At the end of Darkness Rising part 1, we see Megatron in space stating Decepticons, I have returned. So I assume, it's from the ending of FOC

 

Dude, what part of the bolded don't you get? The team at HMS intended for their game to be a new take on G1, designed it to be a new take on G1, WROTE IT TO BE A NEW TAKE ON G1. TFP was its own thing, and Aaron Archer came out and said "Hey, they're the same thing!" talking about a "squint test" when it was apparent that they were not. FOC suffered from this Aligned nightmare more as certain visual cues were forced into the game.

Stop trying to rationalize it, and don't explain the differences. We're all perfectly aware it doesn't fit, and only a few holdouts even try to justify it.

And yes, I'm of the mind that the WFC/FOC stuff should be in a separate category on the wiki.

 

I think the best way to connect the stories is to take out some of the details. For example, Transformers Exodus novel and War for Cybertron can fit together by saying that The Chapters that take place during the levels of War for Cybertron are not canon, but rather an adaptation for a good book since parts of the game, such as encounters with frequent generic enemies or trying to activate levers to reach the next part of a level are to long or boring for a story. Certain details such as Sentinel Zeta Prime in the novel being held prisoner by Starscream before the Great War started could be he was a prisoner for most of the War but was freed or escaped shortly before the events of War for Cybertron.

 

Other details to connect the War for Cybertron game and Exodus novel are below:

1. Tyger Pax and Bumblebee's voice. Bumblebee can talk in WFC but in later chronological stories he can't speak. I believe that the Battle of Tyger Pax takes place between the two games. This way, the other Autobots and Optimus have time to get to know him and welcome him into the Autobot chain of command since he first met them in WFC during the Siege of Iacon. since Cybertron's Core is shutting down from the infection of Dark Energon, Optimus Prime launches the Allspark into space to keep it from Megatron and so it Probably won't die out from the recently infected core. Meanwhile, Bumblebee is helping fight in Tyger Pax and Megatron crushes his voice.

 

No, you can still totally do that - the point is not to focus everything on the repetitive giant hordes.

I mean, Halo did it just fine.

That doesn't make any sense.

Only to go and get captured again? That's honestly cheap and poor plot direction.

...you do know the official backstory for that regarding Aligned cannon is that BB took a shot to save Prime, losing his voice in the process, right?

I mean, he's not talking by the time of FOC so you're not solving a problem that wasn't already fixed here.

 

Not to mention the fact that Starscream was either a NAIL (which didn't really exist in that game) or an Autobot before the end of Level 1 in WFC, so it REALLY doesn't make sense at all as far as the novel tie in.

 

Jetfire called him a traitor and promised he'd report him to Zeta, pretty sure he was an Autobot. Not that High Moon bothered to give him Autobot sigils before turning to Megs.

 

I'd say Starscream was about as neutral as possible before joining Megatron - the problem with what he was if not an Autobot is due to the fact there aren't any other factions named or known of before the Deceptions are born.

 

I've not ready any of the novels, so I can't really comment on them, but honestly, I don't think the differences are too major until you get to RID. Yeah, the designs are different, but so was Prime's design when he got his Beast Hunters upgrade. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, the two definite returning characters from Prime, look drastically different from their Prime forms in RID.

The key differences come in when you get to RID. Grimlock and Sideswipe are still, respectively, a muscular T-Rex and a red sports car. The differences come when you consider that the RID Sideswipe is way younger than WFC/FOC Sideswipe, and that Grimlock is way less angry and violent, and can transform without going full-on rage mode.

Obviously, I can call upon the "same name, different individual argument in Sideswipe's case. Megatron and Optimus Primal of the G1/Beast Wars continuity took their names from the original Megatron and Optimus Prime, and it's entirely reasonable to assume that someone named themselves after a war veteran, as BW Megatron did.

The confusion comes in with Grimlock, who acts dramatically different from his FOC counterpart. Well, so far, all I've got is headcanon, and I acknowledge that this is headcanon, so please don't call me out on trying to pass it off as canon, because I'm not. This is me just theorizing. That said, I believe it is the same Grimlock, but after the whole space bridge explosion, his memory circuits were corrupted, and he wasn't discovered until after the war ended. All the processes wired by Shockwave that turned power away from thinking to increase his fighting strength were mostly repaired, and Grimlock became calmer now that he no longer suffered from what Shockwave did to him, though he retains his fighting spirit and some of his increased strength.

Another argument against my case is that the other Dinobot to be in RID, Scowl, was nowhere to be seen in WFC/FOC. I could argue that we might not have seen Grimlock's entire team, though it is a tiny bit curious why no one would mention him. Perhaps Shockwave had captured other Autobots, trying to practice his Dinobot experiment on them before he captured Grimlock? I'll take either one as a working theory.

Really though, it all comes down to headcanon-ing your way around the gaps, and how much you want Prime/RID and WFC/FOC to be in the same continuity. Honestly, it makes more sense in the Aligned Continuity than anywhere else (including G1, anyone think of the contradictions to IDW or the cartoon?) to me.

 

Aligned makes the most sense to me--in fact only makes sense to me at all--if you look at it as unified, objective, but somewhat vague history. And the Aligned history is not what we get in Prime or RiD'15, or the High Moon games, or the books. If we think of the Aligned history like our own real world history, then the various stories in the "Aligned continuity" are like historical dramas. They will use creative license to fill in all the unknown details, change or embellish events for dramatic effect, and interpret historical figures in their own ways.

We don't really expect different stage interpretations of the man Julius Caesar to be exactly alike, nor for the events of every World War II or Vietnam movie to line up exactly with one another, for Schindler's List to look and feel like Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, or for Gone With the Wind to make sense as a sequel to Uncle Tom's Cabin. And yet they're all based on the same real life world history, sometimes in very close proximity to events depicted in vastly different works.

That's a given in the real world were we have only one actual history (even if we can't always agree on exactly what it is), but we aren't used to the same thing occurring to fictional histories that we never get to observe directly. And yet that seems to be exactly how Aligned works are being made: Hasbro outlines a single canonical history to be used internally, and various derived works describe and embellish parts of it without regard for anyone else's version.