YMMV / Armored Trooper VOTOMS

• Awesome Music: Honoo no Sadame, the opening theme. To have a taste, here's the original version and here's the Operation Extend edition.
  • Also 'Tetsu no Lullaby, the rocking opening of Pailsen Files.
  • The Armored Hunter Mellowlink gives us pure 80's goodness with Soldier Blue.
• Complete Monster: Colonel Yoran Pailsen is a ruthless Mad Scientist who crafted an experiment on the world of Sunsa that involved burning hundreds of children alive to determine who had a unique "survivalist" trait. Obsessed with creating the "perfect soldier", Pailsen directs his private unit, the Red Shoulder Battalion, to commit wartime atrocities and even fight to the death among themselves. In order to test his theories, Pailsen even manipulates the head of the military, Fedok Wockam, into starting a pointless battle that leaves 120 million people dead, obsessed with furthering his research no matter the human cost.
• Cult Classic: As with most of Ryousuke Takahashi's opus, watching VOTOMS at least once in a lifetime is practically a must for any serious mecha fan. However, VOTOMS is a decently well known anime even outside mecha circles.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite his horrific reputation, general nastiness, and dying in his debut, Pailsen proved popular enough to appear in two of the three pre-Shining Heresy OVAs and having his own series named after him.
• Fan Nickname: "Dead Chirico", for Chirico whenever he's unconscious. This comes from the horribly Off-Model way he's drawn whenever that happens.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point, Chirico is described as someone who "couldn't die even if you killed him". Hopefully he never runs into one Shirou Emiya.
  • Chirico was doing 1440 noscopes on his Scopedog long before 360 noscopes were a thing in Call of Duty.
  • With the release of the iPhone 11 Pro, fans have compared its camera layout with that of the Scopedog.
• Memetic Badass:Chirico. Taken up to eleven in Jigoku-hen when he can kill anything with his pistol.
• Memetic Mutation: The aforementioned "dead Chirico" deal. JP fans also like to post, spoiler tagged, a specific frame of the TV series's OP◊ and the word "museru" / "むせる" on message boards and forums.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Several.
  • The sound effects for the ATs rollerskate treads have an oddly orgasmic feel to it. VRRRREEEEEEEEEEE FWOWM.
  • The punching sounds if a Scopedog gets close enough for an uppercut. It even expends cartridges like a gun!
  • The when the Scopedog's scopes switch lens. It sounds much like a camera zooming in.
  • The oddly muffled machine gun fire used by the ATs, plus the strange techno-ish explosion that follows.
• Moral Event Horizon: Where do we begin?
  • The Secret Society deploys a platoon to attack on Lido, and also attempts to kill Chirico if he knows too much about the operation. And it doesn't help that when he was "saved" and arrested by Jean-Paul Rochina. He then interrogates Chirico with electroshock torture.
  • Kan Yu straight-up destroys the boat with unarmed civilians because he thinks that they are Veela spies.
  • Armored Hunter Mellowlink, Vecker torturing Arity for his own pleasure.
  • We found out that the "traumatic" memory of Titania: getting hurt in a car accident and her father repairing her as a Nextant. Even worse is that this was actually an intentional order given by Vyacheslav.
• Nightmare Fuel: Wockam's interrogation of Pailsen.
  • Imagine if you're an unfortunate citizen living in Uoodo, you get caught by the bikers, then caught in the crossfire between the police, the army, the biker gang, and the main protagonist.
  • The video recordings of the Red Shoulders Chirico finds on the spaceship trip to Sunsa are this mixed with Soundtrack Dissonance, with the triumphant march of the Red Shoulders being played over the heartwrenching screams of their victims getting killed.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The Playstation 2 game is an extremely polished, well-paced action game that covers the entire series and Shining Heresy, and allows you to use practically every AT featured in the series. It's also easy to pick up and play, with translation hardly being an issue if you know the story by watching the show
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Balarant faction in both the series and OVAs never gets explored beyond showing some masked mooks and the Fatty AT. The series guide even snarkily comments that they apparently have no use for any other mecha.
  • Titania gets casually mortally wounded in Alone Again despite that the ending of Shining Heresy implied a progression of her character arc.

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