I Liked Prime, but going back on it i do see some problems with them, tell me yours and your reasons.

 

My main problem with is was Arcee got way too much spotlight at times and I felt like others got sidelined. Of course that is just me but most peoples problem is how much the show could just kind of reset itself at times.

 

Orci & Kurtzman being attached. (It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it became apparent that they were the problem with ANY movie they were involved with. Fortunately, other writers took over and reshaped the series some so it wasn't their $#!7 show.)

Optimus was too wordy, too dour, too serious, and didn't have enough screentime a lot of the time to give him the impact he was supposed to have.

Arcee was too much the focus in some episodes and it seems like her arc never really came to a conclusion. It just kind of got there and then they sent Airachnid to the moon and well, that was that.

Silas was a compelling villain and they didn't give him enough to work with. He was great in the episodes he was in, though. (Doggone. Clancy Brown, man's a BAUS.)

On the plus side, the kids weren't annoying.
Megatron was a more competent version of his G1 self and it was nice to hear Welker get to deliver lines that actually made sense and plotted plans that almost worked, unlike the G1 counterpart who was just a raving lunatic who got lucky once in a blue moon and still somehow seemed to fail.
Starscream was nothing short of amazing and Steve Blum was fantastic in the role. (Second place goes to Charlie Adler in the live action movies. He didn't get a lot to say, but he sounded great doing it. No one, of course, holds a candle to the late Chris Latta. Shame his personal demons finally caught up to him. -_-)

Oh, the biggest problem with the series is season 2. ALL of it. Bookended by great finales/premieres but bogged down throughout with pointless and middling episodes that went nowhere, really, and that whole chain of episodes that played out like that movie "Vantage Point" where they went over the same thing, over and over again, but with a different character's point of view, and the conclusion wasn't really that satisfying. (Neither was Vantage Point, but critics derided it, anyway and it was a one-time thing, so alls well that ends well.)

Although...the finale to Predacons Rising/3rd season more or less just took what they built and needlessly killed Optimus for no good reason. None, whatsoever. It was so much a throwback to Beast Machines it made me want to puke. (I more or less ignore parts of season 3 and all of that conclusion movie. The kids weren't in it, even, and that seemed so out of place as decisions go considering they helped save the dang thing...)

I don't know. I do like the series, overall, and a lot of the episodes work as a standalone and the pilot flick was really quite good. I think it got bogged down in muddied waters too often. It's definitely worth rewatching, but it's not a perfect classic. Neither is G1, but it was groundbreaking at the time, so people hold it in higher regard and you can't argue with people like that, unfortunately.

 

I overall liked Prime. I feel like the good plot lines got rushed and the subpar ones dragged on too long. It is still my favorite next to G1 though.

 

Whew boy

-All the wasted characters
-All the wasted plotlines
-All the relic hunts
-Inconsistent characters (looking at you Arcee)
-Boring Optimus
-Boring music
-Autobots were perfect sunshines who never lost except in the season 2 finale
-Dead worlds

Character design and the animation was good tho

 

I know @Autobot Burnout is gonna have a field day with this thread.

 

Oh, am I ever.

To save time I'm just going to bullet point them.

• Cliffjumper was a super-heavily promoted character, which was a big deal because Cliffjumper never gets main character billing. On top of that, he had a truly amazing and unique muscle car design independent of Bumblebee...except he's dead in the first five minutes.
  
• And then for the rest of the show, Cliffjumper's death is treated as this horrible thing that apparently never happens, which the show thus goes on to support by never killing another Autobot on screen other than Prime. Seaspray is a total farce because it's an example of 'tell, not show', and thus Seaspray never existed in reality. We're just told Dreadwing killed him. And then this is never brought up again...unlike Whine-Cee conistently bitching about CJ's death.
• Until Airachnid comes around purely to antagonize Arcee and retroactively kill Tailgate, a character who doesn't fucking matter beyond dead.
• Airachnid in general is such a pathetic character and was clearly trying to be something other than what she visually was. Grand number of times she legit transforms? TWO. She spends more time with the long spider legs from the back then in her actual alt. mode. Why they didn't, y'know, make her a spider transformer? Probably Hasbro demanding another aerial Decepticon and the prime team rebelling. It's worse when they basically have Arcee bitch for a season and a half about getting revenge, and then when the time comes...Arcee spouts some 'higher road' bullshit and puts Airachnid in stasis, after which the audience is constantly reminded about this fact and that she's in the Autobot Base. The base gets nuked eventually but guess who's STILL IN STASIS. And then the time comes for Thirst where Airachnid is finally let out and she does...virtually nothing of importance beyond lead all the insecticons off the Nemesis to go eat each other on some random-ass planetoid never to be seen again. Few characters were ever as worthless as this precious little mary sue robot.
  
• Nemesis Prime - all that hype for ONE episode that wasn't even a season finale. Added bonus of making Prime look like a total idiot because Silas and Fowler fight for like what would have been five minutes in-show, only to then cut to Prime noticing the big Nemmy Prime robot stopped moving. The added amusement comes from the Nemesis Prime Arms Micron toy bio, where his intelligence stat is higher than OP's. Meaning a literal non-sentient mechanical puppet is smarter than Optimus Prime.
• The idea of relics in general was just fucking stupid. Why the hell would Alpha Trion launch these 'relics' - most of which were not relics but just stolen Decepticon tech from their R&D department - to Earth, which he knows is really Unicron because he helped put the bastard in there in the first place?
  
• Megatron in general is just a terrible fucking leader to the point Starscream is legitamately better at the start of the show. Mainly because Megatron's first priority when the Autobots invade the mine is to blow up the mine as opposed to Starscream's voiced protests about that basically destroying the Decepticon's major fuel supply. This of course has the worse case happen - Bots are unharmed and the Decepticons just lost what was their greatest asset on Earth. On top of that, Megatron routinely throws away every advantage given to him, namely Silasdown - so what if SOUNDWAVE once again failed to stop Raf (more on this next), that's still a guy who knows human culture, governments, and probably more black site projects. Instead, Megatron basically throws him away to eventually be killed by Knock Out's experiments.
• Raf is literally the only reason the Autobots win whenever the solution is not 'beat the shit out of things'. Soundwave, a millions of years old computer, is somehow unable to actually compete against a kid, all because the kid is smarter than Jimmy Fucking Neutron? On top of that, Raf does a laundry list of things that shouldn't be posisble in Human Factor: he uses an unapproved, unmodified consumer grade laptop to hack into a military black project site and cause the laser sat to burn up in the atmosphere. The entire point of black projects is so this kind of shit does not happen.
• But no, how does Megatron finally get clued in to how useful humans are? Miko pushing a fucking button on a spaceship, because somehow pushing buttons to fire missiles is now an unfathomably dangerous human ability. Especially when Megatron only knows this secondhand and the Decepticon who tells him couldn't have possibly seen Miko push the button. For all they know, it could have been Wheeljack since it was also his fucking ship to begin with.
• Breakdown was just wasted potential. The excuses the show writers came up for his arc ending abruptly was utter bullshit - things like "oh, he was an opportunist" and completely dodging the question of how he and Bulkhead knew each other from the past. The reality is that they couldn't afford to keep paying Alec Baldwin for the voice.
• Unicron in general. The idea of him being inside Earth is quite novel...until you realize he actually can't do anything and the whole objective is then for him to be taken out of Earth for him to actually be a major threat.
• The back half of S3 is some of the lamest bullshit ever. Predaking shows up, takes a pipe to the face without giving a shit, then promptly transforms in front of everybody. He explains that he's basically taught himself sapience which has allowed him to achieve things the original predacons couldn't - namely transformation into a bipedal robot mode - and despite the mountains of abuse leveled on him by that point, all he wants is to be in charge of the Predacons as their king. This arrangement still has Megatron in charge of Predaking, so really all Predaking wants is to be a general. Megatron can't possibly lose...and yet he's actually shitting his pants because Predaking transformed and nobody told him. So, what does Megatron do? Orders Shockwave to destroy the protoforms, the one thing that would piss Predaking off, and then Megatron blames the Autobots. Predaking naturally eventually learns the truth and tries to go one-on-one with Megatron...only to get kicked out of the airlock. Megatron legit shouldn't have feared Predaking from the start, given he took down even bigger monsters as seen in flashback! Meanwhile, the destroyed protoforms become bullshitmatter which - SURPRISE! - can fix the REPEATEDLY EMPHASIZED TO BE BROKEN BEYOND ANY REPAIR Omega Lock, and effectively makes the stakes of the previous season ending null and void.
• Miko is clearly not Japanese despite claiming as such. English shouldn't be her first language, meaning she should have had times where she used Japanese out of habit.
• The show's sense of justice was all over the place - Arcee claims vengance against Airachnid for killing Tailgate...except she doesn't in the end. Miko wants revenge against Hardshell for...almost...killing Bulkhead and does kill him. Oh, and Bulkhead's fine despite having to rest for two episodes after a fucking crater is carved into his back.
• Arcee is a bigger threat to the Autobots than the Decepticons. The episode where Starscream comes to ask for protection, in return for all the Omega Keys being given to the Autobots? Arcee puts herself above the objectives of the Autobots and whines hard enough about the fact Starscream killed Cliffjumper (almost like they're enemies in a war or something) and Prime ends up listening to her and kicks Screamer out...with the four keys. Starscream thus goes right back to Megatron with the keysi and it doesn't go well for the bots. Prime should have dressed down Arcee for being a massive bitch and overstepping her authority, given Starscream was literally handing them the things they needed most at the time.
• That same episode introduces Red Energon, which exists purely for Starscream to sneak around the Autobot base undetected. It never gets brought up again even though shit like that would be really useful. Thus, its only even created for the purposes of the plot and not as an actual piece of worldbuilding. Lazy writing at its finest.

 

Uh...This never happened! I think you are mixing up the eps 'Partners' (were he asks to join them, then both he and Arcee to a stupid and he escapes and goes neutral) and 'Inside Job' (Where, with the aid of Red Energon, Screamer gets into the Autobot Base, steals the keys, then immediately uses them to bargin with Megatron to be allowed back into the Cons (he never, EVER tries to bargin with the Autobots with them...though they assumed he would). Perhaps with a side of the ep (I forget the name) where Dreadwing literally gives the Forge of Solus Prime to the Autobots for nothing (then get's killed by Megs for trying to kill Starscream).

 

It's blurred all together but you're probably right. My point about the existence of Red Energon being solely to give Starscream a plot-necessary power stands though.

 

Optimus Prime had the personality of a wet blanket. I guess these people forget that OP knows how to laugh and have fun too.

That, and this is a personal nitpick, it was an ugly cartoon.

 

My biggest gripe with it is it tried to be "more serious" and it wound up just being an edgy teenager trying to look cool. They tried approaching "mature themes" differently from previous shows, and it didn't pay off.

One light in the darkness is they made Starscream an actually competent leader; he just can't win the respect he needs to really be an effective leader to save his life.

 

It was a show made by people that wanted to be "epic" and "serious" but did not have the writing talent to pull off serious properly, so it just ended up a kid's cartoon that is either embarrasing to watch for people with self awareness or boring for children looking for something actualy fun.

 

I also really liked prime, but there really is a lot of wasted character arcs, I get it's because it was going to end sooner than expected but still, we didn't even get to see what was the beef between Bulkhead and Breakdown. Also how sometimes it felt characters growth didn't really stay. Optimus as a character was a little blend, they gave him more character as Orion than Optimus (though this is every recent incarnations with him). And (and maybe it's just me) I think it tried to sell itself as more dark and gritty than it is, I mean, yeah, there is characters death but all of them, except one and some mentioned but not show, are Decepticon and it makes a difference, also in trying to make everything dark every stake turned to always be hight and it got old fast, after fighting Unicron fighting a giant lizard didn't look so bad...

 

I agree with others that there was wasted potential.
- I didn't think it at the time of watching it, but the 'relic of the week' bit for S2 did get old.
- they didn't build up to the Unicron story arc properly: it was all sudden like 'oh hey, here's Unicron! Deal with it! (they did the build up to the S2 and S3 finales a lot better imo). Not to mention, something as big as Unicron probably should have been saved for the end of a different season (I mean...it's freaking Unicron!)
- I wish they could have explored other character backgrounds a bit more. Like Bulkhead/Breakdown's as others mentioned. Wheeljack's I felt could have been dove into a bit more, go into more detail on why he left the Wreckers aside from 'I don't like Magnus leadership style' (also give more opportunity to show his more sciency side other than the one ep...'Minus one' I think?).

 

• Acree was traumatized and lost both Cliffjumper and Tailgate which is fine... but the problem is we know nothing about Tailgate. Cliffjumper atleast had a Spotlight episode, but Tailgate was mentioned and never again. Who is Tailgate? They could of left it at Cliffjumper, and the plot would barely change.

• Optimus was very boring. He wasn't snarky like in G1, young like in Animated, or violent in the movies, he was just whatever. I get they wanted Optimus to be a leader everyone could look up to, but he had no flaws. This exchange sums it up best:

Jack: "Hey Optimus wanna see something funny?"

Optimus: "No."

• Besides the theme song, there were no memorable songs. G1 still has the most memorable background music.
• Miko got annoying really quickly, because it seemed like she learned nothing from the previous times she blindly ran into battle.
• The ending felt... rushed. Predacons rising is just whatever.
• Breakdown, got killed off because they couldn't afford the voice actor.

 

I found many of the characters to be blander versions of previous versions. Wheeljack, Cliffjumper, Optimus, Arcee, Bulkhead, and Bumblebee really suffer in this regard. Despite having many years after beast wars, it still suffered from the same problems

Breakdown, Dreadwing, Arachnid, Insecticons, Cliffjumper were all killed to make way for other characters, Predicons, Magnus, Smokescreen
The deaths also felt forced most of the time.

 

How did it become apperent that they were the problem? The series had a few of the same problems as the movie, mainly killing off characters five minutes after we're introduced to them without even developing them as characters... but other than that Prime had none of the other problems that the live action films have suffered with... mainly inconsistent plot lines, too much focus on humans, not enough focus on the actual Transformers, and awful character designs.

 

Well, as you already said, murdering characters like it was going out of style, for one. Storylines that ultimately went nowhere, which Autobot Burnout addressed, for two. I own the series on Blu-ray, I enjoy it (for the most part) but I don't ignore the problems it has. It's better than average for a kid's show, especially in terms of Transformers, but it definitely has issue tied to those two.

Star Trek got better without their direct involvement, Transformers got better without their direct involvement (and I'll be fair to them, it was all Bay sinking the capsizing ship that was TLK, they weren't even involved so that one had nothing to do with them.)

They're fine, separately, but together as a duo, they're a mess.

 

Yeah but then again, this is a show about sentient alien robots that turn into cars. I think a young genius hacking into the government (a trope that seems to sleep into media a LOT lately) is something we can led slide.

 

Cool, thanks for clarifying.

Oh and I kinda think anything is going to turn into a mess when two or more writers are involved. Creative differences between different writers having very different ideas for how they want the story to go is almost always going to result in some problems. Doesn't matter who the writers are, you're never going to agree 100% with the other person no matter how well you work together.