My Review of "Transformers: War for Cybertron Season 1"

Transformers: War for Cybertron was announced not too long ago and when they did the excitement for the series was at an all time high. I guess you can say people are still excited about it but it really depends who you're talking to. I can tell this series plays out to pander to fans of the original TV series from the 80s and that's not a bad thing. The thing is, it's not necessarily a great thing either.

The series takes place before the famous crash landing of Teletraan 1 (the Autobot spaceship) on Earth in the popular 80's Transformers TV series. There's tons of turmoil happening in Cybertron (the home planet of all Tranformers). We see a lot of the old characters that we remember from the old TV series like: Bumblebee, Starscream, Jetfire, Optimus Prime and Megatron.

All of the relationships between the Transformers is a lot more complicated in this series. It looks like at one point all of the robots were at one time unified until an incident that had happened that split the Transformers into two factions Autobots and Decepticons.

This series is so fresh after that incident that some characters such as Bumblebee still aren't affiliated with each of the sides. So there's neutral Transformers that just want to live their lives and not get into all the robot politics.

Even some of the characters within each of the factions question some of the motives of their affiliated faction. Jetfire starts to question Megatron's leadership decisions and even Ratchet wonders if he wants to be an Autobot anymore. Ratchet basically wants to help all Transformers whether they're Autobot or Decepticon.

This is a nice change of pace of the mindless good guy versus bad guy situation we're accustomed to with giant fighting robot TV shows. It makes it a little more interesting and they can pull it off because the majority of the people interested in this series are probably over the age of 30. They're the ones that remember all of the backstory of the old Transformers and old lore that was never explored.

Unfortunately that kind of plays as a disadvantage for new viewers or people that don't quite remember the show from back then. There were several times I was wondering what the heck they were referring to. This included discussions of events they don't really give you a backstory of but you just go with it.

The artwork and visuals for this TV series are stunning. They look absolutely beautiful but I had a few questions for the character designs. Why do they look like Earth like vehicles when they're all the way in Cybertron? They were supposed to be robots in disguise and I even remember Teletraan 1 had changed their appearance to reflect Earth vehicles. They made some modifications to make them seem more robotic but we know they look exactly like a car, truck or some sort of vehicle that is designed for a human to drive. Again this is geared toward die hard fans so they probably don't even give a crap about those details.

The whole season is pretty short and only consists of 6 episodes. The whole point of the series is to give a little backstory to the history behind the relationship between Optimus Prime, Megatron and Ultra Magnus. The three of them used to fight together until a fateful event that forever separated them.

Megatron is now looking to find the "All Spark" in order to weaponize it and eliminate all Autobots. Optimus Prime wants to find it first and get it as far away from Megatron as possible. It's a nice and simple story and for the most part it works. I do like the more complex backstory they include in their exposition.

I did find that the sound mixing of this TV series was a little off. The sound effects with the voices and background music needed a lot of adjusting. I know it sort of emulates the original series but that was back in the 80's when they didn't have great equipment. It kind of made the show seem a little dull while I was watching it.

The pacing of the series was also a little slow. I guess it was because they had to explain a lot of backstory but they didn't quite explain all of it because there are still some holes. I guess that could be what they'll be covering in the second and third part as this series is slated to be 3 seasons long.

Overall, I think I'm probably going to wait until the third season finishes before watching this series again. It was a little bit long and drawn out despite being a very short 6 episode season. That just goes to show that I found it a bit boring. I have to give this season a 6 out of 10. I think only die hard Transformers fans will really enjoy this. Then again they might not like some of the issues I had with it as well. I just can't recommend this series to anyone personally.