Scramble City moves like it's trying to cram three episodes into one, burning through a city construction and a full combiner war without stopping to explain itself. You get pure G1 chaos: Decepticons show up, robots fight, combiners clash, and nobody wastes time on why anyone cares. This is what happens when a franchise remembers it's about giant robots transforming and destroying things, not the story around them.

The Autobots are in the early stages of building Scramble City, and their newest arrival, Ultra Magnus, oversees the work. After an opening recap of how the Transformers came to Earth and the story of Devastator, the original plot begins: the Decepticons find out about the project and send their combiner robots to attack, and the Autobots answer with combiners of their own. Released in Japan in April 1986, this single-episode mecha action OVA was made to promote the Japan-only Scramble City toy line, and it is set years before Transformers: The Movie.