[TTV G3][Poll] What is the core of Bionicle?

I think part of the misunderstanding on this “core” business has to do with people perhaps thinking different franchises can’t have the same core.

By that I mean, I feel like part of the issue people have with naming a “core” of Bionicle is that only that “core” is what you need to make something Bionicle, but many different franchises can share the same “core” trait, but utilize different factors to make them unique.

So, like @Jon said, The Lord of the Ring’s core is the worldbuilding, Middle Earth. Tolkien created from scratch every facet of it, making entire languages, timelines, ages, conflicts, story arcs, and characters to adventure around in it. But the other factors that make it The Lord of the Rings instead of something else is the fantasy aesthetic, the character types, and the narrative structures.

So, we can say the “core” of Bionicle is the world, that without the world it wouldn’t really be Bionicle, but that doesn’t mean that worldbuilding is exclusively the core of Bionicle. If Bionicle is also worldbuilding, than the things that make it different from Lord of the Rings are the robot/tribal/elemental aesthetic, heroic groups of characters, its own narrative, and the toys sold.

Bionicle the whole is the combination of all the elements listed in the poll, but most of those elements stem from the worldbuilding and are in service to it.

Of course, by that logic then the “core” should in theory be the sets, as everything is in service to the sets, but I feel we as the fans are talking about the core of the experience outside of what LEGO offered.

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Of course not, but when you start the poll with “The core […] the thing that everything can change around”, it’s difficult to not interpret it as “the one important thing, with everything else that works in service of it”, which isn’t much better. When you pick one thing and rearrange everything else that defines Bionicle, how would you not get a non-Bionicle?

Here lies the problem to me. The answer shouldn’t be “yes”. There’s a jump of logic between “these elements form Bionicle” and “one of these elements is the core of Bionicle”. Says who? Since when does one facet get to have agency over everything else, especially when they can be valued equally? Like I said, dividing something into equal parts and calling the favorite “special” is a pretty bad way to analyze something.

To me,…

Harry Potter, at its core, is a story about the power of love as told through three children as they learn about a magical world and try to defeat evil. What do the characters service?

Lord of the Rings is one of Tolkien’s many attempts to create a mythology similar to those of old epics, which are about the heroic deeds of the protagonist instead of directly being about the world around them. From what I remember, Frodo and Sam’s relationship is inspired by Tolkien’s experiences in WWI with a friend who ended up dying. Do most people obsess over the appendices, or is their attention drawn somewhere else?

Star Wars (as of Episodes I-VI), at its core, is a family drama about redemption set in a science-fantasy universe where the heroes have to face others -and their own- dark side. It looks like the Sequel Trilogy will continue in that vein. What is the story about?

And just like that, BIONICLE is a toyline about six elementally-themed characters who traverse through a mysterious, expansive, and fleshed-out universe in order to defeat an entity who has left it in disarray as they learn the values of Unity, Duty and Destiny. This is what (to me) is Bionicle’s core, what all the details should service.

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That’s why I said two or three of them. That would show which are most important to the most people without destroying the poll. Never did I suggest that you should be able to vote for all of them.

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I voted in this poll a while back but wasn’t really sure how to articulate my thoughts on the topic, and thinking about it more since then, I’ve managed to refine my thoughts a little. So, in what’ll probably become one of my typical essay answers, I’ll try to articulate them here.

First off, I voted for atmosphere and world building, but that answer has changed multiple times over the years I’ve spent in and out of the Bionicle fandom. During most of G1’s run, I only had a couple of sets and didn’t think much about what was behind them, so back then I would’ve automatically answered that the sets were the core of Bionicle. I took a break from '06 to halfway through '08 because the '06 sets just didn’t appeal to me much at first glance (I thought the Piraka weird and the Inika universally ugly) and from the end of '09 to late 2014 because there just weren’t any sets around. Only since getting back into Bionicle, and with a lot of story-focused pokemon gameplay behind me have I really started to put more emphasis on what’s behind the boxes on the shelves rather than what’s in them. Through this lens, I’d also conclude that G2 was definitely more targeted at ‘old me’ with its epic sets than at ‘new me’ with its lackluster story content.

During late '14 and through most of '15, my answer became story/plot for two main reasons: I read all the way through NickonAquaMagna’s Nova Orbis and started working on a story in a similar vein myself. Reading through Nova Orbis and in the development of my own story, my first concern was always the plot, the overarching sequence of events that happened and that I wanted to have happen to the characters in the world. However, perhaps somewhat ironically, reading back over my own story in progress I kept finding places where that plot felt contrived, where circumstances just seemed too convenient for the characters, or where there just didn’t seem to be much overall meaning to what was going on. It started feeling like I was just getting stuck over and over and that I’d never get to something I considered even worth throwing up online.

Getting into roleplaying games (D&D specifically) halted work on that story for a while as I focused on the characters that I was now playing instead, and it was while working on the backstory for one of those characters that I started to realize that it made a lot more sense than anything I’d thrown together for Bionicle up until that point. The reason for that, I believe, is that rather than servicing the plot, the characters in that story drove the plot. Rather than trying to craft a grand narrative right from the top, I planned that story around the decisions of the characters, focusing on the “why” rather than on the “what.” Given their situation and what they knew at the time, did it make sense for the characters in that scenario to make that decision? If yes, than that became way in which the plot progressed. Me moving back to Bionicle in late '15 stopped work on that story before it was anywhere near finished, but when I started working on my ‘Nova Orbis’ again, I re-focused my attention to the characters and their decisions and ended up with something much better than the first time around.

Work was then interrupted again by The Folly of the Toa, which started out to me as a joke picture, then turned into a writing exercise to improve on the technical aspects of writing (grammar, formatting, etc…), and finally became the culmination of me focusing on and studying characters to drive a plot through. I constructed the entirety of the plot of Folly of the Toa explicitly around the characters’ decisions, trying to justify each one as I went along, and ended up with something that I actually felt proud of. Granted, I should’ve done a lot more editing on it in retrospect, but over the year that I spent working on it, that story cemented the idea in my mind that the plot should always, always be subservient to the characters. If the characters are poorly developed, they’re harder to care about and their decisions and actions through which the plot advances become contrived, even ridiculous. Of course it’s true that most Bionicle sets through both of the theme’s iterations depicted only characters; it’s the nature of constraction to feature characters far more than locations, which are the realm of system. CCBS isn’t called the “Character and Creature Building System” for nothing. Between that and my own studying of the theme’s characters, I probably would’ve answered that its characters were the core of Bionicle if this question had been posed to me last year.

What caused me to move over to world building and atmosphere in the end was thinking back, not to what I have personally focused on as of late, but to what got me interested in Bionicle in the first place and what kept me coming back for one reason or another: the world and its atmosphere. Why? I think it’d be easiest to explain if I put forth my favorite artifact from Bionicle for each category. In sets, 2015’s Master of Water is my runaway favorite. Yeah, the weapon is ridiculous, but that set’s just so good at being posed in ways that convey attitude and I think that its mask is one of the best designs Bionicle ever saw. I’ve had that set somewhere on my desk for the last two years and I’m still not tired of looking at and periodically re-posing it. However, it’s nothing to me beyond eye candy; I don’t care for the character it’s meant to portray (G2 Gali) and honestly don’t think it even matches that personality very well. I like looking at it, but it’s not really inspiring anything beyond that.

My favorite plot is '07’s storyline, because it is markedly deeper than and different from the plots of most of Bionicle’s other years. In '07, the Toa were in over their heads and losing until the very last moment. It was the only year in which I could say that the final victory of the good guys was a pyrric victory, not just another happy ending, and that made it so much more interesting to me. That said, that power largely comes from the sacrifice of a character, so… even in my favorite plotline, the characters dictate and are pretty much the core of the plot.

My favorite character is Makuta Krika. Yes, I’ve got a thing for tragic characters in desperate situations, and even though he wasn’t around for long I felt like Krika as a character added nuance to the typical good vs. evil narrative that I never really felt was there before in Bionicle. The fact that he was coming from the evil side made that a lot more significant; we’d seen heroes cross into the grey area before, but rarely the other way around. Still, while I’m sad that Krika went the way he did (and some of my first Bionicle fanfic ideas were terrible, wish-fulfillment type things where he didn’t actually die and ended up doing random things during the Reign of Shadows), an image of Krika is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when I think about Bionicle.

My favorite atmosphere/worldbuilding items are the MNOGs. They did such a good job of establishing the island, the world of Mata Nui. While only the first MNOG really followed major parts of the main plot, both introduced many characters and locations along the way, and by being interactive to the degree that they were, they created a vivid world that even the rest of G1 could never quite match. The MNOGs cemented what Bionicle looked like, and just as importantly to me, what it sounded like. I still get goosebumps when I hear that ominous beach chant, the Onu-Koro theme with its rhythmic clanging of tools in the background, and that flute melody from the Le-Koro band. Now that’s atmosphere. I can’t say that I get those feelings when I think about Krika and '07’s plot or when I look at Gali’s master set and crucially, the MNOGs came long before any of them. I don’t think any of them would’ve even existed if the MNOGs hadn’t.

My reasoning on that is as follows: if it hadn’t been for the world that the MNOGs and later side media established, the plot of early Bionicle would’ve been forgettable. Heroes fighting beasts to protect mostly helpless villagers from one big bad guy, all dictated by the needs of the sets. The sets have to be technic-based? Alright, we’ll make the characters robotic. We want collectible items? Alright, we’ll give them a bunch of masks. The masks and the robotic nature of Bionicle’s beings only became interesting because of how they compared to the world those beings were situated in: they were living in tribes, on an island that hardly looked their natural home. Turns out it wasn’t, but we wouldn’t have known the how or why behind that without all the world building that was done in Bionicle. Without that, I think it would’ve rapidly gone the way of its predecessors, the Slizers and Roboriders, at best a three-year line notable mostly for its interesting habit of representing living creatures through the technic system. But Bionicle became more than that because it was always so much more than just the sets, featuring a plot and characters that actually mattered and that people cared about because the world was already established.

So in the end, for me the conclusion is one that can probably already be distilled from what a lot of other people have mentioned above: the worldbuilding and atmosphere are the core of Bionicle because they underpin anything else. Without them, the characters and plots would be all to easily reduced to tropes that have already been seen elsewhere and will be seen again, something to read and enjoy once, then largely forget about. I don’t think the average quality of G1’s sets was good enough to carry the line on its own without interest in the characters that they represented or the plot those characters were shepherded through, and though a lot has changed from 2001 to 2015, I think G2 is a pretty good example of how a constraction line cannot survive on solid sets alone. Constraction lines like Bionicle depend on their characters being appealing to have long-term success, For the characters to matter, the plot that their decisions create has to matter, and for that plot to matter, the world it takes place in has to matter.

A final note on whether Bionicle would work as a system theme and whether it could still be, in spirit, the same as it was in G1. For me, it’s a mixed bag. There’s nothing inherent about system vs. constraction that would keep a system theme from having as good a world and atmosphere as Bionicle did, but when it comes to selling sets, I’m far more interested in constraction sets than in system sets. Constraction sets display nicely; with Bionicle, I bought a set, put it together, found a cool pose for it, and from then on it spent its time sitting on the desk or windowsill where I enjoyed looking at it. I have gotten a variety of system sets over the years, but only a few of them have had any kind of shelf life for me, and they almost all still employed some constraction elements to make them, well, posable (the hulkbuster and mech sets from Power Miners in particular come to mind). If a system-based Bionicle theme were to come out, the only way that I’d really be interested in buying the sets is if the figures in them were customizable and posable, worth displaying in a way that standard minifigures aren’t to me. I don’t care much about the grand buildings or vehicles, the static objects that are the subject of most system sets. If a big Kini-Nui set came out with all the Turaga, for example, I wouldn’t feel a need to buy the set, but maybe I’d try to get the Turaga on bricklink. However, Ta-Koro Guard battlepacks would fill my desk in a week if the figures in them were decently posable and customizable. I’d build a whole army of 'm.

Already, Nexo Knights has shown that a set consisting only of a figure and accessories is possible in system and is possible to do well in system; constraction is not required, but for me to buy a system set, it has to have the qualities that I like about constraction. It has to focus on the characters, not the place. The theme could use something like a new MNOG, a movie, or a TV show to create those places in far greater detail than any number of sets ever could, and I’d be more than happy having a bunch of more posable Bionicle minifigures sitting on my desk.

I should acknowledge as well that this is only my view, a product of my experiences and particular interests. To prolific MOCists, use of constraction might well be a requirement as it allows for far more freedom in creating intricate MOCs of characters than anything minifigure-sized is ever going to do. I should also point out that the content that I’ve created as a fan of Bionicle has been far more focused on characters and plots than on world-building; I don’t paint landscapes, I draw characters and write stories about and through them. But without the atmosphere, without the worldbuilding to underpin it all, I feel that those characters and plots become meaningless, just another forgettable collection of tropes. In fact, if Bionicle hadn’t established that atmosphere and world right from the beginning, I doubt that I’d be writing and drawing about the theme at all.

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People misunderstand things all the time. It’s not my prerogative to accommodate the fact that they’re not able to grasp a concept without putting themselves into a false dilemma. If I wanted to make polls that just helped people feel better regardless of how well they actually understood something, I’d write political polls for Buzzfeed’s Facebook.

Assuming that all parts are inherently equal is definitely, intrinsically worse.

Bionicle has some parts that are more important than others. Everything has parts that are more important than others. There can be some debate and discussion as to which parts are the more important ones; that’s what this topic is for.

But the idea that all parts are equal is at best entirely misled or at worst a fundamental flaw in comprehension. The misdirection with trying to state that the concept of a core doesn’t exist, or the fallacy that deciding in a core will result in the other aspects not being focused - they’re offshoots of this idea that is directly counter to how the real world works.

And this is exactly why this poll exists this way it does. Because if you give people the option, there’s a good chance that most of them will choose all of the options. This is not a description of the core of Bionicle. It’s literally just Bionicle.

Claiming that the core is the combination of several things is counter to the literal definition of the word:

  1. a : a basic, essential, or enduring part (as of an individual, a class, or an entity) [the staff had a core of experts] [the core of her beliefs]
    b : the essential meaning : gist [the core of the argument]
    c : the inmost or most intimate part [honest to the core].

If you’ll notice, they’re all singular nouns. That is because, and I’m really just baffled that this concept has to bear so much repeating, if you have a combination of many important parts, they make up a whole.

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@Jon is right, we cant really pinpoint what makes Bionicle special if we say all of it is. Some things are indeed more important than others / have a larger impact to the enjoyment of the line.

And since this is subjective to the person answering the poll, everyone will give different answers based on how they best experienced the line and what their current thought processes are. That indeed is awesome since we can get to know peoples experiences with the line along the way.

But if we just say all of the elements are important, that aint gonna help us pin point a gradiant of the theme, not to mention we wont get to know people more if since everyone will state the same answer and that is kinda swarmish in nature, which in the end is a waste since we could have gotten a lot more diverse answers and perseptions along the way.

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I just want to say that I do not want to come off as someone who doesn’t like this poll. I love discussing what the most important of Bionicle could be and see others’ opinions about it.

I agree that there are some parts of Bionicle that are more important than others. In my opinion, the characters and world-building are more important than the sets and story, they just stand out to me more.

I don’t know where this fits in the poll, but I feel like the core of Bionicle to me is the setting of Mata Nui. To me, the environment of Mata Nui was the best. I didn’t want the story to move on, I wanted to stay as Takua, wandering Mata Nui as the Chronicler and helping out the Matoran and the Toa. To me, the characters and story that occured on Mata Nui were the most memorable and had a unique feel to them. I loved learning more about the island as well. The designs were so tribal and reminded me of Avatar mixed with robots. I loved the story of the Quest for the Masks and the Chronicler’s Quest. The characters, especially the Matoran, were memorable. The sets during that setting were nice to play with and some even made more modern versions of them. I really enjoyed the story of the Great Spirit and Makuta in MNOG.

For me, this is the core of Bionicle: The setting of Mata Nui. I feel that this is the most important part of Bionicle and what made me love Bionicle. The first thing I think about when the word “Bionicle” comes to mind is the island of Mata Nui. I don’t know if it counts, but I can’t really decide on anything else.

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That’s definitely a testament to its worldbuilding, and as a fan who came in post 2006 (aka no nostalgia attached) I can say for me that it was definitely Bionicle’s best years.

The strength of the line is purely in the worldbuilding, in the island, in the atmosphere and feel of it. That’s such a unique aspect to it that can’t be matched by other franchises.

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Well, in that case, I don’t know what I was confused about. I guess I just needed time to think about it. Also, that whole misunderstanding about the poll, but now I feel the most important thing about Bionicle is the atmosphere. I guess I was just a bit reluctant, but just because I pick one thing doesn’t mean the others aren’t good enough. I would still enjoy Bionicle for those aspects.

Anyways, I agree: the atmosphere is what makes Bionicle so memorable to me. Where else is there an island of biomechanical beings, six of which arrived in canisters and not only had power over the elements, but had power in their masks as well, and they fight corrupted robot animals who also wear masks and a shadow demon vortex?

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For me I have to go with story for the fact that other Lego lines have constraction in them (Hero Factory, Chima, and Star Wars to name a few). If you strip bionicle down to its sets and replace the story with something else it becomes a different line entirely.

I feel the need to post here after Kahi’s rant on the podcast.

The reason people think this poll is stupid or disagree with your assertions is because few people define “core” the way you do. Most people would define “core” as the minimum elements that make BIONICLE distinct from something that isn’t BIONICLE. (You know, the central concept the theme is built on.)

For example, the core (using a sensible definition) could be stated as:
"Technological heroes with elemental powers in a tribal setting."

What this poll is asking is “Which of these four methods of delivering the core concept is the most important to BIONICLE?” Which is a perfectly good question, but it causes confusion when you say you are talking about the core, then ridicule anyone who tries to explain why your wording doesn’t make sense.

tl;dr: The core is something you build the theme around. These four options are general directions for doing the building.

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This was a tough one for me, but I’ll have to say the Sets, because that was all I could really appreciate when g1 was at it’s height

You have to take everything into consideration.
It depends on what you value, both on a story and on toys, because you have to take into consideration this is still a kid’s toy.
I see most people vote for worldbuilding, myself included. Now, this is an argument repeated ad nauseam, but it has to be emphasized again.
Bionicle G1’s world is too big for its own good.
But that raises the other issue.
Bionicle G2’s world is too small.
A delicate balance is needed. Working on a project, I can’t stress how much of a pain it is to go through all the little plot details to make sure it fits into canon.

How would I make G3?
Have a plot that isn’t barebones, but isn’t overwhelming. That’s a solution plenty have offered, because hey, it’d work! You can’t separate characters, plot, and atmosphere (tone) from each other, because these 3 are the crucial elements to a good narrative. A good narrative can weave these 3 together to make something that will blow you away. If you have bad characterization, you won’t care what the plot is because you have no reason to care about the characters’ motivation. If you have good characters, you can take them anywhere!
But, if you have a bad plot, then the sense of urgency is gone. While you care about the characters, the conflict is bland, therefore it bogs down the experience.
The worldbuilding, or tone, impacts both of these immensely. Atmosphere determines how characters act and react, while also being able to affect the plot. That’s why I think it’s the most crucial element.
I’m not even gonna touch on the sets, because I’m no designer and I haven’t the slightest clue of how to design Lego toys.

Christian Faber had the right idea. “You are the true hero, and your legend is now.”
Bionicle is all about the fans and the stories they create. The freedom to express yourself is probably the most crucial element to Bionicle as a whole. While we may not be able to have our cake and eat it too, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want a nice, balanced experience.

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To me, the core of the series is the characters. Specifically, having interesting characters that develop over time. G1 relied on proper world building for about 3 years, then it seemed like we just drifted from poorly defined location to location (as far as easily accessible visual media was concerned). The thing is, we all stayed with the series beyond that. If world building is the core, then how can we call every later year of the theme “BIONICLE”? More importantly, if world buillding was the core of the theme, why did we all stay after 2003 ended?

I’d say the answer is that the characters are what make BIONICLE what it is at its foundation. It’s how they develop together, and it’s their personal shortcomings and insecurities that kept us reading comic after comic. It’s why we were excited to see that the G2 Toa resembled our classic heroes back in 2014, and it’s why some of us were later disappointed with G2, because the characters were never well defined and never really developed in any of the presented story media. The characters weren’t portrayed seriously, as actual people who just wake up one day and find themselves forced into the role of a hero, whether they actually care about helping people or not. The core of BIONICLE to me, will always be about characters. Characters that are each largely imperfect, but grow to love each other and work together. The characters need to feel like real characters, or it just won’t feel right.

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In my opinion, the Atmosphere to build and play with your friends is very important.

I chose characters, as they were the thing that was the entry point to the story, and the story was built on them.

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Without good characters, there is no story. For Honor’s campaign might have been redeemable if its characters were more than just a name and a voice. A big part of Evolve’s charm came from how fun its characters were. Bionicle’s characters were memorable and fleshed-out. This was a big part of why its story and lore held any weight at all; as opposed to HF’s characters, whose personalities didn’t go beyond specific quirks, and were therefore not interesting.

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Oof, just thinking this all over again. Atmosphere makes your world feel real, Characters drive the story, and Story sets the stage for the actions for the tale that will happen. Really if any of these components aren’t done well it would break the illusion the magic of that world. Bad Characters, sure the world is cool, but has no weight, Bad Atmosphere, sure good plot, good characters, but what is this place, and Bad Story, makes no sense.

I think these components are honestly and truthfully equal in importance. However, the main attraction of Bionicle for me, is the atmosphere.

Decided to put my two cents in on how I feel about these concepts.

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What about good worldbuilding on a tropical island? :V

I’d argue the opposite there; while we got a lot of new, conceptually cool locations that helped flesh out the broader world better, each was also very loosely-sketched in comparison to Mata-Nui and Metru-Nui, where we got a very solid sense of the geography, architecture, and most importantly, culture. And unfortunately this impacted the side characters, too; pick out a member of the Chronicler’s Company from 2001 or even the disk-finders in 2004, and I can tell you all about their personality and role in the island. Try to do the same for the Voya-Nui resistance team or the Av-Matoran, and aside from maybe Velika I couldn’t tell you what makes them unique or what sort of role they play. G1 lost the trees for the forest as it went on, and we were never really given enough time in each of the new locations to really get to know them. A consequence of the plot being on a countdown timer, maybe, but a definite flaw nonetheless.

^This!

Yeah, ultimately I’m inclined to say it’s a combination of factors; fleshed-out worldbuilding, solidly-defined characters to fill that world, and a decent premise to drive the characters forward to create the plot, that in turn develops the characters.

Worldbuilding is the underpinning, so the later years took on something of a disconnected quality as locations like Mahri-Nui and Karda-Nui were only vaguely sketched out. That’s not to say the worldbuilding in the ignition trilogy was bad per say, just that it had become too large-scope for its own good, and lost sight of the little details that the early years had thrived on. The story and main characters were able to keep it going through sheer momentum, but I definitely think that bigger-picture focus is part of what led to it losing steam.

I’d argue that the Metru-Nui arc struck a pretty solid balance of world, characters, and plot, especially if you read the books; though it wasn’t necessarily outstanding aside from the character arcs.

Meanwhile, whereas Mata-Nui had kinda simpler characters and an extremely loose plot that didn’t really extend past the basic premise of each year, (find the masks/defeat the Bohrok/find the seventh toa) it had a very well-established world that left a lot of room open for the other two elements to be developed at their leisure. I feel more could have been done with the latter two, but the world was detailed and immersive in a way we wouldn’t really get again, and the atmosphere is, ultimately, what I think gives Bionicle its staying power. I don’t really care about like, the Matoran Civil War era or the Toa Mangaia like some people do, but show me a beach with a canister, and you instantly have my attention.

Still, ideally Bionicle could excel in all three aspects, and do so regardless of the location. I do think a prospective G3 of any sort would really have to take advantage of its potential to improve on G1’s shortcomings to be worthwhile. If, say, you gave the Toa Mata as strong a development as the Toa Metru received, (instead of recycling the same conflict over and over again) or went in and really fleshed out the details of the Ignition Trilogy locations and their inhabitants, or even just slowed down a bit to spend a bit more time with Metru-Nui before it got destroyed, that could really help. Or heck, go back to Okoto, and see what else it may have to offer that G2 failed to deliver on!

(Also sets, while I honestly consider that a minor factor relative to the rest, are still important, and how a lot of people were introduced to Bionicle in the first place. I am kind of inclined to agree with Scorpion_Strike in that a traditional system set of vehicles or locations doesn’t really fit, but I think it could be interesting to have system-built constraction using mixel joints, kind of a ‘best of both worlds’ with potential for a lot more detail and customization than either Technic or CCBS alone are capable of due to their large size. If you took the kind of mechs they’re building for Ninjago or Nexo Knights and rejiggered the proportions and aesthetic, and removed the need for a minifig pilot, you could probably get some interesting results. Just… just make sure to give them knees…)

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Bionicle has 8 letters, that’s an even number, so the core of Bionicle is the middle two letters. The core of Bionicle is Ni.

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