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The Hitchhiker Guide to the Super Robot Anime genre.

Ribbons wrote:

I'm a pretty big mecha fan, but I always wanted to know where Big O was categorized. It has a lot of realistic elements but the series became campy whenever the robots appeared.

I'd personally qualify Big O as being on the real-ish side of things, if for no other reason than the fact that its somewhat pondering movements are much more what you'd expect out of a multi-story metal behemoth than your standard mecha. (Hell, it even beats a lot of other "real" robots out in that regard, considering how Evas and Gundams go zipping about all over the place.) The majority of its weapons (excluding the spoiler[Final Stage], obviously) are relatively plausible; things like rockets, piston-driven arms, and jet-propelled anchors don't exactly break the bank believability-wise. Most of the show's designs are decidedly old-school; I'd go so far as to classify Big O itself as almost steampunk-esque. That isn't to say that a few of the show's other robots don't trend toward "super;" one of the most memorable moments of the series for me was in the second-season episode "The Greatest Villain," which features Beck wielding a blatant parody of old-school super robots.

(Of course, in the end, the series is no more a traditional mecha than Eva is, so maybe the whole point is moot. )

Add to that Big O's nigh invulnerability (it rarely received out right damage) and you've got a Super.

Robots are pretty much all supers, it just depends on its usage in the show as whether or not it is a "super" or a "real".

So, in the case of Big O, while it is pretty over powered, would fit into the real category because its used as a tool, a possibly living tool, but a tool nonetheless.