The Shadow Imperator

We have all six! I compiled a quick gallery here. You might also find the Quest for the Masks booklet to be of interest, as it contains bios from an early story bible.

@Daler99 Here you go

Pretty much all my early sets blew my young mind in some way. Lewa was my first buildable action figure ever, Pohatu had an upside down torso, Onua had a different head connection, Tahu was pretty standard but! I got to make Akamai with him, Gali had a transparent mask, and Kopaka had a cool system shield and the only asymmetric mask. Doesn't sound like much when I type it out but as my first introduction to the Technic building system I loved all the little differences and quirks the Toa had.

According to Alastair Swinnerton, yes. In one of our conversations he said he came up with the idea of Takua and the Seventh Toa at the same time. Also worth nothing is that he was a story consultant for the Quest for the Toa game, so he was very much involved in planning Takua's journey from the beginning.

All sets from 2008-2010 were affected by the brittle socket redesign. Now as to whether that new design tended to break as quickly as the dreaded lime joints, I don't know.

I found the set disappointing for these reasons. I also didn't care for the big gap in his back between his upper and lower torso and his swivel function does little more than interfere with posing. Similarly, I've never liked the Takanuva set. The katana pieces never seem to line up properly with the Ussanui is in flight mode, Takanuva's arms always pop off when I attach him to the vehicle, the voodoo ball is always falling off his back, and his weapon is kind of underwhelming and there's no way to hold it that doesn't look clunky with the Mata hands.

Some of the fruits have actually been depicted with Lego pieces, like the Bula Berry: Vuata Maca Fruit in LoMN looks more like a glowing ball of energy than anything. As it does in Quest for the Toa: In fact, this tree looks like it's made out of living metal rather than wood, doesn't it? In other words, Biodermis. So I think the idea with some of these "plants" is that they were either transplanted directly from the Matoran Universe (the villagers would of course want to bring their energy source to the surface), or possibly evolved from something that was originally inside it. The Vuata Maca trees seem to be a remnant of the concept that was mentioned by Christian Faber here: "It was the original intention that everything would have a bio-mec original design so no ordinary palm trees but only strange new species with new features." This wouldn't be the last time we missed out on a much more alien and unfamiliar biomechanical world in Bionicle. I think why we saw so many earthlike plants had more to do with out-of-universe reasons than lore-based ones. Designing environments takes a lot of time, especially if you're making it all up from scratch, and leaning too hard on the unfamiliar and strange might've alienated some potential buyers.

It's the former. In-universe the change to Matoran was because "the Tohunga realized they were one people." Before Matoran became the standard word, villagers were referred to as Onu-Koran, Le-Koran, etc., (later changed to Koronan, probably because it's not a good idea to have the name of the Islamic holy book in Bionicle), so there's a precedent for them being named after their homes. Along those lines, Matoran would be taken to mean "people of Mata Nui," named after their home/great spirit. The resemblance to Matoro is coincidental, the same way Maku has nothing to do with Makuta.

It is on my list! We also have a new juicy bit of info regarding MNOG, courtesy of JuniorMasterModelBuilder. It turns out the dialogue from the earliest version of the game was preserved on Wayback Machine: For obvious reasons this is quite a significant find. I'll have to dive into the implications of this in a later update.

I believe that's from the E3 build. Fun fact, the token placeholder is still in the alpha game files:

As I said before, we have Makuta's dialogue and he literally says that completing the challenges will defeat him. We also have Greg stating that the Shadow Toa were intended for the game and from a game design standpoint they would have been easy to cobble together using the existing Toa models. But there's a good chance that they did have a true final fight planned originally, as the alpha version has a more fleshed-out final level with playable Kaita stages and an extra final room called "Kuta," both of which you can see in this video.

Yeah, we have full access to them in the beta. They're very simple and mostly just test platforming abilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7XuZklB6ew

I am currently cringing at the thought of whoever won that Sand Tarakava set not knowing the value of what they have, and dismantling it for parts. You can rest easy, because the employee who won it (Darvell Hunt) talked about this in the Litestone Discord server. He sold it on eBay to Mark Durham of Mask of Destiny. It's in very safe hands. The whole "five Sand Tarakavas were sold to collectors" thing is a myth, by the way. I've yet to see a credible source for it.

Thanks for taking the time to read it! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I've been aggressively on the lookout for more early Bionicle facts for the past two years (wow, it's really been awhile) and I still constantly find new stuff. Already I have 10 more things to add to a later document update. It never stops!

It wouldn't have been. It's pretty clear from the Makuta dialogue in the beta that the "fight" was little more than him tasking the Toa with clearing the six final challenge rooms. Peri emailed Templar about the image in question last year, and they confirmed that it was created by them for the Wall of History using LoMN assets as there was no existing imagery of the Makuta fight outside of MNOG itself. Also, we have Templar's recent blog posts to put to rest any doubts that they were the ones who created the Vortex Makuta concept.