There was an older obscure anime titled Gunbuster. It was a rather typical giant-robot-armor mini-series which did something very clever with its robot/armor designs.
In the first two episodes, the show established a very grounded tone with very very detailed and realistic mechanical designs. Plot enforced sience concepts which are normally ignored like Einsteinian time distortion at spaceship speeds. When the girls got into trouble, their punishment was going outside the spaceship in spacesuits to polish the lenses of the huge weaponized lasers, because that is a thing which we would need to do of we lived in such a setting.
The first episode takes place at a mech pilot school and has a climax in which the MC fights some school bullies. The second episode takes place on spaceships. The conflict there is with an alien who is sort of a living spaceship. The characters struggle a lot with this alien. The alien is the size of an aircraft carrier and has the maneuverability of a humming bird. The humans persevere and destroy the alien, but it's a hard costly battle.
The title mech doesn't appear until nearly the end of the third episode. The human ship is surrounded by a fleet of those aliens. Ten thousand aliens just like the last one have the Earth ship surrounded.
When the Gunbuster get finally revealed, it looks nothing like any of the established designs. It's stylized. It's chunky. It looks more like a suit of armor even though it's five times the size of the other mechs. It looks like something out of Big O or Giant Robo. The Gunbuster arrived with unique theme music which was also in contrast to everything we had seen.
This was a great moment. The contrast is design really drove home the idea that this one piece of gear was something special.
Then the MC said, "Fire the homing lasers."
