Tattorack

Not to mention that the core story of Bionicle, of the residents being in a giant robot that they must awaken, was still around. Besides, Bionicle has been around for so long that eventually the story bible evolved. That's the same with every long running franchise.

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-the-clone-wars-chronological-episodeorder And to answer the last question; you couldn't and that was the problem. A problem that Bionicle also ended up having, especially in the later years when it had multiple story threads running at the same time.

https://youtu.be/8XElUAMXy0M A small preview of things to come...

It's not. There were loads of serials released that were prequels to certain events. Reading them in release order would be like watching The Clone Wars by their episode number.

I wouldn't say that the Bionicle story was controlled by the sets at all. In the earlier years, yes, but the main story for Bionicle already existed before the set design was nailed down, so even that would be dubious. Yes, certainly plenty of story decisions were made because of a set element, however, at the same time, the characters we got in set form are only a third of all the named characters in the actual Bionicle story. Krakua, Helryx, Tuyet, Kanohi Dragon, the Toa Mangai, the Toa Cordak, to name a few and lets not forget a whole population of Matoran elements we never even saw in set form.

It's readability. The Bionicle story is for the most part fine. It has it's ups and downs, like any long lasting story universe, so there is very little I'd change to the actual story itself. However, actually READING the Bionicle story became a mess of figuring out which story serials and comics and whatnot lined up with each other, so it ended up becoming difficult, intimidating, even, for anyone new showing interest in the Bionicle story to get into it. And this, unfortunately, contributed to the downfall of Bionicle in the end. G2 tried to simply the story, but ended up dumbing down the characters to a juvenile state and ended up a mess anyway since they didn't seem to have a core lore outline to adhere to.

This is a very difficult question to answer unless you consider the movies 100% canon (I don't, because it brings up too many issues that clearly exist for... various reasons). One thing we can be certain of, though, is that the lego sets aren't truly representative of their "actual" appearance. So at the end of the day, all we can do is speculate. There are quite the number of artistic interpretations out there for how Bionicle anatomy looks like, so pick your favourite. ^^

I believe Pahrak was my first Bionicle set ever. I always wanted Pohatu because I thought he looked cool, but the Bohrok looked even cooler, so I thought they HAD to be the good guys. Yeah... about that, younger me... XD The second set was Kohrok Kal, third was Lewa Nuva, fourth was the blue Rahkshi.

Bionicle taught me colour theory. For the most part the sets are a perfect example of what colours fit good together, and being able to mix-and-match coloured parts together yourself and see when it works and when it doesn't is a great learning tool. Bionicle, alongside Lord of the Rings, also taught me to love deep, immersive fictional worlds.

It's certainly based on a combination of Mahri masks. I did that because that was the only reference I had of Kanohi adapted to a none oxygen environment. Thanks man!

Oh man, I'm honoured! ^^;

And yet completely fails on the journey part. It still remains as a watered down story, because the "island" of Mata Nui in reality is massive, and the movie does nothing to show it, making it feel like Takua and Jaller more or less took a walk around the block rather than go on a dangerous and epic quest through sweeping lands while a new and untold threat could loom around any corner. Also, if the movie is so focused on Takua and Jaller's perspective, the scenes where both aren't present and only the Toa Nuva are around don't make any sense whatsoever. Much less when they don't even fit well with what we know is lore. Face it; the movies didn't have any budget, so what we got were abridged versions of the story from those years. They don't hold up well as movies on their own and they're not representative of Bionicle lore beyond, to a certain extent, the "true" appearance of Bionicles.

Mask of Light is very much watered down. Looking at lore you'll see that several encounters with the Rakshi are missing, their investigation on Krata is missing, the investigation which lead to the reveal that the Turaga have been capturing and locking Krata up for centuries and how they are responsible for the initial poisoning of the Rahi masks is missing, the Toa's encounter with a shadow Krata is missing. Mask of Light is a short list of SOME highlights covering the 2003 story arc, told in a very conservative and cost-saving way, put together in a cohesive movie, but doesn't come close to covering all the events that actually occur and the amount of Rahkshi the Toa Nuva encounter. It falls very short and doesn't even do a good job at portraying the main characters; Jaller, captain of the Ta Koro guard, veteran of the Rahi conflict and Bohrok conflict, commanded several successful offensives and defensives throughout his career, and we see him acting like a goofy teenager.

Hmm... some might not understand the context, but considering the video I don't think I'm allowed to post the context... ^^;

Yeah, I still lurk, visiting the old BZP to see if there are any nuggets of Bionicle related developments. The whole recent 90th anniversary thing made me go on a nostalgia trip and inspired me to make this. Oh... That and I completely took over a discord channel on a server with Bionicle lore things.

My biggest disappointments: 1- The Bionicle videogames get points for effort, but they're not really good games and fall severely short of what's actually possible with Bionicle. With very well defined elemental powers, mask powers, enemies with their powers and weaknesses well defined too, expansive but well enclosed environments and exploration quests built into the lore, one could say that the potential for Bionicle to be a series of open world action RPGs with an emphasis on exploration was virtually handed to LEGO on a silver platter. But the closest we got to that was VNOG. I understand that LEGO was going broke for a period, but even afterwards they didn't do anything like that. LEGO was way to conservative with Bionicle and seemed to commission the games as an afterthought. 2- For the exact same reasons above, Bionicle could've existed well past the cancellation of the buildable toy line to exist as a table-top RPG. There is literally an entire universe out there with all the things I've mentioned in #1, yet somehow the quarter never fell for anyone. 3- The complete cancellation of Bionicle. LEGO stopped Bionicle because they weren't getting any interest from the target audience. And by "target audience" LEGO meant kids from ages 6 to 12. Somewhere along the line LEGO completely forgot that children grow up to be adults and don't stay children for 10 years, and instead of seeing the potential of a massive franchise that could branch out into all sorts of other things that working adults would spend money on as a hobby (like what Transformers, Star Wars, Marvel, etc, are), they decided to completely axe it. 4- The G2 reboot was Bionicle in name only. Sets were pretty cool. I bought quite the number of Protectors when they came out. Loved how slick they looked. However, despite how cool all the sets looked, Bionicle isn't JUST a toy line, it is a universe with lore. Yeah, it was disappointing that it was a hard reboot rather than a soft one or a continuation, but hey, at least we could expect Bionicle quality storytelling without retreading the mistake of turning the lore into spaghetti like G1 did, right? Nope. Instead what we got was something that was extremely dumbed down. The Toa behaved like little children as opposed to the elemental warriors they were supposed to be (something 2001 absolutely nailed and made my small kid brain go WWOOOOWW!!). , even my little brother wasn't interested in Bionicle G2; the moment he saw the Netflix series he asked me why the Toa were so stupid. His words, not mine. And then in the span of just two years the writers somehow made Bionicle lore into spaghetti already! Not because of half a million different characters or lore threads, but because they somehow couldn't agree on what many story elements were or how certain things worked. And then that got axed too.

Hah, I made a topic like this over on the Bionicle subreddit a while back. Was gonna make a topic about it here but looks like you beat me to it. Lots of punky rock type things floating around by the looks of it. Not very surprising, since that how LEGO outwardly advertised it. But to me the music that really fit with Bionicle were the tracks that were created whenever something canon lore was presented, and those tracks were VERY different from the rock LEGO presented Bionicle to the world with. On that note, let me present to you "Datura" by the band "Dirtwire", the most Bionicle 2001 - 2003 sounding music that doesn't come from Bionicle:

Almost any piece of music or the mask change sound effect from 2001 - 2003 period. Heck, just today I dowbloaded the Game Soundtracks folder from the Biomedia Project just to listen to MNOG II's Ga-Koro theme. Not only does it bring memories from the awesome game but also from that short-lived time I was part of the MNOG 3D project.

My unpopular opinion (and first post in... such a long time. Yes I still lurk XD) is that the movies are bad. One short look at Bionicle lore and you're quick to see that the movies are very watered down versions of the events with many short-cuts taken.

If I didn't know any better I'd say that's part of a Toa pod in the image.

Wow I didn't even know you were still on here! Congrats man! Honestly, not so much. I pop in occasionally, hoping to hear something new from Bionicle G1, hoping that maybe perhaps that MNOG III got picked up by someone, or maybe to see if the creative outlet is as alive as it was before. Whenever I make something Bionicle related this is still the first place I go to to showcase them, like the Inktober drawings.

I got FEATURED!?! Awesome! Thanks a lot!

Thanks so much for the feedback! I don't often get such a detailed reply.

This one took me.... PPPFFFFFFFF........ forever to make! Getting water right is harrrrd and I still feel like I haven't really achieved it here. Oh, yeah, I know Gali is really difficult to see on the background, so here's a link where you can see her better: BLAH