Breakout: My Review

[Master Inika]

Recently I've been revisiting the later Hero Factory TV episodes (from 2012-2014). I already own the Rise of the Rookies, Ordeal of Fire and Savage Planet episodes on DVD, because I'm a weird completionist and patron of physical media. These later episodes were never released on any home media, though, which is why I'm not as connected to them.

I have a weird relationship with Hero Factory. I consider it worse than what came before it in every conceivable way. I find the plot, theming, worldbuilding and characterization all pretty bad, and I'm embarrassed to tell people I watch Hero Factory in a way I never was with BIONICLE or other LEGO lines. That being said, I still watch it. If physical media of the Breakout, Brain Attack and Invasion from Below specials existed, I'd still buy them, just out of some sense of loyalty to the LEGO brand. Even after the whole DuckBricks and Masks of Power fiascos. Even if the media itself isn't necessary good. I'm just nostalgic for the early 2010s and in a way, Hero Factory makes me think of other, better franchises, like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

The main reason I decided to make this post was the bizarre decision the storytellers made to split up the Heroes for their missions. On one level, it works to heighten the sense of urgency. There are so many escaped Villains, the Heroes must split up to catch them all. That does add some dramatic tension. The only problem is it also robs Hero Factory of one of the few things about it that I liked: the character interactions. While I would not exactly describe Rise of the Rookies as good, its storytelling is definitely at least competent. At about 90 minutes long, the length of a short feature film, it has a story to tell and tells it: Furno proves himself to Stormer, and Stormer learns to appreciate and respect Furno. Surge is the funny guy (I personally think Surge fills an important narrative role, showing us what Furno would be like if he took his duties less seriously) and Breez is... a generic girl character. Bulk is "the big guy" and Stringer is the cooler, laid-back older brother type character. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I can tell what each of these characters would and would not do in any given situation. The Villains, too, have their own little quirks that differentiate them.

That gets slowly stripped away throughout 2011, and by Breakout the attempt to have character arcs is basically gone, which creates a strange, surreal viewing experience as 2012 simultaneously attempts to be the biggest, grandest story yet. Despite this, seemingly none of the characters have anything dramatically interesting to do. There is an attempt to depict Furno taking Evo under his wing, but since there are so many plotlines going on, that story has zero time to land. (There's also the weird detail about Evo casually considering committing genocide on Toxic Reapa's species.)

Most of the episodes are split between six different storylines: five Heroes chase down five Villains to five different planets, while Rocka stays behind to fight Black Phantom in Hero Factory itself. There are way too many characters and locations crammed into these episodes. Everything is thrown at the wall, but nothing lands. I appreciate some effort being made to differentiate the environments. Of the six storylines, I found Scylla the most interesting. The animation does a good job of making the underwater combat look distinct from the other generic fight sequences, and it's the only environment that offers a challenge and unique solution: the Hero-Cuffs don't work underwater, so Furno thinks to attack it to his harpoon. That was an interesting idea.

Unfortunately, the other five storylines are all generic and forgettable. Hero Factory already had something of a problem with their fight scenes happening against these generic, lifeless backgrounds with seemingly no other sentient beings around. I think back to Episode 3, with Chief Drax, who might be the only Hero Factory side character with his own distinct character design. Surge vs. Splitface on Sigma Sigma tries to have some side characters, but they're the same handful of generic Hero Factory workers we've seen before. (I also need to mention the unrealized potential of Splitface. I love characters with split personalities; it's one of my guilty pleasures, but you have to actually make the different personalities... different. It would have been enough to make one of them the "smart" side and one the "dumb" side, but LEGO doesn't even do that.)

Due to splitting everyone up, neither the Heroes nor the Legion of Darkness are able to have any fun banter or play off each other in interesting ways. Even the designation "Legion of Darkness" comes from Greg's side book, where apparently he alone tried to give the group any sort of cohesion.

I've ragged on this story enough, so I'll mention a few things that I did like:

1) Hero Factory itself being invaded. The earlier episodes did a good job depicting the Factory as "home base", basically impregnable, so there was some potential for dramatic tension in the Factory being infiltrated. Even the climax of RotR took place on another planet. I found it interesting that Von Nebula's vendetta was more against Stormer personally than Hero Factory as an institution and he did not seem to care that much about the organization as a whole. Black Phantom's plan was a level above Von Nebula's in a measurable way.

2) I like the scene where Black Phantom turns Zib off. I find it neat that the characters are robots and I like it when the show leans into that.

 

I thought I'd be able to at least think of three, but I was wrong.

I was looking through some older BZP topics from when this special was still new, and it feels like we all wanted it to be better than it was. BIONICLE had trained us to think critically and have things to say, but when HF came out, it felt like we were thinking harder and putting more energy into these stories than the actual writers were. It's not the worst thing ever, it's not devoid of entertainment value, but it did feel like we were witnessing LEGO dialing back on telling a deep and meaningful story through the medium of toys in real time.

What are you thoughts on Breakout? Would you be interested in my thoughts on the rest of HF?

P.S. I remembered a third thing I liked: in the opening, how the Heroes find Von Nebula's staff creepy but Voltix and the Villains derive hope from it. The whole breakout setup is weird, with Von Nebula's... ghost? I guess? It doesn't make a lot of sense, but I like the idea that the Villains have their own upside-down prison morality and their own lore that views Von Nebula as something of a martyr. Also, when the Villains are teasing Voltix at the beginning, that's what I mean about group cohesion. It's just really basic stuff like "Saved a cell for you, buddy!" but it's so weird to be that the Villains split up within the opening minutes and never interact with each other again. Also, if you know the Secret Mission book, most of those Villains hate Black Phantom for betraying them and getting them arrested in the first place, but this never comes up.

[Nato G]

4 hours ago, Master Inika said:

Furno taking Evo under his wing

I always found this element weird, to be honest. Ordeal of Fire introduces Evo as this super capable zen ninja who's already way more advanced and skilled than the non-2.0 heroes. Breakout depicting him as an uncertain rookie asking Furno of all people for advice makes him feel like a completely different character.

And the situation is only muddied further by the whole subplot boiling down to a debate about murdering unborn alien babies... 

4 hours ago, Master Inika said:

The whole breakout setup is weird, with Von Nebula's... ghost? I guess? It doesn't make a lot of sense.

This was another element that made Breakout super unsatisfying to me. There's zero explanation or investigation given to how the heck any of it happened in the first place. There's no special attention given to Voltix after the inciting incident; he's just treated as another generic villain to be captured, rather than a mastermind to be interrogated. 

The end scene seems to suggest that Von Nebula somehow orchestrated the whole thing, but the lack of answers or followup just makes it more of a confusing cliffhanger than satisfying reveal. 

Edited July 16, 2025 by Nato G

[That Matoran with a Vahi]

I've never watched, and have no plans to ever watch, Hero Factory; so hearing about it and what it did wrong or right, especially from a fellow Bionicle fan's perspective, is super-interesting to me. I definitely feel like I didn't miss a lot by going 'dark age' when I did, but I really appreciate the thought you put into these analyses and I'd for sure be curious to see what you had to say about any of the others as well ^^

I think the point you make here also highlights something else that Bionicle did better, as well. While there were several occasions when Bionicle also split up its characters of the year for plot reasons, 90% of the time - unless it was deliberately to make a point about them being stronger united - they were invariably split into pairs (Toa Metru hunting for the Great Disks, Piraka in Ignition #1) or trios (Toa Metru in LoMN, Phantoka/Mistika split), giving space for character interactions between members even while tackling multiple branches of story at once. I wonder whether, if Breakout had also had their villain and hero teams split into pairs rather than all going off solo, it might have gone at least a bit of a way to making it a more interesting watch?

[InfinityStuffBionicle]

As far as I know, Breakout, the wave, was the reason that cryoshell made Breakout, the song, and therefore, Breakout was the second best wave of Hero Factory.