Collectible Rahi

[evil_jaga_genius]

Throw this on the pile of Ideas To Make Gen3 Not Suck Whenever It Comes Around.

 

So it was mentioned in the talk-back of a recent news post that Gen2 didn't get any collectibles, which were a part of Bionicle from the beginning.  Let's fix that.  Some of you might recall the Bionicle Master Builder Set.  I personally didn't own the set, but it introduced us to all sorts of interesting Rahi species, like the beloved Ussal crab, Fikou spider, and the Kewa bird.  These Rahi were also small - the smallest (Fikou) had 13 pieces, the largest (Fusa) had 74.  For the purposes of this topic, I'll assume the Rahi had an average 50 pieces.  Being made of small Technic parts, we would probably consider them polybag sets today.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, one of the complaints about Gen2 was a lack of creatures.  There were the skull spiders and the six elemental creatures, and that was pretty much it.

 

If you assume the average price per Lego piece is somewhere between ten and fifteen cents, the price of a fifty-piece polybag is anywhere between $5.00 to $7.50.  As comparison, I believe a booster pack of Pokemon cards costs either five or ten dollars.  (Pardon my math if it's old, it's been a while since I've bought a Lego set firsthand, or played Pokemon TCG.)

 

Lego could create a bunch of different small Rahi designs, between 30 and 60 pieces.  They could package these Rahi as random polybag sets.  Then run a sort of marketing campaign: "Tame the wild Rahi!  Collect all ten!"  They would be about the same price as a pack of trading cards (give or take), plus, they would be Lego.  You could actually build the thing instead of having a picture of it on a card.  Then take your Toa and Matoran sets and have fun with your miniature Rahi army.

 

What do you think?  Lego has done random collectibles with minifigures and Nexo Knights, could it work for Bionicle again?

 

-Jaga

[Tuuli]

If they return bionicle to the good old Technic days then it would be awesome unfortunately they think that wouldn't work again

[Pohaturon]

If they return bionicle to the good old Technic days then it would be awesome unfortunately they think that wouldn't work again

The ever increasing amount of Technic integration into both the 2016 Bionicle sets and the more recent Star Wars buildable figures stand against this claim. 

 

I mean, take Umarak the Destroyer, for example. The biggest G2 Bionicle set had a total of 13 CCBS shells out of a 191 piece count, and only 6 of those are standard shells. It's obvious Lego hasn't forsaken Technic's use in constraction, rather the exact opposite.

 

As for the idea, I love it. I always had a soft spot for small sets, with the Rahaga among my favorites. Having ~10 non-clone mini-Rahi sets with low piece counts would be absolutely awesome, and I actually think it's within the realm of possibility that Lego will do this when G3 eventually happens. 

 

[evil_jaga_genius]

I think CCBS wouldn't work the way it traditionally does (a skeleton plated over with shells), but I could see it working for something like hooves for horse Rahi or shells on a turtle or crab.  I think the Elemental Creatures had a good balance with this, with only a couple shell-type parts (the head and the paws on Terak and Melum).

[Tarkumen the Great]

What I would rather have(and have wanted in bionicle for awhile) are collectible villagers. Simple builds, different masks and story. A nice little way to create a village and have some more characters. This comes with the fact that there were no villagers released in G2, only the protectors which were basically the Turaga.

[Katanga]

What I would rather have(and have wanted in bionicle for awhile) are collectible villagers. Simple builds, different masks and story. A nice little way to create a village and have some more characters. This comes with the fact that there were no villagers released in G2, only the protectors which were basically the Turaga.

The only problem I see with collectible villagers is that the builds could get repetitive. With Rahi, you could have a wide variety of different builds to represent the fauna. Unique masks could also be worked into those builds as well, sort of like the old Rahi.

[Aanchir]

If they return bionicle to the good old Technic days then it would be awesome unfortunately they think that wouldn't work again

Have you ever even built a G2 Bionicle set? Many of them used loads of Technic, particularly the Elemental Creatures (which were the closest thing to what this topic is suggesting). Certainly they had a lot more Technic building than the 2009 Matoran, Stars, or Agori, and arguably more than the 2004 Matoran.

 

Plus, LEGO already showed with Hero Factory sets like 40116 and 40117 that polybag-sized CCBS sets are possible, even if they fall short of the 50 pieces that evil_jaga_genius suggests. So how much Technic the sets use is sort of a moot point.

 

 

What I would rather have(and have wanted in bionicle for awhile) are collectible villagers. Simple builds, different masks and story. A nice little way to create a village and have some more characters. This comes with the fact that there were no villagers released in G2, only the protectors which were basically the Turaga.

The only problem I see with collectible villagers is that the builds could get repetitive. With Rahi, you could have a wide variety of different builds to represent the fauna. Unique masks could also be worked into those builds as well, sort of like the old Rahi.

 

You could perhaps have some packs with villagers and some packs with Rahi, and sell them in assortments kind of like the Friends animal packs or Mixels. Give each one a recolored mask as a unifying selling point and you could get a pretty neat series going. I don't think randomizing them would be good or practical, though. For instance, it'd mean each set would need its own separate instruction manual, unlike the G1 collectible packs or the collectible minifigures. And unlike mask packs, Nexo Power packs, or minifigures which all have more or less the same play features, a randomly-packed impulse Bionicle set would not have much room on the packaging to show off all the varied play potential the series has to offer.

 

Overall, I quite like the idea of impulse-priced characters and creatures, and it's something I've definitely contemplated before. I don't know how much potential it'd really have sales-wise, though. The lack of creatures and collectibles is definitely something people complained about with G2, but that was also a frequent complaint in the latter half of G1 (when on average, there were generally FEWER masks and non-humanoid creatures per year than in G2). I think in both cases, LEGO probably had their reasons for not releasing such sets. For every complaint we hear from our fellow fans, LEGO has access to a wealth of market research and sales data that might tell a very different story.

Edited January 29, 2017 by Aanchir