series and games.

I do understand that. My only real complaint is that in the search for popularity, you may have sacrificed accuracy. Gundam may be more well-known to non-mecha fans, but the only thing it has to do with Pacific Rim or it's tropes is the fact that both feature robots with two feet. Gundam is usually a war story, with sympathetic villains, total assholes on the heroes' side, senseless deaths, and generally a struggle of Man vs. Man. It's what's known as a Real Robot series.

Pacific Rim, with it's alien invasions, giant monsters of varying shapes and abilities attacking at near-regular intervals usually one at a time, clear lines of Hero and Villain, collection of all-unique mecha, and over-the-top characters is completely in line with the Super Robot genre, which is the territory of shows like Mazinger, Voltron (which had a continuation/reboot fairly recently), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Megas XLR (a Western example), and the recent (and gone far too soon) Sym-Bionic Titan (also Western).

Pacific Rim's lineage goes:

War of the Worlds
Tetsujin 28
Godzilla
Mazinger Z
*whole bunch of series'*
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II
Neon Genesis Evangelion
*some more series'*
Pacific Rim

Gundam is the great-uncle that split off from Mazinger somewhere down the line. He's in the family, but not in a direct line.

 

[Steven Bogos]

SNIP

Thanks for taking the time to read my reply and type out your own. As for the Pacific Rim stuff, I completely agree with you. The focus of my piece, however, was meant to be on mechs in videogames, which is why I focused on the Real Robot genre. The Pacific Rim sections were actually added in later drafts of the piece to make it more topical, as the movie had just come out.