This made wading through all 30+ pages of this topic that I had missed worth it. Thank you very much for your insight, as always. After reading most of this topic in one sitting - thank you for clearing that up, DeeVee. Every time I thought I understood, the next page would show how wrong I was. *snipped incredibly useful and detailed information on the new masks and stuff* While I am wavering back and forth on how much I like these sets (an internal war between curiosity and nostalgia continues to go on), it was nice to have that information. Thanks, Aanchir! "dry humor" doesn't mean what you think it means. Gali isn't deadpan, she just sucks at telling jokes. I can't say Lewa was ever clumsy; he was easily the most agile and fleet-footed of them. He was just careless and cocky, which IS demonstrated in this new personality. Onua was ALWAYS wise, perhaps wiser than Gali. They're just playing that up more this time than some cliche "BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH MAN POWER" tough guy like in MoL. We don't know about the spiders, no, but we still have almost three months to go. What we learned was the legend, and some things about the setting, and the personalities of the Toa. We'll see more about the antagonists when it becomes more relevant. I don't see how avoiding releasing the EXACT SAME TOYLINE is a bad thing. Change happens. In this case, I think it's definitely for the better. While a lot of the collecting kanohi/krana/kanohi nuva/krana kal/magical kahu saddles/whatever quests from 2001-2003 were left untold at least in part to let fans fill in the blanks (plus to make it easier story-wise to avoid monotony), I'd love to see those smaller sub-tasks of a bigger quest shown off in more detail. Some of my favorite parts of those early years were those mostly-plot-inconsequential tales of finding items and the Toa crossing each others' paths, like Tahu learning acrobatics by fighting on an extremely narrow bridge, Nokama trapping Gali in a cave with a boulder to teach her how a new mask was different from before, and Lewa and Gali talking about the wetness and morality of a body of water. ...any other fans remember those events without checking BS01? These all really gave the Toa character, and personally provided just as much enjoyment for me as having blank spots did. On a related note, about the Toa's personalities being less flat this time than before (in posts other than the ones I quoted, don't want this post to be too long) - I have to disagree. True, the short summaries given for advertising were not particularly detailed, nor as long as these initial ones appear to be. However, regardless of whether one looks to the comics, the books, or whatever media (especially all in combination), I believe that distinct personalities emerged very quickly, and stayed fairly consistent (accounting for character growth, of course). And on the topic of personalities, I'm simply going to be keeping in mind that these are not the same characters as in the original story. Still Kopaka, Toa of Ice, but rather than being the one to deal with the clumsiness of others gracefully yet irritably (such as having an avalanche of boulders knocked onto him), he's now the one who buries others in snow by accident. Something I noted about the new set design that I like is that they seem more elementally suited, particularly Onua and Pohatu. Onua very much looks one-of-a-kind in his ability to move the earth, and it seems, based on his design, that he may well be that; same goes for the other Toa to an extent. I would not complain to see these Toa remain the only Toa for quite some time (or even forever). Can anyone who saw these up close (or spent longer staring at the pictures than me) tell me about the differences between the new Toa besides weapons and masks? There have been a number of topics on the fantasy/sci-fi dynamic in the last few weeks alone, thanks to the hype train trundling on. While a lot of the aspects of Mata Nui (the island) did go away, most of it stuck around in other forms. It set up a lot of the trends of the Matoran Universe in a simpler setting, and it also was excellent as a setting for mysteries (which Bionicle is/was full of). As you said, the science-fiction element proportion greatly increased in 2004 and on, but establishing that the setting was a mix of the two was quite important in my opinion. And did I spy somewhere that a spider was packed in with each Toa set? Or did my tired brain misconstrue an advertisement as the contents of sets? If I did not imagine that, that would make for an amazing way to provide bulk amounts of enemies for Toa to fight.