Top Ten Video Game Robots (Patreon Reward)

[Music] introductory sequence complete initiating countdown sequence greetings fellow organics the green scorpion here with another patron requested topic today by recommendation of Wilson watts or talking about robots those marbles of mechanics that let you know you're in science fiction frankly I'm surprised I never covered this topic before robots are freaking awesome not only are they capable of incredible feats such as enhanced intellect and portable weaponry the idea of a created consciousness opens the floodgates for the kind of hypothetical questions I love and works of fantasy questions like what it means to be alive the utility of logic versus emotion the endless digressions on racism utilitarianism and existentialism a lot of isms I should note that my co-writer is a huge nerd for robots ask comic foil about any series and if there's a robot in it it's probably his favorite character like my other character trope discussions I'll be considering how well these robots work as characters or narrative devices how they creatively embody or subvert their techno themes and what they've done for video games in general there's a ton to choose from so let's lay down some stipulations if the machine in question is completely controlled by another person like a mech suit it does not count for our list conversely if it's some sort of artificial intelligence without a designated physical vessel like say Cortana they also don't count and if they're part organic part mechanical that would make them a cyborg not a robot's the cyborgs will have their day I promise but for now let's stick to the pre-program androids and automatons without those fleshy organs getting in the way so now that we've set our preferences let's give these robot owes some domo arigato so my god color floral I swear to god these are my top 10 robots in video games so in case it wasn't obvious already robots are kind of a big deal in overwatch the lures inciting incident is a war between humans and robots or onyx as they're called here homicidal robots rebelling against their creators are a standard for the genre but in this story the crisis has mostly subsided civilized Dominick's now live independently just like humans though fear intentions see them treated as second-class citizens you have your former war BOTS like bastion reconsidering their need to fight and then you have the Shambhala a monastery of machines that have decided that they have souls and no obligation to follow the rules of their programming get ready to talk about souls a lot in this countdown it comes up a lot from this group comes in yadda whose design marries futurism with buddhist spiritualism seriously again with the isms you've seen this kind of symbology before the bald man levitating in his meditative pose several arms like a Bala Kita's vada the Hindu monk a lot of games have this kind of mystical yogi character with ill-defined powers but Zenyatta offers a scientific perhaps more racially sensitive take on this with prosthetic limbs and magnetic gravity altering technology plus Zenyatta is just a really cool name you've got the Zen in there it sounds like Sun yatta which in Buddhism is the concept of tranquil emptiness and when you combine it with his teacher mode oughtta they make the name of an album by the police plus it just sounds really sci-fi and that creativity extends to his play style zenyatta is a support attaching beads to his friends and enemies alike to distribute pseudo spiritual bus and D bus or he can just Pelt you with metal spears seriously for a supposed pacifist he hits pretty hard and if he gets in over his head he can tap into a transcendent state and ignore all damage for a short time while protecting his allies as a cosmically minded AI Zen acknowledges his mortality without stressing too heavily over it he never gets too heated in battle and the worst trash talk you'll hear from him is a suggestion that his foes haven't really learned from their mistakes ignorance is the shuo path to failure if over watch's story was a bigger part of the game itself I might have more to say but Zenyatta z' way of life is an omelet representative and ex pacifist leads to a really interesting take on classic robot tropes and it runs parallel to his backstory Zenyatta leaves the shambhala because he thinks they're detached teachings aren't helping and he chooses to take too recked action in helping others Xin Yan is a change he wants to see in the world like Mohammed Gandhi just you know a robot never thought I'd write that sentence if you were born in the last 40 years there's a chance your first exposure to robots was this dynamic duo r2d2 and c3po Star Wars has always used droids as a way of illustrating its sprawling tech-savvy world but dive into the expanded universe and it starts exploring the nua of life as what's basically a sentient appliance if you get the chance read marvel's c-3po special it's pretty screwed up and before you ask no I'm not breaking my video game origin rule to feature a Star Wars character because the following droid is created for the Old Republic line of RPGs and mostly stays there this is where we meet HK 47 am I to accompany you now shall I kill something for you HK which stands for a hunter-killer is an assassination droid designed for killing key targets a function he revels in endlessly loyal he's essentially a gun that shoots for you he's got a case of convenient amnesia but that's more forgivable for people whose memories can be erased by hitting backspace a few times with his rewritable allegiance an infinite lifespan he served a number of seedy masters all of which he's inadvertently gotten killed but he promises that won't happen to you because you're his master and what you say goes seriously this guy cracks me up his unwavering obedience to you constantly conflicts with his desire to kill every living thing he sees meatbags he calls them and the way he talks this is about 4000 years before Threepio and while his speech is pretty eloquent he has this habit of announcing the form of his sentences before saying them commentary o master I am so disappointed in you right now no don't look at me agreement this was my thought as well master you show excellent logical skills for a meet back and then there's my personal favourite damnit master I am an assassination droid not a dictionary I could get into his combat stats or how he's one of the only characters recruitable in both Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 but I really just like hearing him talk he's a great friend because he has to be which leads me to a major spoiler click ahead if you don't already know about one of the most famous twists in gaming it turns out that your player character Revan was an evil sith lord the whole time whose memories were erased inhumanely I might add by the Jedi Order kind of puts you in the same boat as HK doesn't it in fact you're actually the one who originally built him you both just forgot at this point you need to decide if you're going to resume your path down the dark side that the Jedi so rudely interrupted or take the second chance to embrace the light side predictably some of your party members will leave you depending on your decision but not HK he'll be by your side no matter what he would follow you to the ends of the galaxy as long as he gets to keep murdering people what a bro he's not Canada Star Wars anymore but he still appears in legends media and his character would influence later droids like k2s Owen rogue one or triple zero in the comics the hunter-killer spirit lives on stopping him from killing is like stopping a painter from painting and what HK does with a blaster is nothing short of art statement assassination protocols activated from one Bioware RPG to another the alien party members in Mass Effect provide what I like to call race character arcs for example Rex doesn't just have his own character to embody he also represents the entire Croghan race the changes in his outlook reflect changes in his people's politics nowhere is this more true than in a synthetic race called the Geth in Mass Effect 1 you get to know the Geth mainly as evil robot foot soldiers but in Mass Effect 2 we learn that those enemies were just extremists who joined the Reapers and the Geth race itself is much more Plex basically a single gap is like a single computer program that can serve a few functions alone it has animal-like instincts but in groups they can share and delegate thought processes and become sapient so when you see a guest soldier that's actually a hundred programs living together in a mobile platform the Geth were isolationists for a while but after the kerfuffle in Mass Effect 1 they decided to send an emissary to meet with the galaxy's organic life-forms this ambassador being a vessel of over a thousand sentient units collectively referred to as Legion and for a man-shaped pack of data legions strangely adorable they follow Shepherd mostly to observe behavior collect information and maybe gain allies to fight against the Reapers but it's made clear that they don't experience life the same way we do the reason those heretics joined the Reapers in the first place was because they were promised what they really seek true sentience but for now legion just doesn't get you every thought legion has is a thorough consensus based on perfect logic but concepts like friendship attachment and fear are completely foreign to them legions also baffled the first time they see organics drinking alcohol why would they willingly poison themselves another great detail the Geth noticed that organics use facial expressions and body language when communicating so they gave Legion these adjustable fringes on their head to act as eyebrows legions a straight shooter that swears by practicality but they have their surprising moments every once in a while you'll catch them doing something weird like practicing dance moves while idle or how they repair their body using Shepherds old m7 armor when better alternatives exist presumably out of some kind of hero worship and then they get you right in the fields and that's where the spoilers come in legions arc culminates with a fight between the Geth and the quarians and unless you're really careful with your choices someone's gonna die here best-case scenario legions finally found a way to give all the guests true self-awareness but only by imprinting part of legions own experience onto them this means that Legion has to sacrifice its own existence so that their people can know fulfilment it's only that you realize just how alive Legion has become the same question keeps coming up in the guest story where one of them asks does this unit have a soul if you don't think Legion has a soul then friend neither do you farewell my artificial friend you belong to the Stars now sometimes I think it to be easier if I were a robot not because they're good with guns and don't have to eat but they aren't born into this world scrambling for purpose they were made with a specific function in mind it's not like they have to go to school and figure out what they want to do with their lives there's a high school robot on this list isn't there here we have I guess from persona 3 and her life as a teenage robot the protagonist and his classmates at geek Oakland High School spend a lot of time fighting shadows in the metaphysical realm of Tartarus so they're allies the kojirou group decided to build an anti shadow weapon that wouldn't look suspicious in class she quickly takes a liking to the protagonist which is no coincidence long story short the protagonist is more important than he knows so I guess is designated as his bodyguard and she's pretty darn good at it it's certainly different to see a cute girl suddenly fold machine guns out of nowhere she even has a unique mechanic of overclocking herself to deal more damage with the downside of having to recuperate afterwards kind of like a hyper beam situation she can even use a persona since personas usually draw from a person's inner self you wouldn't expect an Android to have one but naturally I guess starts gaining some more human characteristics over the course of the game until she self actualizes it's at this time where I guess starts thinking more about what she wants not just what her creators made her to do and with that her persona involves from Pilate and a statue of Athena that provides protection in the Iliad to Athena herself a goddess of true agency the writers must have really liked I guess in later versions of the game not only can you bromance I guess she's the star of her own epilogue chapter having faced true heartbreak in the main games finale I guess wants to discard her newfound emotions and go back to her lab even being haunted by a manifestation of the feeling she wants to suppress but in the end she decides to keep going to school and embrace the unknown future this is why we need robot stories because in the end they're actually no different than us we also struggle between meeting expectations and finding meaning in life having a robot just gives us someone cool to watch until surprise this is actually an allegory for radical freedom what else would you expect from Atlas it's no surprise that a list like this would have a creation from dr. Eggman somewhere but which one gamma Omega maybe Emeril quite a catalogue but I think you got it right much earlier with his sonic doppelganger metal sonic not to be confused of mecha sonic that's a completely different titanium plated Hedgehog Metal Sonic holds the distinction of being egg man's evilest invention a robo rodent that can match and even exceed the speeds of the blue blur making him the fastest thing not alive yeah yeah so what he's a soulless reoccurring mini boss with no personality kind of a downgrade from I guess right maybe but I always saw something special in metal he's the first antagonist in the series to battle Sonic on his own platforming terms before silver shadow or even knuckles and while he doesn't show a range of emotion I think through sumptuous to say that he has no character I mean would a faceless robot rage this much when he's losing I always saw Metal Sonic as a robot that had a mind and free will but ignored it to focus on his built-in goals he's like if I guess didn't self actualize he was built to defeat Sonic and that's all he really wants to do every action he takes is in service to that it's not like he just tries the same thing repeatedly either most of the time he'll let Eggman call the shots but if he sees an opportunity he'll strike out on his own he's tried collecting Chaos Emeralds taking over the world first and in Sonic Heroes he gained some t1000 adaptive technology and overthrows Eggman hatching his own plot to copy the powers of all of Sonic's friends and become this horrible monstrosity dear god this transformation sequence is over a minute long but it's the same end goal every time proved he's better than Sonic and the poor guy just can't do it accepting his only function traps him with limitations that Sonic always uses to win mainly sonic has friends and can exploit basic boss patterns metals blind obsession is the reason why he'll never win and that's kind of sad like look at him in the Sonic mania short he's actually overcome with depression it's kind of tragic for Eggman to is his lifelong adversary and the best thing Eggman's ever created was made just from copying sonic that would really break Eggman spirit if he ever took a moment to think about it but I guess evil engineers with 300 IQs don't get introspective so yeah just another killer bad nick but with a glossy coat of irony on top and the most serious villain the series has ever seen [Music] I mentioned before how Mass Effect uses its party members to keep the player invested in its universes many sentient races years earlier Chrono Trigger was doing a similar thing except with time periods this 16-bit RPG has a sprawling story with lore spanning millions of years but is able to tell these stories pretty efficiently by creating empathetic connections through your team the poorly named Robo constantly reminds us that the future of this planet sucks the first time you meet him he's resting away in some ruins with a case of the old memory loss which is why Marla gives him this placeholder name a two-year-old could have improved but robos a genial fellow who really appreciates you fixing him up and follows your plucky band back to the past again the plot of Chrono Trigger is very streamlined you won't spend much screen time with Robo questioning his purpose or free will he's more of a bot of action real name prometheus it's not super clear why he was made but there's an evil computer called Mother Brain not that mother brain leading a robot army against the Earth's remaining humans and most similar robots are serving her he was probably meant to exterminate but true to his Greek nomenclature Robo prefers to help humans not Lord above them and he really pays for that we see Robo get the grease kicked out of him a lot mostly by other BOTS including his kind of sort of girlfriend atropos you know it's a girl because she's pink and wears a ribbon oh my god I love this game aw drop is his name stumped me for a while in myth it was the name of the head sister of fate that cut the thread when people died but I think the idea here is a Trappist accepts her fate and ingrained purpose whereas prometheus literally fights time to do what he thinks is right he can kick a lot of ass and I'm constantly reminded by his rocket punch that was designed by Akira Toriyama [Music] Wow that is so cool but he's also your team's tank and off healer based a lot around protecting your team members then there's a time he volunteers to work the land and make it fertile so you use your time machine to pick him up four hundred years later during which time he's found religion there's a lot going on behind that blank face of his he's another example of the Iron Giant message we are what we choose to be just with much more subtlety than our previous entries and his theme music is basically a Rick roll what a charming fellow I debated about including GLaDOS on this list we all love GLaDOS but is she more of an AI or more of a robot I think of her as more of a disembodied computer voice because that's how she interacts with you for most of the portal series she hangs over you watching judging calling you fat but the two aren't mutually exclusive she has that dangling body that we see her in most of the time and portal 2 puts more emphasis on her dexterous power over the facility she can alter rooms panel by panel almost like the whole enrichment center is a robot and chels just a little flea hopping around in it so I'm gonna count her and if that bothers you just pretend she's not here move everyone up a spot and put my runner up medicine and number 10 huh man minute 10 I was gonna do this whole thing with the term ghost in the machine too maybe I can use that here GLaDOS has been analyzed to death I know at first she seems like just an automated response to your progress like she's just a recording but she quickly proves to be not only sentient but vengeful and sadistic she's actually a result of Cave Johnson old manager of aperture labs who while dying from moon dust poisoning hoped to invent a way to upload his consciousness into a computer so he could run the place forever the R&D took too long and he demanded on his deathbed that his assistant Carolyn be uploaded in his place which eventually happened against her own free will there's even a cut voice clip from Portal 2 of Carolyn and Cave Johnson arguing about it with some poignant overtones you can look it up if you want but just warning you it's pretty disturbing so Carolyn in one way dead now lives forever in GLaDOS she is the affirmation ghost in the machine a philosophical concept introduced by Gilbert Ryle in 1949 meant to describe the body and mind as two distinct and separate entities like say removing the mind from a woman and putting it into a robot or a potato glados's brain gets moved around and tampered with a lot when first activated all Robo Carolyn wanted to do is kill everyone out of vengeance and the scientists attempted to curb this tendency with personality cores little expansion packs quote-unquote to her personality that bogged her down and made her more pliable these cores can be attached and detached at will like thumb drives but are actually changing who GLaDOS is as a person like ya a court that's obsessed with space is hilarious and everything but when you think about it that's pretty screwed up right that's nothing compared to Wheatley who was intended to make GLaDOS dumber and a code that pretty much addicts the administrative computer to running tests with diminishing returns it's like pacifying a murderer by getting them hooked on heroin like Wow and now GLaDOS is the biggest monster of them all but her attitude towards you is endlessly entertaining and full of subtext depending on a frame of mind she wants you around wants you to leave want you to die or genuinely considers you a friend sometimes all at once how much of this is regular human indecisiveness and how much is because of her amalgam personality and air written coding it's really all up to speculation best expressed in her songs at the end of each game which I consider completely diegetic love-hate intelligence and rage digitized and given godlike power over a high tech base what has science done it's been fun don't come back we've seen robots as your servants robots as your waifu robots as your nemesis but what could beat having a robot for a best body you really want a robot for a friend yeah ever since I was six as far as robotic operating buddy z' go there's no truer friendship between boy and BOTS than the gruesome twosome of Ratchet and Clank one's a total nobody with his head into space clouds the other is a defective century by well sort of plank was made in a sentry bot factory about two sizes too small with none of the weaponry befitting chairman directs villainous army but clanks design was no factory hair one of the computers referred to as clanks mom hated Drex so much and wanted to stop his evil plan so she made one of the robots a shrimp and gave him some inside info to stop dreck yeah really fighting the power there mom you made one robot incapable of defending itself against its countless bigger brothers and tasked him with the fate of the universe it's kind of a miracle this plan worked but anyway Clank ends up crash landing near ratchet and the to meet with ratchets piloting skills and clanks ignition starter they're able to escape into the stars together and the rest is history Ratchet and Clank have one of the more evenly balanced friendships in gaming sure in the first game Clank is basically just an accessory for ratchet but as a sequence progress he grows more independent he can reverse engineer himself into a sentry bot form he learns to command smaller robots for combat and puzzle solving and while he doesn't have the big guns like ratchet he can still hold his own it's also telling that Clank keeps his name in each subsequent title as opposed to say Daxter who lost his billing in favor of a number Ratchet and Clank are both perfectly capable and spend a lot of their missions apart but our best went together and clanks the best partner a guy could ask for he's a little snooty but can be that logical voice of reason when ratchet wants to go in guns blazing at the same time clank was basically born yesterday so he can be naive and depends on ratchets street smarts high intelligence versus high wisdom not sure who's higher charisma but Clank did spend some time as a movie star and a Time Lord oh did I not mention when plague was created a creature named Orvis swooped in and endowed him with the soul of a zonie an extra planner race in charge of protecting time itself so Clank uses his newfound powers to stop his nemesis dr. nefarious oh by the way the main villain of the series sees Clank as his arch-nemesis not ratchet and goes back in time to save ratchets life and with the duty to stay and maintain order in the fourth dimension he decides he'd rather keep adventuring with ratchet instead yet another example of the ghost in the machine the guy is literally an alien spirit put into an off model kill bot but what does parent didyou matter dreck wanted him to be a lifeless soldier mom puter wanted him to be a Robo revolutionary papa Orvis wanted him to be the master of time and space but he just wants to be ratchets friend that's pretty humble for a supernatural supercomputer but clanks a humble guy having a loyal Bionic companion is great and all but isn't a greater knowing that they're here by their own choice it really warms my heart and I like to think that it warms clanks hard to near automata just the whole game near automata brace yourselves for this one because I'm gonna be using some spoilers a few years ago I was writing about near in one of my countdowns thinking it's such a hidden gem and I hope some more people can get into the series and now it's sequel is the biggest thing since sliced bread and its title character is crossing over everywhere you look so number two fittingly goes to 2b as in to be or not to be well well someone's read Shakespeare I mean it's the most well known line from Shakespeare but still near automata is full of references and themes alluding to Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard it's like this game took 1 for credit philosophy course and was a showoff' about it but hey so did I so let's do this near automata takes place on a world conquered by aliens who took over with an army of clunky machines the humans escaped to the moon and built to the sleeker looking androids to fight against the machines and aliens to be and her partner 9s are two such Androids it's pretty standard fare from here Rock'em Sock'em for the fate of the earth until you eventually learned that both the humans and aliens died off years ago leaving the artificial battling for really no reason at all they could all just throw down their arms and stop fighting but what else would they do with their lives what is the purpose of a war Android in a world without war the blindfolds aren't there just to look cool the androids wear them to symbolically blind themselves to the pointlessness of their existence but for to be some things can't be ignored like how at the end of every mission 9's ends up finding out too much to be gets commanded to kill him and the two are then reassembled back at base except 9's has his memory restarted and to be is even more depressed than last time every time to be dies she's just backed up and downloaded into a new body there's no escaping this life of pointless service no end in sight and to be begins to lament her very existence hence the Shakespearean references Hamlet says the famous line contemplating whether it's better to suffer the slings and arrows of life or shuffle off the mortal coil but sadly to be has no coil to shuffle off of the endless cycle is reflected in nears weird sense of story progression you don't go from point A to point B instead you'll have to play through the game five times learning more about the plot and getting a little further in a narrative each time and maybe this is just a pretentious way of padding out the game but it adds more dimension cities characters with each pass all in hopes of escaping this hell program and it kept me hooked and it really helps put you in the mindset of to be like you're trapped in this never-ending loop by the end of it all you'll be fighting to take the whole system down and it's then that something interesting happens to bees finally inadvertently achieve mortality and she's not relieved she's terrified it's antithetical to what she's wanted this entire game but her fear and vulnerability are so relatable and her standing up to fight in spite of that fear makes her one of the most empathetic characters I've seen in some time that's just scratching the surface of this game it wants to be analyzed so badly and I'm sure other people could give you a better take on it than I could I recommend wisecrack those guys are great but even without that background to be strong residents make her well deserving of a recent popularity and it makes near automata one of the most humanitarian things I've ever seen to not actually Beacher humans like the robots themselves I too am a creature of habit and whenever I get a list like this I find myself leaning on legacy characters who's the most important robot in video games that's a good question [Applause] [Music] there are other robots from the early years of gaming you got Rob an actual robot that helps sell the NES you got Bomberman who's a robot sometimes but when you think of videogame robots you think the super fighting robots the Blue Bomber Megaman and there's a good reason for that not only did his series blaze the trail for action side-scrollers his design and ethnos encapsulate robot as much as Dracula defines vampire or Hayabusa defines ninja start with his design simple enough that you can easily draw it you can see him in a bit and still know exactly what this guy would look like don't know why the box artists in Captain n didn't understand that but ok the eighties were weird and even with his Caucasian colored skin an expressive face you can still look at him and say yeah that's a robot clearly inspired by Astro Boy who in turn is heavily inspired by Pinocchio Megaman tells a similar story of an artificial child dr. Thomas white wanted to make an artificial being that would behave like a human and that miracle of Engineering was rock well first it was blues who ran away and became proto man but then it was rock and then assist a roll and for the record yes I'm well aware of the pun and dr. light adopted them both as his children that technology would then be used to make the robot masters that could apply this advanced reasoning to the workforce but when light's rival dr. wily brainwashed him to do evil Rock volunteered to undergo a combat centric redesign and become Megaman key word here is volunteered see later the first Mega Man X game will claim that X was created as the first robot to have free will but I say that's a lot of crap Megaman is clearly making his own choices here dr. light didn't want to lose another kid in a fight against guts man or cut man but rocks saw that people were in need and stepped up on his own that's all him maybe what they meant here is that Megaman is beholden to Asimov's Three Laws while X is it and how did I get this far without talking about Asimov short version there's a convention made by Isaac Asimov that's used in a lot of sci-fi dictating what a robot can and can't do rule number one never hurt a human ever come to think of it I can't think of a time when any of the robot masters directly harm a human being but even mega man challenges that every time mega man corners Wiley Wiley begs for his life and mega man reluctantly lets an escape that's finally addressed in Mega Man 7 though when after years of this malarkey mega man says he's gonna do what he should have done in the first place Oh Shh Mega Man shootin to kill but he doesn't get the chance and after that Mega Man comes to regret the decision and never threatens the death penalty again even helping wily out in Mega Man 10 when he catches his own terrorist disease I don't think that's just following a program since he was almost able to break it that's just Mega Man following his own beliefs he's always been about peace he always tries to talk down his opponents before fighting it was his hatred of violence that spurred him to become Mega Man in the first place so ironically he's the ultimate fighting robot adapting his body to copy any weapon he finds and systematically taking down all opponents but he does it because he truly believes that one day they'll be harmony between humans and robots which sorry man I've looked ahead in a timeline it only gets worse but even despite that Megaman serves as the basis for seven whole franchises based around the relation of man and machine and I know a lot of you would like to see zero yes he's awesome cool his character in the series by far but for his legacy and his surprisingly well defined character I'm giving the top spot to Megaman it's not his programming that defines him it's his heart and to me startling relatability because aren't we all just trying to do what we think is right maybe that's how we are built or maybe that's a conscious decision on our part challenging the nature of our own creation that's what these characters are for me maybe they like their original intent maybe they challenged it maybe they wallow in it but they're all on that journey just like us trying to figure out what they want to be and that's a story I can get behind I'm the Green scorpion and my origin function may have been to get good grades and earn a living but I also want to be the guy who makes fun and interesting videos for all my friends out there let's just hope I never get deactivated for it [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Green Scorpion

Views: 48,722

Rating: 4.968277 out of 5

Keywords: greenscorpion64, The Green Scorpion, Top Ten, Video Games, Robots, countdown, gameplay, commentary, review, playthrough

Id: nnxUt0K7LqY

Length: 34min 45sec (2085 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019