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Nightmare Fuel / Super Robot Wars

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Despite the multitude of Hot-Blooded positive heroes in Humongous Mecha, Super Robot Wars can sometimes do a couple of things that makes players feel slightly uncomfortable.


  • Super Robot Wars Destiny Big Bad Perfectio isn't just off-putting for players, but he can even do that within the narrative, giving despair and nightmares to the characters. His on-screen appearance at first doesn't look that horrifying due to the limitations of the Game Boy Advance, but the concept of an Eldritch Abomination that grows stronger by consuming one's despair, forcing them to cross the Despair Event Horizon at will, is already nightmarish. Making this even more frightening is Perfectio hasn't even shown his true form, who claims his appearance is but a mere "branch" of a whole. When Destiny is integrated in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, he gets even more disturbing because his animations are now tweaked, changing a Beam Spam into a black destructive goo capable of putting his target into a state of Mind Rape.
  • The various Mooks used by the Garden of Baral in the Super Robot Wars Alpha games. What looks like a bizarre, oddly-shapped, yet cute creature all of a sudden shows a Slasher Smile with More Teeth than the Osmond Family and begins trying to eat you.
    • Topping this is the TouTetsuOh, a baboon-like Baral creature in the Second Original Generation with such teeth that it actually laughs during some of its attacks, and has a very savage way of chewing his enemies. Some Earth Federation pilots get really unlucky when Jun Kanan sics the TouTetsuOh at them, who proceeds to vanish and sneak away unseen, with the pilots trembling in fear. The screen suddenly switches to a first-person perspective of one of these grunts, only for the TouTetsuOh to appear from out of nowhere in front of him, teeth ready and CRUNCH.
  • The Einsts from Super Robot Wars Compact 2: this race of Eldritch Abominations proclaim they will start an Adam and Eve Plot after killing the human race. Many of their Mook units are ugly, misshapen and are only talking with strange noises. Invoked In-Universe, as characters find them quite nightmarish, too.
  • Super Robot Wars MX (and by extension 2nd OGs): AI-1's second, third and final forms. In addition, the final attack of AI-1 is downright creepy as hell. First, it absorbs the opponent and blasts the target with some random orbs, all while a giant naked Eldy watches on. The attack is topped off with Eldy delivering a Kiss of Death to the opponent.
  • Greater-Scope Villain of the Alpha saga, Keisar Ephes, is the franchise's champion for this page: it's easy when he's the Super Robot Wars equivalent to Satan. With the souls of the dead called the "Neshama" at his beck and call, who were once people whom he previously protected that have been sacrified to his name unknowingly for untold millenia, his goal is to gather all souls in the Alpha universe to torture on a daily basis, while transforming the universe into a living Hell, all for his personal amusement. This is signified with his mobile weapon's strongest attack, "The End of the Galaxy", where he bombards his target with the wailing Neshama, who proceeds to Mind Rape the target with disturbing visions of planets blowing up, coupled with war, plague and deathnote , topped with the image of what is implied to be the Earth cleaved in two as Keisar Ephes lets out a horrifying Evil Laugh. If the attack winds up becoming a "Dynamic Kill", an extra animation occurs where there is momentary silence...only for the Neshama to appear out of nowhere and dogpile the target and finishes them off into a bloodly mess, leaving nothing behind. For its time, The End of the Galaxy was so terrifying that Keisar Ephes set an archetypal standard of a Final Boss having a nightmarish ultimate attack that other Final Bosses in other games have tried to replicate with varying degrees of success. The fact that Keisar Ephes is voiced by none other than Ichiro Mizuki, who usually sings the songs of the heroes, only makes the character even more unsettling.
  • Most of the entries may be a little too over the top nightmarish that it's forgotten and looked down, but there's another element that's a little more grounded and yet equally nightmarish within the setting: The ODE Incident. Showing that to instill nightmares in this setting, one doesn't always have to be an Eldritch Abomination to do so.
    • First off, the incident itself. You were invited to some sort of innocent parade/festival, comparable to a circus show (without those scary clowns). It's just full of automated robots doing shows. Nothing too scary, right? All of the sudden, the Bartoll robots go berserk in a coordinated way, either shooting people dead or gassing them to be put in a container and taken somewhere with a name as ominous as 'Hellgate' Facility. Regardless, the event was so sudden it's comparable into watching an innocent show, only for terrorists to reveal themselves as the showmen and threaten to shoot everyone down unless they are willing to go to the terrorist base where more torture awaits; the whole show was staged and actually a trap by the terrorist all along. This part is the 'most grounded' part and it could possibly happen in real life too (minus the berserker robots, but who knows when AI have advanced so much in the future!)
    • The process of how someone pilots the Bartoll. The AI will put you on a pseudo-crucified shot while butt naked, and then graft pods on your bare skin which is painful as hell... and proceed to drain your life force slowly just to empower the robot and make them move in a coordinated pattern, forcing your mind to unite as one as whatever the core commands (granted, it's for the protection of the world, but there's a reminder that the creator was too deep in despair when implementing this particular part not to mention becoming the first victim of the rogue system). As shown in the OVA and implied text-wise in the game, when the SRX team investigates the cockpit, they found a lifeless husk of a woman completely drained of resources it feels like a zombie's corpse. The only 'person' that could survive this is Lamia Loveless on the basis that she's a Ridiculously Human Robot, but even she takes a hellish amount of pain in process of being the victim of it (to the point that nothing in the Terra Federation research progress could repair her in the current state) and there's a lot of actually human victims that the incident caused.
  • From Super Robot Wars Z and its sequels:
    • The ultimate attack of The Edel Bernal: he creates a rip in the fabric of space-time, briefly showing off a rather ominous looking eye before a massive, rainbow-colored horde of evil...somethings...burst out in a massive stream, with the Chaos Lemures leading them like some demented band leader, and with the horde making a cacophony of creepy impish giggling. They swoop up, grab the hapless victim(s) and carry them into a dimension of pure rainbow insanity. They get swarmed by a mass of blobs, which is then assailed by "giant sperm", then eaten by a much larger one-eyed blob, colliding with MORE one-eyed blobs. The camera zooms out, until suddenly the mass is blasted by at least a dozen frickin' laser beams, until Chaos Lemures looms large and the real Edel makes a rather wiggly Super Move Portrait Attack, complete with a disturbing expression of pure elation. With a word of "Bye-Bye", he ends the madness by ramming a gigantic spear into the whole mess.
    • Z2's Dimensional Beasts (or DAMON) count, being a series of Eldritch Abomination Ambiguous Robots with More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Oh, and to top it off, they were once humans that were defeated by Gaioh.
      • The Dino-Class's 'Spin Blade Crusher' where they claw open a hole in spacetime. The camera then cuts to the player's mech, as shards of something seem to be falling down. The camera then pans up, revealing the Dino-Class ominously peering down at the player mech through the hole (The Shining-style), before crashing through and drilling the player's ass to kingdom come.
      • The Levia-Class is a floating, crown-shaped Living Ship that looks like a pair of demonic false teeth. Then you get to its 'Evil Soul Fang' attack, where it opens its giant maw, revealing a bunch of tentacles with more teeth at the end of them that chomp down on the player's mech before yanking it into the Levia-Class's waiting maw and chewing them to pieces. In Saisei-Hen, it makes you glad that the Shin Levia-Class's strongest attack is 'just' a giant Wave-Motion Gun.
      • The ADAMON from Saisei-hen builds off of the aforementioned Dino-Class's attack with its 'Dimensional Dive,' where it claws open a hole in spacetime and jumps into it. The camera cuts to the player mech before frantically panning around behind and above the player mech as if to say, "Where'd he go?! WHERE'D HE GO?!" before the ADAMON jumps out from the bottom of the screen and impales the player mech with its shoulder horns, before punching another hole in spacetime and impaling the player a second time with its tail.
      • Also in Saisei-Hen is Exa ADAMON, which is what happens when Anbrorn Jeus lets herself and her ship be turned into a Dimension Beast. The fact that Jeus can still talk after her transformation does not help, as her strongest attack has Exa ADAMON undergo some kind of transformation into something that can't be fully seen right before she cleaves the player mech in two, cackling like a witch all the way.

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