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Which G2 Toa had the most satisfying build?


Which G2 Toa...  

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Just wondering, really. I didn't invest in G2 at the time, so I missed out on... most everything between its initial announcement and its eventual cancellation, truthfully. And, as someone who's potentially looking to pick up a set in hindsight (mostly for that wonderful sense of G1 nostalgia!) I just can't help but be curious as to which would be the most interesting for me. So, I figured, where better to turn than to the old hub of Bionicle opinion?

 

Out of all twelve G2 Toa sets: which one, in your opinion, gave the most satisfying building experience? Was that one the most complex build, or was it just because it was more interesting or distinct from its fellows? Was there any sense of challenge involved in any of the builds, or were they all fairly simple construction?

 

I'm genuinely interested in the opinions you guys all have to offer. And thank-you, in advance, for your time ^^

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It's a tough choice, for sure.
As far as the Master sets go, they tended to be pretty basic and more or less identical all the way across the board, with a few exceptions. Lewa, for example, looks good, but his gearbox is positioned higher up and restricts a lot of his head movement. Onua, on the other hand, has the most variety in his build, allowing for his huge shoulders and heavy weapon. If I had to pick solely from the Master sets, I'd say go with Onua.

 

The Uniters are a whole other ball game. Each one has the same basic features, but the torso and limb designs offer a lot of variety. Gali with her asymmetrical design, Kopaka, Pohatu, and Lewa with variations of articulated shoulders, the latter of which also has a very unique lower leg design, Onua's neat weapon and shoulder design, and Tahu's excessive use of gold, there's a lot going for these guys. To top it all off, they have the ability to combine with their respective elemental creatures, which makes them look even better (well, most of the time, right Pohatu?). For the Uniters, I'd say the best build goes to either Lewa or Kopaka, from what I remember. IF you plan on getting the matching creature, I personally love the way Tahu combines with Ikir. Second place goes to Onua and Terak, with the Creature of Earth adding to Onua's already broad shoulders and filling in the otherwise narrow torso on a previously bulky character. Lewa and Uxar rank next, followed by Kopaka/Melum, Gali/Akida, and lastly, Pohatu/Ketar. With this batch, Kopaka and his creature, Melum, come as a single pack, so if you want to go for value and get both Toa and creature in one smooth motion, Kopaka and Melum is the way to go. But for an individual Toa, Lewa is the most interesting design while Tahu and Gali are the more eye-catching as a finished product.


TL:DR-- Masters are mostly the same, so go for Onua; Uniters are each fairly unique, but Tahu looks good, Kopaka comes with his creature, and Lewa is the most unique of the builds.

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TL:DR-- Masters are mostly the same, so go for Onua; Uniters are each fairly unique, but Tahu looks good, Kopaka comes with his creature, and Lewa is the most unique of the builds.

 

I feel the exact opposite, to be honest. The Masters had fairly different body types, sizes and shapes among them, while the Uniters were uniform in their torso due to the large prefab torso structure piece and the large prefab torso armor, with a bit of variation on how the connection points were used, but overall it was the same thing with slightly different parts. Even the piece of unity was a constant. The Masters had a great deal of variety.

 

On topic, this is the first time I'm not selecting a Pohatu option in a poll, even though his two incarnations are still my overall favorite G2 sets. I voted Onua Master, because his build has the most atypical build due to the way his torso is constructed. As much as I love Pohatu Master, he's pretty straightforward CCBS with the gearbox added in, but Pohatu Uniter is a close second to Onua Master. (And he looks fantastic when combined with Ketar, thank you very much).

 

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I can't speak for the Uniters but in terms of the Masters I do think it's Gali. Kopaka and Lewa are probably a close tie for second. Kopaka's shield and shin armor deal (which doesn't actually bother me but does look a little funny from the side) takes him down a peg while Lewa's short-ish arms and awkward shoulder articulation make his proportions a little off (I also wish they had done a little more with his arm/leg design, just an extra piece or two to give it some extra personality). Gali might be the most simple of the Masters but I think that also means there are less bells and whistles for her design to juggle. She looks great from all angles and the only downside would probably be the way the shoulder armor moves with the function (if I'm remembering correctly) and the funny-ish trident (which doesn't really look bad and doubles up as a great pair of fins).

 

Onua is a truly wonderful set but his limbs seem a little small and even though his articulation is perfectly fine the look ends up feeling a little imbalanced. Nonetheless, very solid set. It's so hard to compare all the Masters since most of them are just stellar.

 

I adore Tahu's design and actually think it might be one of the most inspired redesigns and generally looks really good but the gaps at the back of the shin armor, the armpits, and upper legs/hips make his armor feel incomplete. He's also a little lanky looking but I can't even say if that's strictly a negative.

 

Pohatu's Master set is unfortunately by far the worst of the team imo. I feel like most of the set's budget went toward those boomerangs which were never used again (to my knowledge) and the rest is just completely lacking. Even comparing piece count Pohatu falls short. In concept I like what the designers were going for and given more pieces I think the asymmetrical look could've been made to look really good but an unfortunate number of smaller issues compound to make what's generally an unsatisfying looking build.

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I feel the exact opposite, to be honest. The Masters had fairly different body types, sizes and shapes among them, while the Uniters were uniform in their torso due to the large prefab torso structure piece and the large prefab torso armor, with a bit of variation on how the connection points were used, but overall it was the same thing with slightly different parts. Even the piece of unity was a constant. The Masters had a great deal of variety.

 

The only Master set that had a different body style was Onua. The rest of them were all built on the exact same skeleton, with the only variation in the shape and color of their armor, and different limb lengths. The Uniters had the same torso shell and gear function, but the way their inner structure (how the shoulders attached) were vastly different between one and the next. I acknowledge that The Masters had variation to a degree, but Tahu and Galy had the same shoulders, Pohatu was a generic HF build, Lewa had no head movement, and Kopaka's bulky armor was a bit restrictive.

 

Aesthetically, I agree that the Masters were more pleasing to look at as a finished product. But I had more fun building the Uniters than I did the Masters, and that's what I thought the topic was asking.

 

To my surprise, this was also the first time in recent memory that my vote didn't go to Pohatu, either. :P The guy deserves so much love.

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It's a bit of a tough call for me (having loved the 2015 Toa so much in general) but I think I have to go with Gali Master of Water. It might sound surprising because from a structural standpoint she has perhaps the most average build of any of the Toa from the first wave. She's not taller than average like Kopaka and Tahu, or shorter than average like Pohatu and Onua. She doesn't have unique weapon molds like Onua or Pohatu, or a really elaborate shoulder construction like Onua and Lewa, or an asymmetrical design like Pohatu. Her proportions (whether of her armor or her skeleton) are neither beefy like Onua and Kopaka, nor lanky like Tahu and Lewa. Even one of her most distinguishing characteristics, the heavy armor that sits atop her shoulders, is not constructed that much differently than Tahu's shoulder armor, just with differently sized and positioned shells. With so few obviously unique traits to her construction I'm not surprised I'm the first person to vote for her in the poll.

 

At the same time, for me, part of the satisfaction of the build involves how much I like the design of the final set, since a lot of the fun of a LEGO build is watching a great design come together step by step. And Gali was without a doubt my favorite of the 2015 Toa designs. Her "average" proportions are more visually appealing than the slightly stretched look that Tahu and Kopaka's longer legs gave them. Her proportions are reminiscent of the proportions of the Toa Metru (albeit without such a jarring difference in length between the upper and lower legs), whereas Tahu and Kopaka's proportions reminded me more of the cartoonishly long limbs of the Toa Inika. The added height suited those two personality-wise, but it wasn't as appealing to me in a more general sense. The CCBS shells chosen for Gali's legs and torso also make her perhaps the curviest-looking Toa of Water (besides perhaps the 2002 Gali Nuva, but the parts of her design that made her "curvy" were general Nuva design traits, rather than ones that set her apart from her teammates). And besides my general love of curvy gals, that also made the new Gali look very well-suited to maneuvering in aquatic environments.

 

Even if Gali's build did a lot of the same stuff as the other Toa's, in many ways I felt like she pulled it off better. I loved Gali's fairly consistent and well-balanced color layering across her arms and her legs, which kind of gave me the impression of metallic boots, gloves, and torso armor over a blue armored bodysuit that glowed with elemental energy (similar armored boot color blocking had been done on several Hero Factory sets from the Breakout series, but mirroring that same color blocking on the arms was new. Her weapons not only suited her character, but also required more building than the weapons of the other Toa (besides Onua, maybe) and it's kind of neat how it kept getting bigger as parts were added, culminating at the end of the build when the instructions call to combine it with her flippers to form her misleadingly-named-yet-super-impressive Elemental Trident!

 

As an older Bionicle fan, building the G2 Toa was pretty much invariably a nostalgic experience. While Gali's new mask took more liberties from her original and Nuva masks than many of the other Toa's (with the triangular shape around the mouth, the ridges on the forehead, and the scuba mask as some of the most obvious commonalities), I actually think it might be my all-time favorite mask design, and certainly my favorite mask design for a Toa of Water. The aforementioned Elemental Trident called back to the two-bladed design of her Aqua Axes, but in a way that really physicalizes Gali's immense power over water as well as her strength of will. Yet even with all those nostalgic touches, she also brought a sense of novelty to the new generation. The change of her primary to Dark Azur (a new color for action figure sets at that time) made even just opening the package and pouring out the pieces feel very new and fun. As run-of-the-mill as the gearbox was, the Bright Yellow gears (which, unlike the other Toa's, were both internal AND external). On a more technical note, placing the gears that added friction to the whole mechanism behind the chest plate rather than in the shoulders added a nice sense of surprise and complexity, and kept her shoulder construction nice and compact.

 

The most satisfying of the 2016 Toa to me, both as a building experience and a finished set, was Lewa, with a cool and compact shoulder construction and some neat changes to his color scheme, nice balanced textures, nifty changes to his mask and color scheme, and weapons that gave me some nice Nuva nostalgia. That said, even he didn't give me as much satisfaction as the 2015 Gali (frankly, I don't think any G1 canister sets did either). The gear function of the 2016 Toa was not as exciting for me as that of the 2015 Toa, even though it was something we hadn't really seen before in a canister set. A lot of the 2016 Toa also had weird proportional quirks — the new longer torsos felt slightly out of proportion with the legs of the smaller Toa, while the larger Toa's entire bodies felt out of proportion with their heads/masks. While the variations in shoulder construction for the Toa added some nice complexity and made the shoulders reasonably well suited in width to the characters, the "guts" of a build like that usually aren't as exciting to watch come together as the more external parts of a build that have a bigger visual impact on the final set, like armor shapes and textures.

 

In general, each of the 2016 Toa had little things I wasn't as happy with as their 2015 counterparts, whether it was Pohatu's Sand Yellow cladding that washed out his more vivid Dark Orange primary color, the slight boniness Gali's right leg had as a result of her asymmetrical, coral-like armor, Tahu's wildly inconsistent armor textures, Onua's taller, leaner design, Lewa's slightly limited arm articulation. In addition, the new weapons in general didn't feel quite as unique or well-suited to their wielders as the ones they'd had in 2015, not to mention gave up the Toa's fun "battle mode/adrenaline mode" transformations in exchange for much less innovative moving-parts functions — except for Lewa, who didn't even get one of those!

 

On the plus side, the 2016 Toa's masks were all good callbacks to both the G1 masks and the previous year's designs, although Gali's eye holes didn't line up all that well with her glowing eyes. And I loved the idea of elemental crystal armor as well as the ability to unite the Toa with their new animal companions. Also, to give the designers some credit: of all Bionicle character transformations (G1 OR G2), the 2016 Toa were the ones that did the best job keeping the characters recognizable for who they were. But overall I can't think of any of the 2016 Toa where there wasn't at least one point in the build that I wished that part of the design had been handled differently. The 2015 Toa in general gave me far fewer of those moments, particularly Gali, who came closer than ever to what I'd consider the ideal Toa set.

 

To conclude (after this wholly unnecessary wall of text), you know how versions of Gali in BOTH generations have wielded a two-bladed axe, or labrys, as their weapon? Just saying, Gali is a feminist and a lesbian. *mic drop*

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The Kopaka series as a whole was at a peak in the G2 after the disappointing set in the phantoka line.

 

Master: I liked the idea of a bulky knight aspect for kopaka and the option of using the "Toa Lhikan" esque shield pieces as giant swords for Kopaka. However the ammount of gold used in this form doesnt work all too great, trying to work in blue frozen limbs is difficult enough but the gold clashes a bit (shoulder pauldrons in particular) and males him look like he came home drunk from toa of light cosplay.

 

Uniter: This one is even better than the little bit too bulky foot armor and is more evenly balanced and his broadsword is reminiscent of the G1 Ice Sword,right down the split in the midsection. The launcher is also good value since only kopaka akida and onua had launchers in 2017. However for Melum there isn't much to say for him but i have the odd feeling he was only included in this bundle because he would have been looked like a bland of Therak and not sold well on his own.

 

Both Toa had a satisfying build but i give a slight 51 against 49 out of 100 alloted points score Toa Kopaka Uniter for the many play features

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