Brought to us by Roosterteeth and Netflix, Transformers War For Cybertron is a brand new animated series featuring the well known Autobots and Decepticons as they fight their endless civil war. Siege focuses on the fight for the Allspark on their homeworld of Cybertron, as whoever controls it could potentially bring about the end of the war. This is the first act, featuring 6 episodes, of a planned trilogy, presenting another new take on the franchise.
How did it turn out? Thankfully with Roosterteeth at the helm we received a fantastic entry in the Transformers franchise that really stands out compared to previous works.
This was heavily geared to a more grown up and mature audience, similar to the video games created by High-Moon Studios that detailed the final days of the war. While it retains elements of previous outings like the G1 series, this is a much darker story that really emphasizes the brutality of war and its consequences. For me, this is exactly the kind of tone and themes the franchise needs, without the need for human characters or repetitive silly plots.
A lot of familiar faces make up the cast for this show, and to be completely honest these are perhaps the best portrayals of these characters to date. They are not just some machines that are fighting because they have to, they are living, thinking beings that are enduring a great toll by being a part of this war. They have lost many of their close allies in the field of battle, and this causes some of the characters to look at the leaders they follow and start to question if it’s worth following their lead, and whether those leaders are making the right decisions or not for the good of their people. The fact that six 20-minute episodes are able to convey such powerful thoughts in that amount of time is truly outstanding. This is all thanks to some great writing and great voice acting from the cast.
You have some familiar voices of the Roosterteeth cast like Miles Luna and Gray G. Haddock, delivering some great performances, but the rest of the cast is made up of many names I’m not entirely familiar with, all delivering stellar performances. They really made the characters feel human and easy to connect with based on what they have endured. I know some people prefer some of the more iconic voices for these characters but personally I think everyone did an incredible job, including Jason Marnocha as Megatron, who I have to say is easily the best character in this first Act.
If I was to pick the odd one out among the characters I’d say the voice of Shockwave was definitely the weakest among the performances. Not that the performance itself is bad, but the voice just feels so out of place and doesn’t fit with the character as much as the others do. After all, he is meant to be a cold and calculated Decepticon and I never really got that from this adaptation.
The story is pretty simple to follow and the pacing is great, but you do feel a sense of wanting more when you watch it, just because of how invested you are.
The animation is absolutely stunning, probably standing out as one of the best animated Transformers series in years, giving us excellent and nostalgic designs for each character, along with beautiful shots of Cybertron. It’s also great to see that certain characters have battle scars, adding more to the mature theme of the series.
Of course with any Transformers entry you’d expect there to be some solid, metal-breaking action. While the action scenes that occur in the series are good, I feel they were rather short, which is strange considering that Roosterteeth is able to create such incredible and lengthy sequences in some of their other shows (Red vs. Blue and RWBY to name a few). It leaves you wanting a lot more, though I guess that could because we all have become so used to seeing them fight in the big budget movies that we may have gotten our hopes up too high. It’s almost like Game of Thrones in its first few seasons, where there were brief fights and more attention to the characters and story, which was honestly the best part of the series, until the showrunners decided to focus more on the fighting. Here it feels the same way, and because of that I can forgive the fight scenes being as brief as they are due to fact the characters are so fleshed out.
As a plus, the music in this series is absolutely lovely and fits the tone of the series.
So despite some minor issues, this series will definitely please fans of the franchise, as well as serve as a great modern introduction to new fans, or audiences seeking a more mature entry to get into the franchise. I honestly can’t wait to see what the rest of the trilogy has in store. I’m going to give Transformers WFC: Siege an A.