Sir Keksalot

I actually think Metru Nui would be more fun to explore. More people walking around, more stuff to see and interact with, more bizarre landscapes. Who knows, maybe someone'll do that next.

No idea what the scrungus you're talking about when you say "classic," but people are mostly nostalgic for '01 because that was kind of a golden age for the line. It was when it was at its most mysterious, most engaging, most interesting, and for most of us, it's where our nostalgia for it begins. That year is what most people think of when they think "Bionicle." Also consider that it's just easier to make a game like that from a development perspective. Instead of having wacky water/flying physics or something like Skakdi, which would probably be a pain to animate, or a Kolhii event that would be rather hard to code, you have a soulsborne--something that you can already learn how to make from existing examples. Really, I'd prefer to see a fan game that does something entirely new, re-imagining Bionicle and improving upon what we already have. These fan games may be impressive, and at least one has gotten a lot of attention, but they do nothing to move Bionicle forward from any perpsective except presentation. And that presentation is h*cking good (sorry for cussing please don't take away my exbawkx), and I'm excited for it; but we, as a community, can only milk G1 so much.

It also wasn't a blatant dystopia. It was a scenic, natural environment, with sweeping vistas and lots of moments of tranquility. The sharks weren't an oppressive thought police that would throw you in the gulag if you were a minute late to work. I have no idea how you got any real emotional impact from that episode. Zane being a robot became a plot point, but I never got the sense that it had nearly the impact it should have had. This is the kinda thing that gives a man an existential crisis. It should have made Zane question whether he even counted as a person. And what about his relationship with Jay, who has a habit of poking fun at his eccentricities? There SHOULD have been a substantial rift between them. Imagine if we got to see Zane angry. Like, really angry. Legitimately hurt after a serious personal crisis. But no, he's all peachy by the episode's end. He needed AT LEAST a season to work through this thing, but his arc skipped over the part where he actually needs to grow as a person. And don't get me started on Lloyd. Never--not ONCE--does it really matter that he's skipped out on basically his entire childhood, on being a kid. This is easily on par with the kinda thing Zane has on his plate, but Lloyd didn't even get an episode to address this. Because he's actually dynamic and relatable? Because he has a personality beyond a single character trait? Because I could actually felt a personal connection to this character? Because, through the course of the movies, he had not one, but TWO significant character arcs? Seriously, show me how ANY of Ninjago's characters are better than him. Any of them. My entire argument is merely that Bionicle sucks less, if only in different chunks of its story. Bionicle's shortcomings can be chalked up to some incompetence in spite of genuine effort. Ninjago is just lazy and uninspired. And how exactly are Ninjago's "strong points" at all stronger than Bionicle's? Relatively-speaking, Bionicle's story was more inventive and had better worldbuilding. It had better writing at times, and it gave us better memes. How many memes has Ninjago given us, eh? I thought so. Wake me when horizontal Cole becomes a thing. I mean, it's not remotely an original idea, and it's wildly outside the scope of anything in Ninjago that came before it, and it should have been used for an entirely new Lego theme, but sure, I'm the closed-minded one because Lego decided to just give up on coming up with anything actually cool for Ninjago, if only for a season. If by that, you mean that I'm rather frustrated that this theme that refuses to die no matter what has incredibly lackluster storytelling when it's even planted the seeds for something legitimately good, then yeah, my grapes are far past their expiration date. I would have a very different take if the show were particularly good beyond the most superficial level; say, if it were on par with TFA. Then I'd shut my trap and accept that this new theme comes with some positives beyond getting good sets with every wave. Where Bionicle didn't let itself have enough levity, Ninjago doesn't let itself have enough gravity. Bionicle was too angsty; Ninjago excludes angst, even when it'd be appropriate to be angsty. No, that's not where either of their problems begin or end, but it's more or less how their problems differ. That was mostly meant as a sarcastic reply which grossly oversimplifies the matter. I said it that way because I thought it was moderately comical. You've pointed to their interactions with the community as citation that they're actually having fun with their job, and maybe they are. Maybe they're just trying to cobble something together, but don't know how to make compelling characters. I cited that as a likely cause for the problem, not a justification for my argument. And I find it rather odd that you point to me accusing the writers of having a certain mindset whilst accusing me of having a certain mindset. Tell you what, you stop assuming where I'm coming from, I'll stop assuming where everyone else is coming from, capiche? Did Bionicle influence Atlantis at all? I don't remember citing it as a byproduct of Bionicle in particular. Those first 2 themes followed a similar formula to Bionicle on purpose. Elves was meant to fill an entirely different niche, at least on conception. And Hidden Side has a story? Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely asking. I know there are some named characters, but is there any supporting media outside the app? Or does the app have a campaign and a plot, or something? In hindsight, the drop in original themes could just be explained by the rising prevalence in licensed themes, and I was under the impression that these themes just sorta came and went without much fanfare, like any other theme. HS is still very much alive, thankfully; though, again, it kinda does fill a different role from the other action themes. Not to mention the greater time break between action themes following NK; the time between it and the next action theme (Monkey Kid) will be the longest in a while, and I'd wager this next theme solely exists to appeal to the Chinese market, so you can understand why I think SOMETHING'S up, I hope. Maybe it's the evergreen theme eating up the competition, maybe it's something else, maybe it's something behind the scenes. I mean...I already have, but you're clearly ignoring it. Really, I don't know why this is still going. Both stories fail more than they succeed, it's just that the dumbest things in Ninjago are dumber than the dumbest things in Bionicle. Mostly because Ninjago has Jole. Jole is the real villain here.

You seem to be under the impression that I'm saying Bionicle is particularly good. I'm not. Bionicle's story ranged from decent to outright bad at times, but it had a lot more heart behind it. Ninjago, on the other hand, is starved for ideas and just sucks unabashedly, with little care put into it. Like I said, it never gives the sense that the writers actually care about it. I didn't really criticize Ninjago's humor at any point. All I said was that just being comedic doesn't compensate for bad writing. Never said it did. I said Bionicle had more interesting worldbuilding, which largely owes to it having a direction from the start. I didn't say it was. It's a weakness that they're ONLY archetypes. They don't go above and beyond to be a whole lot else. That's actually something I wanna talk about more. Bionicle swapped out its main cast every so often so you weren't stuck with the same bland characters for a decade, something Ninjago has done. I feel like even after a few seasons, there just wasn't any more to see of these characters. Again, the "Jole" incident exemplifies this. It's contrived, it's pointless, it's idiotic, and it was the thing that made me give up on the show entirely. That's not really interesting. Like, at all. That's the bare minimum one should expect from having multiple characters. Sure, if you call Zane learning that he's a robot and getting over it in a matter of minutes and Cole literally dying and becoming a ghost for a while only to move on no sooner than he gets his corporeal body back "personal crises and personal growth." The closest analogue to this nonsense in Bionicle that I can think of is the incident where Lewa gets mind-controlled for the second time, and even then, he's visibly shaken up by it for a while, having serious self-doubt and fearing that the other Toa don't trust him, so while that didn't have nearly enough of a long-term impact as it should have, it still HAD an impact. Zane was a little sad for a while and then BAM! He's over it and he gets more power for it. This largely owes to Bionicle being too edgy. In the early years, Mata Nui was described as an island paradise; there was a sense that there was some good to return to once Terry was defeated. Then 04 happened and the default state for the world became 1984 with cyborgs. If Greg were a good writer and knew how to write characters better, then maybe that would have helped out some more; but the worldbuilding is mostly to blame here.

That this game exists proves that there is a team of dedicated fans capable of making this game. It proves nothing about its place in pop culture at large, its popularity, or the actual merits of its original run. Now, the press it's gotten is worth talking about. There have been many articles about it from various new outlets, and the amount of attention it's gotten signifies that enough people remember it for a project of this scale to get a fair amount of news traffic. Will the press coverage continue? That remains to be seen.

What the devil are you even on about? You've used quite a lot of words to say "fan games show that there are fans."

me and the squad coming out of quarantine be like

One thing that I tried to make clear early on was that I'm well aware that Bionicle's story is...well, kind of a mess. However, one important point I've been making is that you can tell there was an attempt, and the story was mostly just marred by Greg being a lousy writer/worldbuilder. It's evident that he had a lot of fun with the job he was given and just went to town putting in what he thought was cool, whereas Ninjago has failed to convince me that the writers actually like the IP in that way. Case in point: they're clearly out of ideas, as shown by the video game motif, which should have gone to an entirely new theme. And Bionicle was honestly more creative in its worldbuilding, even if that worldbuilding was a mess. It tied into itself in a meaningful way, with basically everything revolving around the GSR. It had a direction, a point to everything. Ninjago seems to be just adlibbing everything even harder than Bionicle was. Bionicle lore had payoff, even though it was cut short. Ninjago lore is just "oh yep we're doing this I guess" every year. Where characters are concerned, Ninjago's just outright suck. I've gone at length about this already, but they're basically just walking cliches without a lot of interesting personality traits. At least some Toa went beyond this. Vakama, in particular, became significantly dynamic through the arcs he had as a Toa; and the character interactions just bleed personality, especially in the movies. But that doesn't mean the story's issues can be fixed by adding more jokes. The presence of comedy can be useful to a story if done right, but just adding appropriate levity at good times doesn't make a story good by itself.

This is such a broad question that it's not really worth asking because the answer is just "whatever they want/need to do." There's a million other occupations in existence they could take up.

Having seen some of the leaks, this honestly puts a lot of Ninjago to shame. I'm down for a modern Journey to the West retelling (and let's be real, the name sorta gives away that it's Journey to the West). I'm sure Lego will have me assassinated for going into specifics, so I sadly can't say much there, but it's so nice to have something new for once, even if it is an adaptation.

Rather than buying entire sets, why not just do the low-budget thing and print out small images of the characters, then use those in place of the Toa stones and stuff? Or maybe print pics of their masks and put them on a stand? Just something easier/cheaper than going through the trouble of getting an entire collection.

That Trolls and Minions even exist is sinful in its own right; however, I don't think all these licensed themes are necessarily outcompeting original stuff. Lego's had a lot of licensed themes for years; if we sit tight, some mainstay licensed theme will die off eventually, or a gap will form in things Lego can make viable products out of, and that'll allow something original to fill the void. Who knows, maybe even SW will die in a couple decades. The world seems to be starting to lose interest in it, if only a little.

Well, the story would be exponentially worse, and surely more episodic; but, with luck, the franchise might garner enough of a following to get an actually decent revitalization once the original fans are grown up. This alternate Bionicle would either be totally forgotten (like most of those cartoons), get a bad reboot and not much else attention (G.I. Joe), get a good reboot but then get axed and possible get a bad reboot after that (Thundercats, which deserves an F in the chat), or luck out like Transformers and get a few good series, even if there are some, uh...mistakes along the way... Regardless, I don't think Bionicle could have been made in the '80s. There's no way all the convoluted lore and mysterious worldbuilding could have been approved for a cartoon that--let's be real here--no business or staff member would really bother putting in the effort G1 received. The 2000s were just the right time for something like Bionicle to crop up, and Lego honestly missed the bus where TV shows are concerned because that decade was the heyday of action cartoons. But who knows? If Faber succeeds in convincing Lego to bring it back, the recent rise in popularity of such programs on streaming services could make for a better shot.

You, uh...completely missed why TLNM sucks. Literally everything you just said is superficial at best. It doesn't matter how much it ties into TLM or TLBM. The cat shouldn't be the antag; it's not even a real character. Garmadon is the reason why there are problems for the characters to solve in the first place. He should absolutely be the antag, it's just that he's terribly-written, as though the direction for his character changed entirely halfway through the movie. He doesn't have to be cured, particularly when he gets redeemed--but that's still not ideal because this movie doesn't really do a good job of showing how to deal with having your family split up, it just says "hey it's ok you can bring your family back together by being a good boy!!!" But that's a terrible lesson for kids to internalize because, guess what? If Mom and Dad split up, they're probably not gonna reunite just for you. And stuff like changing Misako's name or having the ninjas look like "cavemen" (no idea why you said that tbh) is all superficial. Lloyd, Koko, and Garm are the only actual characters in the movie. Everyone else is just...there. The ninjas literally have no personalities. At all. The movie absolutely should have changed stuff from the show because the show sucks. It should not have been so haphazardly thrown together, as it seems to be.

I like the idea of keeping the elements to a multiple of 6 and having that number be important to the Matoran, recurring in their folklore like 3 and 9 recur in Norse mythology. I'm gonna focus on cutting down on the elements and restricting them to 12, each of which has a corresponding ethnic group on Mata Nui; there are still 6 regions, but there are also some smaller tribes and dispersed groups, such as the Av-Matoran. Elements are decided by what kind of mana inhabits a given material or phenomenon. Mana is a concept in Hawaiian culture which refers to a sort of "life force" which can inhabit anyone or anything; here, it is used to refer to a kind of spiritual "signature" which exists within stuff and can transform into other stuff. For instance, water has Ga-mana, but when it freezes, it then has Ko-mana. Toa are attuned to a certain kind of mana such that they can control it as though it were part of their bodies, but at the cost of their physical stamina. Toa of physical elements can all control the same amount of mass with the same amount of energy; that is, Onua needs to use the same amount of effort to move 20kg of rock that Kopaka needs to move 20kg of ice. The same rule applies to energy-based elements, except with the quantity of energy rather than the physical mass. The goal of this elemental roster is to cover as much of the natural world as possible with the most distinct categories I could manage. Fire--literal fire, as well as magma and plasma, as these all have the same kind of mana. The Matoran refer to magma in their tongue as "thick fire," and as far as they're concerned, it's all different forms of the same stuff. Fire is associated with the color red. Water--liquid water and the moisture in the air. Water is associated with blue. Air--basically the entirety of the atmosphere. Air is associated with cyan because focus groups are apparently unable to accept green for this element and I'd rather keep Lewa's power set the same. Ice--solid water in all of its forms. Ice is associated with white. Earth--rocks and the sediments that form them, excepting magma. Earth is associated with black. The Earth/Stone divide has proven so...well, divisive that I've elected to just clean up the system and lump them together. Pohatu can't just be left elementless, so now he gets... Kinesis--kinetic and potential energy. Matoran understand that all things contain energy based on their state of motion, and so there is an element based around this. Toa of Kinesis can add/subtract kinetic/potential energy to objects to stop objects mid-motion or load them up with energy so they go flying at the slightest touch. Kinesis is associated with brown. Light--light on any wavelength, from ELF to gamma rays. Av-Matoran can be any color paired with glow-in-the-dark white. Iron--any kind of metal, including rust and patina. This element is usually associated with orange, but can also be linked to a pairing of a metallic color and the color that metal would rust into; that is, gunmetal (iron) and burnt orange or copper and verdigris. Aether--this is how the Matoran understand "spacetime." It corresponds to gravity manipulation, creating wormholes, and very weak time manipulation (i.e. experiencing time faster or slower for a few seconds at a time). Aether is associated with violet. Lightning--electricity and magnetic fields. Lightning is associated with magenta and purple. Flora--organisms analogous to plants and fungi within Mata Nui's ecosystem. Flora is associated with green (duh), usually paired with brown. Uh...come back to me on number 12, I'm tryna figure it out. Push comes to shove, I can split up Earth and Stone again and just define it more clearly. I was gonna make this element associated with yellow. Shadow--not a true element, but a sort of "anti-element." There are no true Matoran or Toa of Shadow, only Makuta cultists and beings mutated by the Makuta.