One of the few dramatic and interesting series...

Shahrose

Beast wars was great, it created tension and what I liked about it was that it was targeted to more adult audiences which meant the story was richer and for the most part more well thought-out without most of the kid's cartoon like effects. It was an amazing series but it had its flaws, like the fact that in some episodes a predacon character would get blown to pieces and then reappear in the next episode totally recovered, whereas ,if the same thing were to happen to a maximal, they'd be gone permanently and it would be be shown as a serious and emotional event. Some episodes sheerly underpowered the maximals when inferior predacons would defeat them with ease...this was I guess to make the story more interesting by making showing the good guys as weak, but it's very inconsistent. An example of this is when Optimal Optimus and Cheetor are battling the normal transmetal Megatron they miss every shot on Megatron and he doesn't miss one and damages both maximals severely and gets away with the stasis pod. That's complete folly...Optimus was shown as having the power to defeat several predacons on his own in the previous episodes, especially when he was first conceived (when he temporarily took Prime's spark). You will also notice that when a maximal first appears from a stasis pod or when they've transformed to a new state(such as a transmetal, or transmetal 2) they are shown as incredibly powerful in that episode, and then in the latter episodes they're average fighters and shown fairly weak...predacons like Waspinator would defeat them...again very inconsistent. If this show had been a bit more serious and fixed their flaws, it would have been spectacular. Nonetheless, it was still the best animated show on TV and I still love it for what it is; dramatic, with an exciting and well thought-out plot that surprisingly fits in well with the original Transformers series), good animation/sound, voice acting and action.

The thing that disappointed me was the fact Beast Machines was spawned from Beast Wars. Beast Wars was a gem, Beast Machines was in a word... terrible. It tried too hard to be emotional, it messed up the story by making some of the most noble maximals like Rhinox and Silverbolt evil. The animation got worse, the character models were worse and less powerful/interesting, Megatron was just some Godly evil character with no personality(mainly because they never really confronted him until the end), there was no good action and the ending was incredibly disappointing. I thought Cybertron would be a magnificent place and I was curious to see how they would show it since in Beast Wars we only saw glimpses of it. They totally ruined the show with Beast Machines.

score /10

Shahrose 12 August 2005

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1150475/