Season Review: Transformers: War For Cybertron “Siege”

The Transformers is a franchise that has gone through more retcons in it’s nearly 40-year run for one reason and one reason only…to sell you toys. And it worked! Between merchandise, movie tickets sold via the Bayformers run, and whatever else, if there’s a model to latch on to as we get into the increasingly common era of live-action anime adaptations, this is a great place to start. While toys themselves aren’t as popular as they used to be, the franchise continues to live on in other ways.

Rooster Teeth is probably the best studio in the world to take on this franchise from a purely aesthetic point-of-view. The studio responsible for introducing 2.5D aesthetic to anime, the Austin, Texas-based studio best known for RWBY, Red vs Blue, and Gen: Lock has begun to embark on a future of not producing content solely for their own streaming service. With the studio’s gaming-inspired programming DNA, adapting Transformers: War for Cybertron as just the brand but having nothing to do with the game franchise of the same name is a nightmare-ish task to try on an already rabid fan base that has already destroyed the GoBots and nearly left the Power Rangers for dead.

Netflix has been ramping up it’s intellectual properties of animated content inspired by gaming/toy franchises. Reason being, a majority of their subscribers come by way of gaming consoles so it makes perfect sense to take franchises like Castlevania, The Witcher, and The Transformers, classic IP for the millennial gaming audience the streamer covets, and make a Netflix original anime series that continues the streamer’s goal of bingeworthy content (i.e. excellent story-telling) all-the-while making you forget about the fact that you pay on average $10 a month for the largest streaming company in the world.

For all intents and purposes, “Siege” does a solid job of achieving everybody’s goals. Further establishing Rooster Teeth as a more-than-capable animation studio that can help Hasbro keep alive an aging franchise for the content hungry streamers that could not only fork over licensing fees, but help sell toys. Dig a little deeper, and Rooster Teeth pulls back the curtains on a desolate planet known as Cybertron engulfed in a civil war by two sides, the Decepticons led by Megatron who opts to punish and enslave all those who defy hi, and the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime who wants nothing but peace and harmony for his planet. Like every war series, you get your standard set of soapy plot points that should keep everyone entertained. You’ve got your potential love triangles, you’ve got your double-crossing allies, and lots and lots of robot fighting action done by the same people who have mastered the craft with RWBY and other like-minded series.

Die-hards for the franchise might see some notable missteps. Obviously, casting choices is an issue here because in this universe, Peter Cullen is god and he is nowhere to be found here. Instead, Jake Foushee takes the reigns as Optimus Prime that comes off a serviceable choice for the role, if not the ideal one, which is further evidenced by the fact that Optimus is scripted as being a bit more naive when it comes to war strategies whence compared to other depictions of the Autobots leader. The character models look excellent,though it should be noted, are just slightly altered versions of the G1 series and really nobody in the series has spent any amount of time in their mobile transformations.

With all that said, Rooster Teeth has put together a way better effort at adapting Transformers for a contemporary audience than even the Paramount Pictures run. The choreography for the fight scenes is much cleaner and more efficient, the animation is outrageous, and while the voices aren’t familiar, they get the job done for half the price.