Development

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With the conclusion of the US Transformers cartoon series in 1987, Japan produced their first exclusive anime series, Transformers: The Headmasters, to replace the fourth and final US season and to carry out the story concepts begun in The Transformers: The Movie and carried on through the third season, using the existing cast and adding the eponymous Headmasters into the mix. With the completion of the series, the evil Decepticons had finally been forced off Earth, and the stage was set for the beginning of Super-God Masterforce.

Although nominally occurring in the same continuity as the previous Transformers series, there was a very obvious effort on head writer Masumi Kaneda's part to make Masterforce a "fresh start" as a mecha story, introducing an entirely new cast of characters from scratch, rather than using any of the previous ones. To this end, although the toys are mostly the same in both Japan and the West (barring some different color schemes), the characters which they represent are vastly different—most prominently, Powermaster Optimus Prime's counterpart is Ginrai, a human trucker who combines with a transtector (a non-sentient Transformer body, a concept lifted from Headmasters) to become a Transformer himself, the same applies to the other Powermasters' counterparts; the Godmasters. The Pretender figures released during that year were the same but in Masterforce the Autobot pretenders disguise themselves as regular-sized humans that can wear normal clothing instead of being giant humans wearing armor as they were in contemporary Marvel comics.

The attempt to start things afresh with Masterforce does give rise to some continuity quirks, however, such as Earth technology being portrayed as contemporary, rather than futuristic as in 2010 and Headmasters, and some characters being totally unaware of what Transformers are, even though they have been public figures for over two decades.

The show never supplied the viewer with the full backstory of the characters. The true goals and identities of the key villains Devil Z and BlackZarak were also left unexplained. Even the timeframe of the show was never revealed, with the series taking place an indeterminate amount of time after Headmasters.

Additional information for the characters and their setting was later provided in made-for-video clip shows and other media. In a Special Secrets episode, Shuta and Grand Maximus explained and revealed several pieces of trivia about the show.

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