Watch Beast Wars, Beast Machines (Not as good as BW but it's dark and very interesting with it's plot), R.I.D/Car Robots (The Dub's polished), Armada (There's no japanese sub version sorry), Superlink (Energon is just lost in translation), Cybertron/Galaxy Force (This is the most fun out of the trilogy, it's dubbed is as polished as R.I.D), Animated (This one is great minus the Supervillains, Prime (It's on TV now on the HUB)
Howdy. Beast Wars is a fantastic story. The only negative thing I can say about it is that it is followed by Beast Machines. If you fall in love with Wars, you might want to consider avoiding Machines. On its own Machines is a good series but a few drastic things change in it that just makes it a bad Transformers series. Strip anything Transformers related and Machines is a good show though. But that's just my opinions. Other vary. Animated was also quite good. I didn't love the first season where it was the Autobots as super heroes instead of fighting Decepticons. But after it picked up it became better. It's an interesting re-imagining of the mythos. And Transformers Prime is just joy in CGI form. It's fantastic. It has amazing characters, sharp visuals, and strong plots. Prime will forever change how you look at Arcee in a fantastic way. Just ignore anyone who claims that War for Cybertron is a prequel to it.
You mentioned earlier that you didn't like the graphics in early Beast Wars, and I agree that it can get weird and clunky in some of the earliest episodes. But just earlier today I re-watched the first few episodes of each season and the animation does get a lot better through the series. It's pretty crazy going straight from the pilot to Coming of the Fuzors and Deep Metal.
Watch Masterforce..you will love it. Just youtube the intro and it will leaving you wanting for more.
Best to start with Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Animated, and Prime, the series which were written, voiced, and in the case of BW and BM, animated on this continent. The animation in Beast Wars improves by leaps and bounds over the entirety of the series - they were developing the technology as the show went, just as with the first two seasons of ReBoot (the third being made years later). Then check out some episodes of the Japanese stuff (Headmasters, Masterforce, Victory, Zone, BWII, BW Neo, and the Unicron Trilogy) online and see if you can stand them before plunking down money for them. If you don't like anime old or new, they might be a hard slog. Its okay if you don't, tho, room for all Transformers fans here! --Moony
This. The general classic "feel" from G1 carries over to animated and prime. The rest, from what I've seen of them, always felt like pokemon style animations. I'm still willing to give them a shot eventually.
Headmasters was OK...a bit silly at times, though. But you need it to get through to Masterforce, which IMHO is the best TF series EVER.
