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# Shogo: Mobile Armored Division is the best mecha game you never played
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/shogo-mobile-armored-division/
- Published: 2016-08-10T20:50:52.000Z
- Updated: 2016-08-18T23:25:33.000Z
- Description: Whether in Gundam or Pacific Rim, everyone on Earth is pretty much guaranteed to have seen a mecha before. The image of a gifted teenager climbing into a building-sized robot is one of Japan’s most indelible contributions to pop culture, but few videogames have really captured that precise mecha moj
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Sponsored Post, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

Whether in *Gundam* or *Pacific Rim,* everyone on Earth is pretty much guaranteed to have seen a mecha before. The image of a gifted teenager climbing into a building-sized robot is one of Japan’s most indelible contributions to pop culture, but few videogames have really captured that precise mecha mojo.

It’s not just about the robots; it’s about the pilots. Usually, they’re teenagers caught between life-or-death combat and having to go back to school. The robots, as in *Neon Genesis Evangelion* (1995-6), might not even be robots but creatures enslaved by an insane pseudoreligious apocalyptic cult. Or, as in *Patlabor* (1989), automated mechs replace construction workers. Or, as in *Gurren Lagann* (2007), just about anything can turn out to be a mech.

Monolith Productions’s 1998 PC game *Shogo: Mobile Armored Division* folds a whole bunch of nerdy anime influences into a straightforward, fast-paced first-person shooter. Like Bungie’s 2001 melee-focused *Oni*, *Shogo* successfully bolted Japanese culture to solidly Western gameplay in the vein of *Doom* (1993).

The mecha in *Shogo* follow in the footsteps of *mangaka* Masamune Shirow, who wrote *Appleseed*, and Mamoru Oshii, who directed the *Patlabor* movies (just compare “*Shogo: Mobile Armor Division*” to “*Mobile Police Patlabor*”): all bold protruding fins and heavy shoulder plates.

They’re also, in true mecha style, more exoskeletons than tanks. While the *Shogo* mechs don’t contain the kind of psychic link that defined *Evangelion*’s pilot-robot relationship, they are as agile and reactive as any human despite their size.

*Shogo*’s blend of Western videogame tropes with Japanese cultural fixtures is no longer as unique as it once was, not with *Titanfall* (2014) and *Hawken* (2012) pilfering the mecha genre, but what endures about the game is its commitment to everything around the robots. It’s not simply a game about hopping in a brown military machine to blow some shit up; its affection for the genre extends to the idiosyncrasies, all the convoluted plots, angsty dialogue, and bursting clouds of missiles that make mecha anime what it is.

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