Sir Kohran

It wouldn't be a huge surprise if it was. Bionicle's original success was partly because most of Lego's System lines at the time weren't selling. Now that today's are, and that constraction is even being incorporated into System themes, themes that are completely constraction face a lot more competition. There wasn't a delay at all, as the fact that a new line was on the way was announced in the same news about Bionicle ending. It took a while for that new line name and details to be revealed, though.

As much as I'd love for a return to the old system (circa 04-07), it almost certainly won't happen. But I do think CCBS will be replaced, or undergo some kind of overhaul, especially if Hero Factory didn't really sell well. Lego obviously doesn't release sales info very often, if it all, but do we know how well HF sold? Not well.Most people only bought them for the parts. It ran for almost five years, so surely it sold at least decently. Probably better than the recent Bionicle has.

I'm still scratching my head about that. Was Templar really in such a time crunch that they couldn't create any sound, or proofread any of the text (Nokama proclaims that they are going to "Metra" Nui if I remember correctly)? The last update went live in January 04, so something tells me they were probably occupied with other stuff. Maybe other LEGO games, maybe work for other clients. Work for a digital agency. Can confirm that sometimes the money just runs out. Surely a few sound effects and a piece or two of music wouldn't have cost a fortune. It was probably just a lack of time, bearing in mind the game couldn't stick around into 2004 as it was set on Mata Nui and the story location was switching to Metru Nui.

There is some potentially interesting stuff going on at the end, but it's muddled a lot by Templar being required to obscure any details related to Mask of Light. Instead of just keeping the resolution to the story away from the film, though, they went for working around it without attempting to contextualize anything and it becomes just a mess. The two or three short cutscenes are okay, but they look rushed, text moves by too fast to read (surprising given they had that figured out for the news updates), and they have no sound whatsoever. That sounds even worse than I thought. The fact that they weren't telling the central story (as they had the first game), and didn't really get any other to tell may explain why the game is so lacking in anything interesting or memorable.

There's a reasonable amount of character development for Tahu and Takua; Tahu goes from a headstrong hothead to more considerate of other Toa, and Takua goes from spineless loser to being able to face his destiny. I thought they went too far in making Takua flawed, but that's a different matter. If there's one other thing I don't like about MOL, it's that the ending is way too sudden and leaves too many questions unanswered. Was Makuta killed for good? Was Mata Nui reawakened, or was that any closer to happening? What relevance does the new island have to the story? Did the heroes immediately go there or go back home? Of course these questions were answered by other media, but they're left hanging when MOL is watched by itself, and even watching the other movies doesn't help as MOL never got a direct sequel. LOMN and WOS are both prequels, and whilst TLR technically takes place after MOL, it's long after and focuses on a completely different set of characters and places.

If that set format doesn't work, how did old Bionicle do so well when that was the path taken from start to finish? As Sumiki said, Lego tried to make Bionicle work as a System line with the playsets, but they didn't take off as most Bionicle fans didn't have that much interest in System.

The second one usually wins, if not by a huge distance.

It doesn't really have a birthday as different parts of Bionicle launched at different points in 2001. The website was there from almost the start of the year, the MNOLG's chapters arrived across different months, the comics were around the middle, etc. It's true that the sets were released around July, but only in America. In Europe that happened some months earlier. I don't know if there was a specific day on which the release happened in either place.

It didn't really help that there wasn't a lot to really write music for, due to the game's general lack of action or drama. How much interesting music can there be for long stretches of a character walking around, talking to people and moving stuff around? Even the first game doesn't have much music for its similar parts, and what there is is pretty restrained (but still good of course). Most of the memorable music is for the cutscenes. It starts fairly well, but the fact that it then never expands much from there in almost any way is what makes it a letdown. I've heard the game does have a few cutscenes and some important story near the very end, but that's a case of too little far too late.

Constraction will probably continue as a portion of licensed themes' sets. Whether there'll be more themes in which most or all of the sets are constraction figures accompanied by an original story is difficult to say right now.

What CD is this?

Perhaps I'm just letting my own decreasing level of activity affect my view of the board as a whole, but there don't seem to be quite as many posts and new topics as there were early last year and in 2014, which (if true) is unusual given that the new Bionicle is now in full swing.

We'll probably never know because they would've been struck from the canon pretty fast after the lawsuit. That, or they were something that Templar added themselves for flavor and then had to remove for the same reason. Totally forgot to ask Templar about it when they were interacting with the community a few years ago! Based on how they're treated though, I wouldn't be surprised if they were an early incarnation of the Great Beings (who really only began to be developed in 2009. If the relationship between the Toa and Bohrok could shift from "share an evolutionary ancestor because they are both part of Mata-Nui" to "Av-Matoran turn into them" in the course of 6 years from 02 to 08, there's no telling what else might have evolved behind the scenes). Just to answer TheSkeletonMan939's question directly, Papu and Rangi are the mother and father deities in Maori mythology who each represent the earth and sky. This is remarkably similar to Gaia and Uranus in Greek mythology. They have no part in any canon Bionicle story. I think it's possible, maybe even likely, that Papu and Rangi were just going to be names borrowed from the Maori deities for individual Great Beings, rather than the deities themselves being incorporated. Like how 'Toa' refers to a Bionicle hero rather than a human Maori warrior (the concepts do overlap slightly, but that's why the borrowing happened in the first place).

I doubt it as Lego don't seem as keen on online games as they were just over ten years ago, plus the new line has been going long enough that I'm not sure a whole game to introduce people is really needed at this point.

I think we've established that the Mata/Metru-Nui cast in general (other than the Toa) pretty much vanished after the flashback, except for some bits in the serials.

Wouldn't that have made him even more worthy of being chosen? He could've had a pretty sweet redemption story. Starts out as jerky matoran, becomes selfless toa. Onepu's jerkiness/only major portrayal was in MNOLG and the Bohrok episodes, and by 2006 pretty much all the canon story was written by Greg who didn't take much interest in those, so I doubt such a story would've happened unless he was advised to by someone else. Their peak as characters was surely the Metru-Nui flashback that they starred in, though (as I said in my first post in this topic) it would've been nice if the classic Turaga had been a little more involved in the later story. But I also think we need to realise that with two Toa teams, Takanuva and a load of new characters to handle, six physically weak characters who hadn't been sets since the very first year were never going to get to appear or do much.

it was their pre-lawsuit name, now it's mostly used to differentiate between the first matoran style and all later styles, (MoLtoran, Metruan, Voyatoran, Mahritoran and Kardatoran are the terms generally applied to said later styles, i believe.) Isn't 'McToran' the name used for the first style? Derived from the fact that the first six were available as part of the McDonald's promo. I just find it odd to see people using 'Tohunga' so long after it's been completely dropped from the canon. Obviously Lego couldn't use 'Tohunga' again after agreeing to remove it, plus after two years of 'Matoran' a different name might've been confusing for some.

Even as a kid, the blue on him still confused me. I'm surprised that there aren't more Ta-Matoran with blue on them, blue being a commonly seen color in fires of greater temperature. For a long time I thought the blue was a way of representing his 'different' status. I don't remember when the 'fire can be blue' explanation came along, but it definitely wasn't there from the start.

I never noticed that until now. An Ussal enlarged to be in scale with a rider might be an interesting MoC. Why are people suddenly using 'Tohunga' instead of Matoran, by the way?

That wasn't revealed until long after 2003. At the time, he was considered a Ta-Matoran, and given that his body had some red and he lived in Ta-Koro, arguably he was.

I think the first two are more categories of themes than specific themes by themselves, like how 'constraction' covers Bionicle and Hero Factory. Admittedly, when Lego first released sets within the medieval and science fiction genres in the 1980s they did use Castle and Space as theme names that included just about every set there was, but more recently (particularly since 2000) sets of those genres have used specific theme names, such as Knights' Kingdom, Kingdoms, Alien Conquest and Mars Mission.

I was horrified by that. I think it was a case of trying to connect things that really didn't need to be connected. Like the 'Anakin built C3PO' in the Star Wars prequels.

I think Matoro's death would've been the story team's decision, not Greg's, unless you meant something else. I thought it made a good change to have someone other than a Fire character do something important, although if Jaller had died it might've been more poignant as fans knew him better than Matoro (who hadn't appeared much as a Matoran after 2001).

This is a good point that I was going to make - trees are organic living things. If they can then be an element, should a 'Toa of Animals' be possible?

I feel I addressed this in my later posts. There were things wrong with them other than that they were filler. I also disliked Vakama defecting, but more because it seems unbelievable that after the hero's journey he completed in the story up until then - maybe the most intense journey any Bionicle character had been through at that time - he'd suddenly throw it away and join evil (and then only to throw that away and rejoin good ).