Transformers: War for Cybertron

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 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.

This show is awesome for transformers lovers and people who are new to the franchise! My only wish is for them to give us more than just 6 episodes per season because u can love the show if there are only 6 23 min long episodes.

Obviously the visual design is great, but that's really the only nice thing I have to say about it. This is some of the most lethargic voice acting I've ever heard. A lot of the characters sound almost identical. Almost all of them sound like they're about to fall asleep. Characters have a tendency to speak very slowly too, sometimes leaving huge awkward pauses between words for dramatic effect I guess, but they do it sooooo often, most of the time when there isn't anything particularly dramatic being said, that it's just unpleasant.

For that matter, the dialogue itself feels off sometimes too, disjointed and awkward as if there's been some kind of poor translation from another language, but...there hasn't. This was made in America. The guy doing the voice of Starscream was the only one that seemed to be giving it any effort. The guy doing the voice of Optimus is kind of painful to listen to because he starts out trying to play the part with a Peter Cullen impression, but he can't seem to hold it for more than a few seconds at a time and just keeps slipping into a normal voice most of the time. It's pretty bad.

The pacing also has a kind of Dragon Ball Z feel to it (not a compliment). There's a lot of standing around very slowly talking about what's going on and what they're going to do, but not much actual doing. Mostly just a bunch of melodramatic posturing. When there is action it feels pretty clunky, which isn't all that surprising considering the big blocky designs of the characters. They're nice to look at when they're standing still, but they have a pretty low range of articulation in motion, which leads to some weird robo fist fights that feel like you're watching a game of Rockem Sockem Robots.

Honestly I haven't been excited by a new Transformers show since Beast Wars so I don't know why I had any expectations for this, but the trailers made it look like this could be something special, but sorry, just having the characters look like the good old G1 days isn't enough for me when everything else about it is so disappointing. I'd give it a 4 or 5 out of 10 at best.

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.