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AllNewSuperRobot wrote:The Eastern Dragon wouldn't have made a very good toy though (much like the Snake design in general). Also the Eastern market wouldn't have liked "their" dragon being the design used for a villain.

Sounds to me like you've never seen Gigano Dragon from DinoZaurs (a Japanese anime, known as Dinozone in Japan, made for Bandai as their own attempt to compete with Hasbro and Takara's Beast Era of Transformers):

https://youtu.be/DMCej_fZC0E?t=290

ZeroWolf wrote:But how much input did takara get with the input of the series? Also they would of had their kind of dragon be a good guy though that makes me wonder what they thought of Serpenterra from power rangers, I got my details right, he was only in the Americanised version of the show and not in the super sentai original.

Serpentera did have Super Sentai counterpart. All of its MMPR footage was taken from Dairanger footage of Daijinryuu, a neutrally-aligned but singleminded cosmic being.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:The Eastern Dragon wouldn't have made a very good toy though (much like the Snake design in general). Also the Eastern market wouldn't have liked "their" dragon being the design used for a villain.

Sounds to me like you've never seen Gigano Dragon from DinoZaurs (a Japanese anime, known as Dinozone in Japan, made for Bandai as their own attempt to compete with Hasbro and Takara's Beast Era of Transformers):

https://youtu.be/c6gFhwX9JLM?t=424

That looked horrendous. On par with Unicron Trilogy CG... I like how even there, they ignored how a snake body-type could feasibly bulk out into a robot, so they just "squeezed" him together.

I edited my post with a different clip.

It's actually a number of years older than the Unicron Trilogy, back when Japan was still learning how to animate with CGI. Still, at least it used full CGI instead of that flat-looking, emotionless, cel-shaded CGI that Energon and Cybertron used. DinoZaurs could at least give its CG characters facial expressions in up close shots when it needed to, so credit where credit is due.

Whereas the CGI of Energon and Cybertron was pretty much limited to just... "Uhh":

AllNewSuperRobot wrote::lol: The infamous "O" face of the Unicron Trilogy...

In that respect, I think more of that clip and a lot less of Unicron Trilogy.

Yeah, and the other clip has a better fight scene, too.

Given the time DinoZaurs came out and the level of CG technology Japan had to work with at the time, I'd say they did a pretty serviceable job overall. Having watched all 26 episodes myself, I rank its CGI somewhere above that of Voltron: The Third Dimension and either right below or right around Season 1 of ReBoot. After all, it was animated by Sunrise, one of Japan's largest and best known animation studios, made famous for the Gundam franchise and much more.

Whereas Energon and Cybertron, having come out four and five years later, have no excuse. Though, at least Cybertron's CGI was a big step up from Energon's, being less cel-shaded, more detailed overall (e.g. - able to have separate battle-damaged CGI models like Beast Wars had), and having far less technical deficiencies than the appallingly bad CGI of Energon.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:I vaguely recall a Zoids cartoon around the time of Armada that had a similar level of CG also.

Yeah, the various Zoids anime were also done by studios that had a better grasp on CG animation. Not as advanced as American CGI, but good enough for what they needed.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:In hindsight it really shows how advanced Mainframe was with their understanding of CG.

Yeah, at the time, only Pixar was their better... Then came Dreamworks, Blue Sky, and everyone else who wanted to get in on the CG animation scene. Suddenly, it wasn't as special anymore.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:I often joked with friends that the animation in the PS2 Transformers game was better than the show it was based on

Well... Ya weren't wrong.

I never got to play any of them myself. I did always want to play the N64 game, but I never got the chance to rent it from the local Blockbuster when I got to wanting to play it (the N64 game was exclusive to Blockbuster). I didn't have any non-Nintendo systems back then either, so none of the other games were an option.

And I didn't know about the Beast Wars Second GBC game so it wasn't an option for me back then.

BUT, I have watched Let's Play walkthroughs on YouTube of both the Season 1 PC/PS1 game and the Transmetals PS1 game.

The Season 1 PC/PS1 looks and sounds terrible, which is a shame since it also looks like there was a half-decent game buried beneath all the mediocrity that knocked it down several pegs. And at least the game got its own comic. A weird comic, but a comic nonetheless.

The Transmetals PS1 hews closer to the show, by having cutscenes with models actually based on those of the show, along with Rhinox and Waspinator in new models based on their Transmetals toys, and by actually having most of the cartoon's voice cast.

But, the game also suffers from a lot of the same dubbing problems that Armada and Energon suffered. I could tell that this game was made by the Japanese rather than written by Forward and DiTillio. Characters call out attack names or phrases that were more akin to those that they used in the Japanese dub of the cartoon. For instance, Cheetor yells "Fire!" for every shot he fires, like how he would yell "Utsumashi!"--the Japanese word for "Fire!" or "Shoot!"--for every normal shot he fired in the Japanese dub of the show; and he would yells "Double Arm Blast!" when shooting from his two cheetah head hands together, which is like how he would yell "Ryōte Utsumashi!" ("Double Hand Fire!") when doing the same in the show.

Other examples were Tarantulas doing a ninja technique saying "Let's see what makes you tick!", Optimus firing his two back guns yelling "Prime Guns, FIRE!", Megatron leaping into the air to fire his tail gun yelling "All available power to primary weapon!" (obviously lifted from his line in "The Agenda (Part III)"), Silverbolt leaping into the air to fire a blast from his torso crystal while yelling "With all my Spark's MIGHT!", and unlockable character Windrazor doing the same but instead yelling "Spark Extinguisher!" as the attack's name.

And a lot of the cutscene dialogue has that same clunky feeling as the dialogue of Armada/Energon, with a lot of filler words like "Right!", "Okay!", "Let's do it!", etc. inserted to fit the Japanese lip flaps. And the attempt to overlay the American personalities of the characters onto the animation that drew more from their Japanese personalities made the dialogue feel even more jarring. Like, Rattrap in the Japanese version is more cowardly and silly compared to his more bold, wise-cracking Western personality, so the scenes of him panicking at the base were attempted to be changed to him complaining instead, but the animation still betrayed that attempt. And, Cheetor was less childlike in the Japanese version, since Rattrap was instead made into the audience-relatable character while Cheetor was more like a cool big brother type in the Japanese dub, so the English game's attempt to make him seem more like his younger, happy-go-lucky Western self was a bit awkward when the animation instead makes him come across as a cool guy itchin' to defend the base.

Though, I do like how the game's opening is well synchronized to the first Japanese Beast Wars Metals opening "Tamashī no Evolution". It's just too bad that the American version instead just replaced the song with generic rock music.