Cultural Impact
Raijin-Oh was a tremendously popular series at the time of its release, spawning two similar sequels and OVAs. This led to waves of similar TV shows in the early 90s, where a child or children were made into the pilots of giant robots. This was a significant change of pace for the mecha genre, which usually pursued an older demographic and used teenage or adult characters as pilots.
To modern fans, Raijin-Oh is probably most notable for being the subject of the deconstruction manga series Bokurano. Bokurano contains many plot elements that directly parody Raijin-Oh's premise, characters, and especially its tone. Otherwise Raijin-Oh had little worldwide impact, despite some success in Southeast Asian countries like China and Taiwan.
Raijin-Oh was featured in the New Century Brave Wars game, along with several of the Yuusha series robots, also created by Sunrise at around the same time. The reason for this was likely to have been the similarities between the Yuusha series and the Eldran trilogy, that and both series were animated by Sunrise. The toy company which made the Yuusha series, Takara would later merge with Tomy and thus both companies had access to each other's toy ideas, hence why Raijin-Oh was part of the video game. However the other two Eldran series, Genki Bakuhatsu Ganbaruger and Nekketsu Saikyo Go-Saurer were not included; in fact a few of the Yuusha series robots were also left out of the game.
Raijin-Oh has only recently begun to appear in Banpresto's Super Robot Taisen series of games. It has appeared in Super Robot Taisen GC, Super Robot Taisen XO, and Super Robot Taisen Neo. This is in part due to the fact that the Super Robot Taisen series largely concerned itself with 70's and 80's series at the time the game series began in the early 90's. As of 2009, Raijin-Oh is nearly 20 years old and therefore old enough to be nostalgic to adult gamers. It is not clear why Raijin-Oh has only appeared in the 3D Super Robot Taisen games that appear on Nintendo consoles, as opposed to the more popular 2D games that appear on PlayStation systems and Nintendo handhelds.
Read more about this topic: Zettai Muteki Raijin-Oh
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