Dug out my Armada collection tonight for shits and giggles and I can't help but think that this was a great toyline.
Most of the figures are just plain fun to fiddle with, minicons are neat and the play value is awesome. Sure Cybertron has the force chips as its version of minicon but it just seems pale in comparison to Armada.
The design asthetics are original and cool looking (i.e. Jetfire, Scavenger, Tidal Wave, Megatron...). I know a lot of folks feel that the gimmickery took away from the line, i.e. lack of pose-ability, but the gimmmicks are just fun,fun,fun, who can't resist Scavenger's Stompy Stomp , Hot Shot's Axel -Zooka, Hoists uber reaching shovel arm?
I have at least one of every mold in Armada, but lost interest in the energon line and have only 4 Cybertron figures. The latter two just seem boring to me... Now I'm just collecting Alternators, and I'll admit that even though each Alt is a work of art , they aren't as fun as armada.
Anybody else feel the same way?

 

Armada was fun but I'm opposite from you...I think Energon and Cybertron vastly improved the disigns especially adding articulation and keeping the fun factor. I think the biggest reason I was let down by Armada initially is I got back into collecting through the RiD car brothers, and Armada Hot Shot is a major step backwards from those three.

Totally agree about the Alts, they're the only TFs I've displayed instead of 'played' with. I know this is a total oxymoron, but they're semi-poseable statues whereas the 'kiddie' stuff, as you said is just plain fun.

 

Yeah I agree, Blurr and Sideswipe are good Examples of gimmicks getting in the way. On the other Hand Megatron , Cyclonus and Red Alert are Minicon gimmicks done right.

 

I loved a few of the armada characters but hotshot and smoke screen just seemed like bricks. and I totally cant stand Armada hotshot's head. Its so incredibly cartoony. He and backstop both suffer from stupidhead disorder. I loved what they did with starscream thundercracker and skywarp though. and though he isnt very articulated by any means I am a huge fan of Overload.

 

I like Cybertron best, then Armada, then Energon. I thought energon stunk. The combination gimmick took far more away than any Armada gimmick did, at least to me.

 

At first I couldn't stand Armada. Now after watching it a second time it's not that bad, now I continue to boycot another series for my own well being.....that being Cybertron.

 

Armada gave me some of my favorite toys to dick around with in the last 3 to 4 years. I love my Jetfire, Tidal Wave, Megatron Overload and of course Unicron. The mini-cons are my favorite transformer gimmick ever. I just wished we had more of the headmaster/targetmaster style mini-cons.

 

Hoist is one of my top ten all-time favorite Transformers and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future.

 

To me some of the toys just didn't live up to the designs, which for the most part were really cool. Yeah, after Beast Wars and RiD, the articulation bothered me a lot, and I was insanely put off by the colorschemes. Huge blocks of color with no highlights, bad placement, and tons of bad repaints of toys from the line within itself. To me, the line had some good toys that were all hampered by something or another, with hardly any of them being "perfect." Take Megatron for example, decent design, lots of play value, and yet it can't even move it's legs forward and has hot pink where much more sensible reds should have been. It's wacky decisions like that and other nonsense like the unpainted faction symbols and hot shot's fugly surprised face that really left me with a bad taste in my mouth with this line, and to me it pales in comparison to the lines that have followed it thus far.

Sorry

 

Eh I think the armada toys were way better then energon, which to me looks even more wacky and playschoolesk then armada...for me it def goes, with the new main lines, Cybertron...Armada...Energon as they go in liking for me.

 

agreed that the line was fun

and that Micron Legend by Takara was several times better than Armada.



tons of paint ap differences made the line much more adult than the playskool Hasbro line

 

I think that's what causes the love hate relationship with Armada, It seems to have started out geared towards a young market (i.e. 7-10 year olds) and as it progressed into Energon and Cybertron the target market has gone up. I wouldn't be surprised that in 20 years there will be a huge group of Armada nostalgists , the same way we have G1 and Beast war fans.

 

While Armada does have some stinkers like Hot Shot, Smokescreen, and Sideswipe, a lot of the designs were original and pretty damned cool. Megatron's sheer number of Minicon ports played well with his lust for power no matter what form it came in. And in retrospect he had a very original design. Most Megatron have some kind of allusion to a previous version. This one broke the mold. It gave us a deluxed size version of Prime which was far better than its Supercon counterpart. Armada gave us a return to the Seekers and coneheads with Starscream and Thrust. Not to mention it started a trend by giving Starscream a sword that now, I can't imagine future versions of him without one. One of the the best 'bricks' came out in the form of the Tidal Wave; a beautiful and imposing alt mode that could split up into three separate vehicles, as well as become armor for Megatron. For a figure that was meant to be an add on, it stood out well. And let's not forget, Armada gave us something no other line had accomplished for 17 years: A playable and transformable Unicron toy. The only thing that overshadowed it was some figure that became a 20th anniversary version of a certain leader.

 

I liked Armada forthe most part. My assumption was that Armada's goal was to bring "kid-friendly" back to Transformers after RiD, which had a lot of toys which tended to be complex, fragile, and difficult to transform for some. Armada took the idea a bit too far in some ways, with some backpedaling for Energon and beyond.

I think the best thing about Armada is, while minicon-gimmicks were the linewide gimmick, there was a lot of variety in design and gimmick implementation. Energon and Cybertron don't seem to do quite as much with the gimmick concepts given them IMO. Of course bigger ambitions lead to bigger failures in Armada sometimes.

 

i like the few armada mold i have. bendy prime, galvatron, tidal wave and a couple of seekers. admittedly the articulation is lame. i love minicons, i always thought, if galaxy force used minicons instead of force chips it would make the line 100x better.especially if you consider the minicons they were getting. hop, blit, bumper were all very classy minicons. if only they'd made more!

 

Love Armada... it put the fun back into Trans... fun... mers :/

 

transfunmers?

 

Yes, Transfunmers.

 

quick, patent that name.