I recently started watching the giant robot series Brave Police J-Decker from the early 90’s. It is part of the Yuusha franchise which was started by Takara who make Transformers, you can see it pretty easily in the designs. But it got me thinking about the influence of Transformers on the robot genre. Or rather it made me wonder what exactly the influence has been.
There is no denying how incredibly popular Transformers was/is in Japan. Long after the 80’s American series finished there were many other Japan-only iterations in the franchise (good or bad is not relevant, just that they kept making shows). When America made Beast Wars, Japan made even more of the series. New Transformers titles continue to be produced to this day, getting a release on both sides of the ocean. What I always loved about Transformers was the focus on sentient robots fighting their robot enemies and dealing with their robot planet. There were peripheral humans in earlier series, but they weren’t the stars of the show and the crux of conflict was between the robots. Incidentally, the reversal of this is what I hated about the live action film (that and the fight scenes sucked). Despite the huge love for Transformers in Japan, I can’t recall there being a bunch of Transformers-clone anime.
All the Yuusha series feature sentient giant robots, but humans are integral to the stories. SD Gundam features a robots-only world, but it is parody. Machine Robo is maybe the closest, that I know of. Are there other serious (and I say this with a lilt in my voice, but don’t deny that your heart cried out when Optimus Prime died in Transformers: The Movie, don’t front) series that feature sentient giant robots as the main characters dealing with their own problems? I’m honestly asking because I don’t by any means consider myself a giant robot expert. I’m trying to piece together why there isn’t and what the Transformers influence has been in anime.
(P.S. I’m very much enjoying J-Decker!)
Reverse Thieves 
I really can’t think of any.
Ghost in the Shell deals with the metaphysical idea of what it is to be human as you slowly replace yourself with robot parts. And it has tachikomas!
Reboot? Not strictly an anime but it features AI characters inside a computer world. It also gets pretty serious in later seasons.
Apparently Brave Exkaiser had a bit of a Transformers feel. But it was the first of the Brave series and the Brave series had many of the same people as the Transformers. Something must have made them move away from the Transformers model and move more towards what later Brave series would be like. What that is I do not know.
– Hisui
The whole sentient mecha theme is main theme of Transformers, if you try and copy it, no doubt people will make the link to Transformers and pass said show off as a rip off.
You get the odd sentient mecha here and there in anime, but not a lot of shows do it.
Really? I would argue that if there is one thing the anime industry (and the entertainment industry in general) has never had a major problem with it is copying a successful idea. It has to be some other reason. I mean how many Evangelion types show were made for an example of something more than bit odd and hard to replicate? Something easy to replicate seems like a no brainer. Individual people might forsake such blatant cash grabs but the industry as a whole is not that prideful.
– Hisui