I mean yeah that's true some people like flat, overly dark stories devoid of any humor whatsoever.

I'm not being sarcastic, I'm agreeing.

 

Damn wish my boy sunstorm would finally get some characterization

 

So I finished Siege after being somewhat impressed with episode 1...it went down hill very quickly.

While I think the voice cast did a decent job, almost everyone speaks in the exact same low rumble with grandiose undertones and it gets very monotonous and I kinda stopped caring halfway through speeches. The ones that don't sound exactly the same seem to have voices that are not working. Soundwave specifically was just bad. Shockwave's wasn't bad exactly, just didn't seem to work right.

Character motivations seem to change when the story demanded it. No real warm up. Just stuff like "I WILL NOT MURDER THESE BOTS EVEN THOUGH I HAVE LEAD OUR BOT MURDERING TEAMS FOR GOD KNOWS HOW LONG AND OPENLY ADVOCATED SHOOTING A SURRENDERING AMBASSADOR ABOUT 12 SCENES AGO. BECAUSE IT'S BAD." Never felt natural.

And they have some cool ideas but do NOTHING with them.

Spoiler

"Soundblaster is a failed clone of Soundwave created by Shockwave? And he hates that being brought up? That sounds really interesting and...no wait he's compared himself to Soundwave and now he's gone...Ok then."

They also just seem to throw shit in there for no reason. "Hey look zombies! Why are they here? Because they're looking for sparks...so why are they protecting the Allspark?"

And did I miss something with Prime's mission? Ok yeah get Allspark off the planet. Yeah fine got that. And now we're going in to space because...what? Elita-1 mentions he had a mission. He does? Hell even if it was "to get as many Autobots away from Megatron as possible" they never mentioned.

And they try to do that whole "Both sides have arseholes" thing but the worst most Autobots do is have a bit of an argument. Any Cons who are nice were obviously gonna join the Bots. Then they show the cons making literal murder fields. So after that Megatron's "I WAS FORCED TO SLAVE IN THE MINES" thing doesn't really land. IDW showed you can do that thing well. It was not done so here.

Still...it was better than the Prime Wars cartoon. Yeah not hard, and has some effort put in and some good ideas. But it never capitalised on those ideas.

5/10. Would watch someone who isn't Freddery make fun of it.

 

It fulfilled my expectations 100 percent.
To bad the show didn't have more episodes so we could get more in depth with the story, it felt to rushed.
Another thing, I'll try to rewatch it with the 6 year old. Who is a big fan of cyberverse. But I think he will struggle to keep attention with the slow pace, but I think he will like the look of the characters, since the majority of them are as bulky as as his favorite cyberverse grimlock

 

I don't even MIND the "Senate oppression" story...it's just that, with the exception of IDW1 (and "Megatron is My Hero", oddly enough), they never DO anything with it. We never see the early parts of the rebellion where the Decepticons and Autobots alike were supposedly fighting for a good cause. We never see the old Cybertronian society, we're just told about it. They're trying to do "shades of grey" without putting in any effort to show morally ambiguity in the characters onscreen. Megatron is a totally evil despot in all the present-day sequences of Prime and Cyberverse, and all the scenes period in Siege. The fact that he allegedly fought against slavery sometime in the past doesn't change the fact that he's being written as a completely evil dictator. There's no hint that he has a valid point anymore, no implication that the Decepticons are anything but a bunch of thugs (with the exception of the two defectors who join the Autobots). Now, that's not a BAD thing...having bad guys primarily just be bad guys can work (see G1, Victory, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Cybertron, Armada, etc.), but it does sort of undermine the whole point of introducing the corrupt Senate thing in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, the Decepticons were basically the best part of the show (alongside Soundblaster and Mirage), but I was enjoying them as G1-esque villains, not as deep characters.
I will also say that I was actively annoyed when Optimus first mentioned the "we used to be friends" thing. Can we either give that a rest or handle it better?

This is another good point. Trying to shove as much character development and plot into two hours as Siege did made for a very confusing, disjointed plot. It's a minor miracle that any of the character development worked at all.

Note that I'm not saying this as a means of bashing anyone who liked the show, or even the show itself. Please don't take it that way. I personally enjoyed a lot of the show (except for some of the poor voice acting), I just didn't think it was very good from a storytelling point of view (it's kind of how I like "A Prime Problem", despite not thinking that episode is very good).

Time for Longitudinalwave's obligatory psychology comment: if you are implying that the characters act as though they have different personalities in different episodes, the term you're probably looking for is Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). Schizophrenia does mean "split mind", but the "split" refers to the split between the mind and reality, not to the creation of two minds. As a psychology major, this is just something I feel it's important to educate people about. You are not the only person to have this confusion. Anyway...back to transforming robot toys.

I actually liked Mirage and Jetfire, but I agree that the former's development was really rushed and that the latter's development made no sense given his behavior in the first episode. Why did they include his actions in the first episode if they were going to have him turn into an honorable warrior later?

As for the difference in reaction to working with Impactor and working with Jetfire, I guess it's possible that Jetfire, as the leader of the Seekers, is simply a lot higher-profiled than Impactor, and that's why they react differently to him. Apparently he's supposed to be super loyal to Megatron at first, and he had a high position in the Decepticon hierarchy, so it's possible they see him as less trustworthy. But that's just conjecture, and it still wouldn't totally make sense.

You know, you're really not wrong. The show really does a poor job at establishing why the Autobots are the good guys (and I liked some of them, including Ratchet)! It's kind of similar to what happened in TF: Prime, just taken up to 11.
Also, man oh man do I hate this version of Optimus Prime. He's up there with Energon Ironhide, Headmasters Chromedome, and Headmasters Daniel and Wheelie in terms of characters I dislike. It's like Cardbordimus Prime from TF Prime and RID 2015, but now he's also somehow a hotheaded idiot.

You know, I was so busy trying to follow the plot, trying to ignore Soundwave, Shockwave and Optimus Prime's terrible voices, pretending Hound was Ironhide, and enjoying the nostalgia that Mirage and the Decepticons were providing that I almost totally failed to notice this.
Since the Autobots are a bunch of unlikable jerks who are lead by an angry idiot and threaten to kill civilians for not being Autobots, and the Decepticons are genocidal madmen bent on conquest as per usual, why would anyone want to pick a side in this version of the war? I sort of assumed that the Autobots were good once Ratchet joined up (although it's telling that it took him, Wheeljack, Mirage, Impactor, AND Jetfire, two of whom were originally Decepticons, to really get me to root for the Autobots), but in the show itself, without relying on older shows like it wants you to, there's no clear reason to assume that fighting for the Autobots is the right call to make.

Here's the answer: because reasons! It's why lots of things happened in G1, so it (theoretically) works here too. (Except G1 also had good voice actors and Autobots that weren't jerks all the time, and it wasn't unrelentingly depressing when Starscream's off-camera, so I enjoy it more. That, and nostalgia.)

 

Thing is, it's not even a very convincing war. They literally make a point of having someone see the few Autobots in the Ark and going, "is this it?" Whereas there are thousands upon thousands of Decepticons cheering at Megatron's rallies.

And to be fair you can see why. Megatron is seemingly charismatic, decisive and a master of propaganda. Whatever the hinted-at previous rulers of Cybertron were, they're not in charge now, and to that extent he's by definition been successful at overthrowing them in order to secure better rights for those previously classed as slaves. Meanwhile the Autobots are led by a slow-witted narcissist with a hairtrigger temper living in the Cybertronian equivalent of a 1968 VW Camper. That's not a war, that's Four Lions with robots.

 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I have only minor criticisms.

Some of them should have been speaking faster. There were times where they dialog felt unnaturally slow. Stoic Prime didn't sound that great (but angry Prime more than made up for that). And a lot of characters sounded too similar to one another. But that's it really.

I liked the story. I don’t consider the Allspark Macguffin to be overdone because the first live action movie is the only other media I've seen that uses it (Prime Wars didn't focus entirely on the Allspark so it doesn't count).

I really don't understand some of the gripes I was reading last night. Shockwave, Ironhide and Moonracer all had fine voices in my opinion. Soundwave was weird but not bad. I don't see how the last episode was any sort of disaster as I saw some people say.

I ultimately enjoyed it, and I'm convinced there are some people here who didn't like it because they convinced themselves not to from the start.

I think I'm gonna leave this thread now. I don’t want to feel like anyone's trying to convince me not to like it and I don't want to feel compelled to convince someone else to like it. If you wanna have a positive discussion about it though. My PM's are open.

 

There's nothing wrong with a dark story. Like any story, its effectiveness is contingent on its quality--Siege is far, far from a quality production.

 

Excellent show. The story was gripping from beginning to end and I was on the edge of my seat for nearly the whole time. Definitely the best animated show since the original series, and way better than the crap we've gotten lately, like Animated, Cyberverse, and RID. Finally a mature, serious take on the Transformers universe where it feels like there are actual repercussions to the characters and they're not just flailing around, talking in silly voices, and cracking jokes. Can't wait for the next chapter.

 

Let me reiterate my thought from before:
Bumblebee was being paid to find energon? What is he being paid? You'd think in the situation the planet is in, mercenaries would want to be paid in...I don't know...energon?!?

Do we need a third sound for when triple changers go from Alt mode 1 to Alt mode 2?

 

Agreed. I love me some post Apocalyptic storytelling but the dialogue, voices and rushed (yet still somehow dragged out) story were too much of a hindrance to the end product.

 

I finished the show and... it was really, really flat for me. Like, the story was really basic and straightforward and it was far more focused on telling a sequence of events than actually exploring any of the characters deeply. Honestly, I think it would have made far more sense to start from the beginning of the war than anything else. Like, I felt way more emotion from this one scene from Prime than anything from this show:

 

loved moonracer's combiner reference!

 

For example:
Shakespeare's tragedies are very grim, but they're some of the most acclaimed works in the English language. Similarly, Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and 90% of Edgar Allen Poe's work are very dark tonally, and they likewise are excellent stories. This does not mean, of course, that every book that involves lots of gloom and death is equally good.

Watchmen (from what I've heard; haven't actually read it myself) is a very dark story. However, it was also well-crafted and intelligently handled, and that complexity is why it received good critical reviews. This also applies to comics such as The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, and The Dark Knight Returns. However, the dark and gritty '90s anti-hero craze that followed these influential comics was often resulted in stories that were very poor in quality. The danger isn't in the grimness of the story...it's in believing that making a story grim automatically makes it complex and good.

Or, for a more Transformers-related example, Last Stand of the Wreckers (which I have read) is a great comic, also being well-crafted and intelligently handled. It's also extremely grim, but it's an excellent story. The first quarter of All Hail Megatron, by contrast, was dark, but it wasn't nearly as well-handled and isn't nearly as popular or good.

You get the idea.

 

Superbly put. When Shakespeare put the fumbling, drunk guard into Macbeth, he literally invented comic relief. Last Stand is pretty grim and brutal but it also has tiny little moments of character humour, such as Rotorstorm's "Wreckers... combine!". Moments like this aren't just done because the author wants to show their range - they're about leavening the bleak tone just enough to keep the reader/viewer going. Hell, I mean that's why you get the And Finally on the news: yes the world is full of virus, war and poverty, but also, two pandas at Edinburgh Zoo have managed to have a bit of nookie.

None of that in All Hail Megatron. Or indeed Siege.

 

Now you got me on that one LOL

 

It was fine.

Random thoughts:
Why kill Skywarp? Kill Hotlink. He’s already painfully generic.

Hound had Ironhide’s personality

Mirage had Hound’s hologram ability.

His electro disrupter just makes him invisible/hard to see .....like how a mirage works.

It doesn’t project hard light copies of himself and large buildings. Like a hologram.

Found this weird because it’s not like any of those 3 characters weren’t in the series, so the writers had no reason to swap those details around. Seemed like poor research rather than a creative new take.

Cybertron is populated by Reflectors, apparently.

 

God! I need more episodes.It leaves you wanting to see much more.

The animation was correct, at times excellent and for another normal.

I'm a huge G1 fan,for that reason love the designs(I'm not going to complain about that,even the Megatron lips haha)

Ok, the story is something we've already seen many times, but there were moments that took me by surprise.I like that it's a dark story,I mean is a war, right?

Although there are characters that lacked development, there were others who shined!

Things that I loved:
Seekers
Elita 1
Jetfire
The Ark
The robots dead
Soundwave (So inferior  )

Things that were correct:
The Music
The animation( like a I said for moments I loved it)
*Megatron
*Megatron was presented almost as a deity, but chapter after chapter he became a normal character like everyone.I wish it had a special power or something like that.
Shockwave was fantastic! It was like the wizard of the decepticons.
Optimus Prime

Things that I missed seeing:
A bigger battle (or at least with a long duration)We saw a couple of fights, 2 or 3 per episode, but I would have liked to see a longer one that is only in one episode.
More transformations
More about the past.
More of Ravage!!!


I will surely see it a few more times.

As a note I would put an 8/10

Hopefully soon we have news of the second part.

 

There’s a lot of things I can overlook:

animation models that are obviously simple geometry but made to look detailed with texture mapping... flat... very flat texture mapping.

animation models that don’t cast shadows.

animation models that are shot, explode, crash through a building and come to rest- without any dents or damage.

What I find hard to overlook is the one guy fits all voice. I see these characters and want to expect different voices. I’m not expecting the original G1 cast to reprise their roles... but when I see Bumblebee I would expect him to talk different than Wheeljack.