Armada didn't have to be better than Beasties. It just has to be better than Beast Machines, and that it was.
I've never bothered to check out the latter, "good" part of
Armada. So I just looked up the final fight, and... I dunno, I'm sure it would've seemed amazing in comparison if I'd just subjected myself to the whole series leading up to it for some reason. But on its own, it still had so many anime visual shortcuts, and the dialogue and delivery were still so bad. I'll definitely give it points for its physicality, though.
Superomegaprime wasn't kidding about those two tearing into each other.
Comparing it to BM... I mean, that's a real race to the bottom, but it just so happens that one of the diamonds in BM's rough was the not-quite-final boss battle from 3:37-8:08:
I remember an online comment from someone at the time (possibly me, heh) saying how ironic it was that Cybertron had never looked so good, 10 minutes of screen-time before it was completely reformatted. Also holy crap, the Optimal body was capable of
that? Primal, what were you even doing in season 3?
I'm not an unbiased judge, but I say it still holds up in a lot of ways despite its datedness. In fact, when it aired I thought it was the best-ever Optimus/Megatron fight, and it's still at least a contender in my book. I also just now watched the
Cybertron final battle for the first time, and its CGI effects are better. But it's still mostly just a lot of anime punches and power-ups and kabooms, which don't do that much for me.
Prime's action scenes were a high-water mark, but I don't remember specific ones well enough to call out any in particular.
And though things finally came together much better MUCH later in the series, MegaGalvatron’s dialogue continued to resemble random AI sentence generated slop till the very end.
Watching the final
Armada fight and the final
Cybertron fight back-to-back, the difference in writing and voice direction was like night and day. Almost hard to believe it was the same actors (though of course they'd both proven themselves well enough already in the Beast shows).
Everything that comes out of Meg’s mouth is like a bad AI random sentence generator of things a Megatron voiced by David Kaye could say. And everything he ever says is only just a vague allusion to what is going on currently on screen, peppered with random HAHAHAs, angry grunts, or “Optimus!”. And his tone was like ALWAYS off of what was actually going on around him. It’s so weird.
” Dunno. Not sure they’re even here anymore. Maybe they all migrated to TFW2005.
