Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy

Loved seeing a different take on the G1 story and how the bots we love were before they got to earth. The darker take really works and there are some great characterisations and surprises.

My only gripes are that most of the Autobots sound the same and the character models are recycled too often.

Recently I've been rewatching the G1 Transformers cartoons with my kids and while it didn't age quite as well as I imagined, it's still fun to watch, and my kids love it. Jump to 2020/2021 in cartoon land, or "animated series" and we have to make do with seasons consisting of 6 episodes each. Let's be honest here, these are basically expended commercials for the (admittedly wonderful) new WFC toy line. Going into Siege I was expected there would be a lot of action and story packed into the episodes, considering 6x24 minutes isn't a lot to work with time-wise. I was wrong. Characters seem half asleep, nothing much happens, even when Siege transitions into Earthrise. During both current seasons my kids asked me when the Transformers would stop talking (slooooooowly, so full of pretentious "meaning") and would actually transform. But no, the al forms are almost never seen, they're just robots, talking, depressingly talking, and running. It struck me that Bumblebee thinks it's a better idea to run away from a big threat in Earthrise rather than transform into a car and drive like hell. Then we see Sky Lynx and its alt form is never even shown. To make matters worse is that the voice acting seems to be done by actual robots; there's no emotion or any life in any of the dialogue. It's tiresome and weak. Even the blast effects during fighting are a miss; "plip plip" sounds without any oomph. It's just a boring show for adults that has no real feeling of stakes, doesn't reward investment, and offers no hook beyond seeing the original transformers combined in a few bare bones episodes, but they're not in disguise, and we hardly see them in action.

I was super excited for this show. Everything about it looked great. Two episodes in I was extremely disappointed. The acting is poor, the writing is rough, and the action is lacking. I finished through the 6th episode and warmed to it a little but I wouldn't recommend this show if you want something in depth.

I loved this! Lots of the great characters from the original, minus the annoying and cheesy human characters. I loved the darker tone!

It would have been nice to see a bit more transforming, but at the same time, they're on their own planet so they wouldn't have as much of a need to be in disguise.

A lot of reviews have lamented the voice acting, I felt it was decent. It was great that Starscream sounded the same, but unfortunately, many didn't sound quite the same. I must admit, at the start I did think that Optimus sounded like Peter Cullen but as it progressed, not so much.

I've not seen any of the series after G1, so can't comment on them, but I feel this does the franchise justice.

I thought this was entertaining. It has some deficiencies but overall was good. My major complaint was how short it was. Six, 24 min episodes is almost insulting.