With the premiere of Nier: Automata Ver1.1a on the horizon, fans are excited to see the game Nier: Automata‘s war between human-created androids and vicious alien machines adapted to animation. While anime is famous for its many great mecha and cyberpunk works, it is surprisingly devoid of true robots.
However, when machines without humans piloting them do show up, they can pack quite the punch, from mindless drones to planet-eating horrors. There are more than a few terrifying robotos to be found in anime, but which are the scariest of all time?
Devil Gundam – Mobile Fighter G Gundam
The powered armor known as Gundam in one of the longest running anime of all time is not robotic in the strictest definition: it has no intelligence and requires a human to control it. However, there are some exceptions, and the biggest and baddest of them is the Devil Gundam, created by Raizo Kasshu as a tool to evolve the human body and make it immune to disease.
It worked a little too well: the Devil Gundam evolves into sentience, and while it enjoys making itself stronger, it has no intention of helping humanity. In fact, it prefers to stick them into its core as fuel sources instead of pilots, and to use its regenerative abilities to power itself up and make endless copies of itself to fight as its army.
Magi – Neon Genesis Evangelion
Nope, not the Evas. While they put Neon Genesis Evangelion among the scariest and best anime of all time, they aren’t robots: their mechanical parts are armored restraints keeping their organic bodies under control, meaning that they’re more at home in the ranks of body horror anime. What is a pure machine, however, is the Magi.
Though it’s been implanted with the personality of Ritsuko’s mother, the three-part supercomputer that helps NERV combat the Angels is still not human. The system is capable of horrible things if hacked or not properly controlled, multiple times it comes terrifyingly close to self-destructing and causing untold amounts of damage, and its shred of artificial intelligence can even turn on its commander at critical moments.
Big Gete Star – Dragon Ball Z: The Return Of Cooler
Without the computer chip controlling it, the Big Gete Star wouldn’t be anything more than a planet-sized lump of metal. But with it, it becomes a galactic problem, capable of traveling through space and draining planets dry of their energy like a massive parasite, like something out of the top horror anime of all time.
It would be bad enough on its own, but then it runs into a defeated Cooler, who manages to fuse with it and use it for his own gain, reviving and attacking his old enemies, now with hundreds of clones even more powerful than his previous incarnation. Had Cooler not gotten greedy and overloaded the Star with Goku and Vegeta’s power, Earth could have met the same grisly fate as the Star’s other victims, and there’s no telling where or if it and Cooler would have stopped.
Tres Iqus – Trinity Blood
Don’t let his human face fool you: Tres is not just a cold young man but a ruthless mechanical soldier, one of several known as the Vatican’s “Killing Dolls.” Despite his organic brain and ability to experience human emotion, he openly states that he considers himself to lack a soul and thus to be a machine.
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Specifically, he is somebody else’s machine: Tres is unflinchingly loyal to his master Caterina, thinking of her when he hesitates in his bloody work as a Gunslinger, and building his confidence back up by reminding himself that he belongs to her.
Ashtanga – Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
When the heroes of one of the best mecha anime for beginners grew strong enough to mow down the initial waves of Mugann drones with ease, the Anti-Spirals quickly upped the ante. Mugann might be faceless, but their larger and creepier successors the Ashtanga certainly are not.
These massive ships, full of smaller fighters that can be launched at will, are shaped like mockeries of human bodies, almost as if to taunt their opponents. Every part of them, from their sluglike bodies to their disembodied hands and feet, are covered in stonily staring faces that are capable of screaming loud enough to subdue victims.
Robots – Blame!
Currently available on Netflix, Blame! features the last remnants of humanity struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world littered with all kinds of nightmarish robots, all answering to the Safeguard, a supercomputer created to be a defense system that went unstoppably out of control.
The Exterminators spawned by Safeguard to destroy all humans are bad enough, not only firing off lethal beam attacks but horrifically leering at their victims while doing it. But the most dangerous types of robots are the ones who can disguise themselves as humans and are intelligent enough to lead rebellious humans into a trap, like the one who killed and replaced poor Tae.
The Legion – 86 Eighty-Six
Shin and the rest of his squadron are treated as expendable, inhuman drones by the San Magnolia military enslaving them. The opponents they’re forced to fight, the Legion, legitimately are a robotic army…but one would hesitate to call them mindless. They are an AI collective made up of tens of thousands of the minds of murdered humans, who have been assimilated and used as the processors of war machines.
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Because of this, they are particularly horrifying to even get too close to, let alone fight, especially for Shin and his increased sensitivity to the dead. Not only is their weaponry ruthless and powerful, but the screaming of countless splintered minds is hell to endure.
Puppetmaster – Ghost In The Shell
No discussion about the horrors of technology in anime is complete without a mention of Ghost in the Shell, one of the most famous works about the fraught relationship between man and machine of all time. Major Motoko Kusanagi, already concerned about what her cybernetic parts mean for her own humanity, is confronted with the worst of her fears in the Puppetmaster.
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The enigmatic villain of the 1995 film adaptation is a particularly advanced piece of artificial intelligence, whose motives to become a true human are sympathetic, but his methods are the stuff of nightmares. Not content with a mechanical body, the Puppetmaster moves on to possessing humans, forcibly hacking their minds and memories until nothing remains of whoever they once were.
The Machines – The Animatrix
With some of the most infamously scary machines in film, this anime series set in the world of The Matrix certainly lives up to its source material. Though everything before the machine takeover makes viewers’ hearts hurt for the machines mistreated by humans, they quickly turn terrifying once they start biting back in the segment “The Second Renaissance.”
More story-based than the movies, The Animatrix has time to linger on the mounting horror of humanity as they are outmatched and overpowered. Viewers watch as machines blow up the United Nations and major cities, melt people alive with clouds of toxic chemicals, dissect and experiment on prisoners of war, and finally plug survivors into the first Matrix: the version machines viewed as paradise, but to humans was twisted and hellish.
Death Stench – Gyo
The work that infamous mangaka Junji Ito may be best known for is Gyo, the story of two average teenagers caught up in the invasion of Japan by a resurfacing World War II bioweapon, which takes some very strange forms over the course of the story. While it tends to manifest as gas or bacteria, the Death Stench can also stuff humans and animals full of wires and piping, wiping out their consciousness to turn them into killer machines.
In both the manga and the OVA, once a human is infected and turned into a machine, they become a mindless monster with no hope of recovery, dangerous alone or in a horde. And even if you manage to escape your former friends and neighbors, don’t forget that the transformation affects animals and fish as well. You’ve still got to watch out for enormous robot great white shark stalking the streets in search of prey: GASHUNK!
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