Aanchir

Thanks for finding that! I looked for it on the Wayback Machine but had a tough time locating it, especially since I didn't remember when it was published.

Your art is always incredible and I'm so happy to have been able to watch you work on some of these! I hope you manage to create even more amazing art this year, and hopefully get all the recognition you deserve for it!

 

I just love how TLG decided to put one of those sloped, vented, bricks on Gali's back.

That's another thing; why did they use bright blue for the back instead of dark azure or orange to go with her color scheme? They went through the trouble to make the short axles black in the same set, but they couldn't recolor any other small parts?

 

Black 2M axles are not a new recolor. Even though they are no longer the standard color for those axles, not a year has gone by when they weren't in at least seven sets. By contrast, none of the Bright Blue parts Gali uses on her back currently exist in Dark Azur, and I guess they were worried about her not having enough blue on her back if they went with orange.

I don't really mind, though. From the pics I've seen, Gali's color scheme still looks very coherent. Akida likewise uses both Bright Blue and Dark Azur to great effect.

...and I don't really understand why the crystal blades couldn't be transparent. Maybe the softer plastic doesn't' work in a transparent color?

Exactly. The softer plastic parts are polypropylene and generally can't achieve the same glassy look you get in polycarbonate. Vahki eyestalks are a good example of this in a non-blended piece, and Tarix's water blades and Malum's flame claws are good examples of this in G1 blended pieces.

The Protectors can probably ride on at least some of the Toa's shoulders alright, but having them ride piggyback would be a challenge since the 2015 Toa have those gears in the back of their torsos that would make it harder for the Protectors to reach around.

 

Since Tahu and Kopaka are allies, I would theorise that if the pair swapped golden masks there would be no change in their powers, since the masks would still be in friendly possession. (Assuming the Nuva Symbol comparison holds.)

 

That's a shaky assumption; that was a fairly specific attribute of the Nuva symbols, not a widespread property of such elemental "batteries". Makes more sense to me that, if a mask contains the power, whoever wears it can use that power (though only the respective Toa has the mastery to make good use of it.)

 

It's also possible that the masks are somewhat tailored to the user, and Toa simply can't use masks that don't match their element, the same way Protectors and villagers can't use the golden masks.

I do wonder why darth vader, luke  and obi wan did not receive a gearbox as well to make the lightsaber more fun to play with

Could be that the designers thought LEGO Star Wars fans would prefer more traditional action figures without a lot of "gimmicks". Or maybe they just knew that they didn't yet have all the pieces they would've needed to integrate a gearbox unobtrusively into an organic figure. After all, the new parts budget for that first wave was still going towards parts like the new torso, leg, and shoulder shells. Now that those parts are available the designers could focus their attention more on ways to enhance the figures' playability, like the new gearbox cover, torso beam, and blaster housing.

I do have one nitpick—I seriously doubt the lightsaber hilt is actually chrome silver, based on the pictures. Chrome silver (Metalized Silver) is pretty recognizable, since the chrome finish makes it so that you can practically see your own reflection in the part. The more matte appearance of this part suggests that it's probably Cool Silver, Drum Lacquered, which is shinier and less streaky than Silver Metallic (Flat Silver) but isn't nearly as polished and reflective as Metalized Silver. I actually prefer lacquered silver to chrome silver, since the lacquer coating doesn't stick out as much and doesn't show scratches to nearly the same extent as chromed parts.

Technically, Cool Silver, Drum Lacquered is no longer in use, and has been replaced with Silver Ink, which includes both matte/lacquered and metalized (chrome) versions. Visually, there isn't much difference between Cool Silver, Drum Lacquered and the matte/lacquered version of Silver Ink, and I'm not even totally sure whether the color itself has changed or just the terminology, but I thought I'd make that distinction.

Anyway, good review! I agree with most of the major points. The problem of the arms being too short seems negligible to me, since my own wrists are about level with my crotch when my arms are at rest, same as Finn's. His arms could maybe stand to be one module longer. This is an easy fix if you have the right parts — just replace the 5M beams and 4M shells in his upper arms with 6M beams and 5M shells (available in Sand Yellow from CHI Vardy). This is how many of the other buildable figures' arms are constructed, and I'm guessing the only reason LEGO didn't do that in this set is because the 5M Sand Yellow shells are no longer in production.

As for the knees, they DO look really knobbly, a problem he shares with Poe. In spite of not using the shells with knee guard, Rey manages not to have this problem to nearly the same extent due to the shells on the upper legs being reversed so they cover the knee. I'm not sure how well that'd work for Finn, though. The length of his legs doesn't really bother me. They're actually shorter than the legs of Luke, Phasma, and Obi-Wan, and about on par with the shorter figures from this series like Jango, Cody, and the First Order Stormtrooper.

And yeah, his head sculpt is fantastic. I'm glad it's fairly generic and doesn't include any sort of headgear, since that makes it a lot more versatile for MOCs. It's a fantastic likeness of John Boyega, only stylized ever so slightly so it echoes the crisp, well-defined contours of the building system. The expression is fairly neutral but doesn't feel lifeless. It's a perfect example of how the heads of these buildable figures should look.

Even though the torso shell is not optimized to represent a shirt and jacket, the armor texture is not too distracting. A more custom solution might've been nice but I don't know whether it would've been possible without making him too bulky. His overall costume design and color scheme make him a lot more interesting to me than the more monochrome and more generically-armored figures like Phasma, Kylo Ren, and the First Order Stormtrooper.

It's interesting that Finn is the only character with both a gear function and a blaster. When I saw the movie I was pleasantly surprised to see how accurate the blasters from these figures are to their on-screen counterparts.

Thanks for this review! Loved the hilarious image captions. It's great to see this series of figures evolve. It's only been two waves, and yet the current batch of sets really brings so many new things to the table that the first batch lacked.

In the first chapter of Bionicle Chronicles #1, Lewa rescues a baby Taku bird (basically a duckling). We now know that Rahi aren't really born or hatched the way real animals are, so the possibility of Lewa coming across one that could be considered a "baby" is unlikely, to say the least.

In Mata Nui Online Game, the impenetrable layer in the Onu-Koro mines is referred to as being organic, like an Ussal's shell. We now know that this impenetrable layer was presumably meant to be the outer "skin" of the Great Spirit Mata Nui's robot body, but that "skin" certainly isn't organic.

In comic #6, "Into the Nest", Onua states that "The Matoran have discovered that the Bohrok do not truly live. They are artificial life... biomechanical creations". Later in the story, the word "biomechanical" would be used liberally to describe even characters who DID have living components, like the Matoran and Toa, but almost never to describe something purely mechanical like the Bohrok.

The instruction manual to the "Bionicle: Quest for Makuta" board game referred to the ages of the Toa, with Tahu being the oldest and Lewa being the youngest. This was never referenced again, and we later learned that all the Toa Mata were effectively the same age.

Kahu in 2001 were hawk Rahi and Kewa/Goko-Kahu were vulture Rahi. Later, these two species were basically conflated into one species called Gukko, which were giant hummingbirds. Greg later canonized the fact that Kahu and Kewa still existed as subspecies of Gukko. However, even then, it basically means the depiction of Ka (Kongu's "pet" Gukko) in Mata Nui Online Game was entirely non-canon. Usually when there's a discrepancy in the appearance of a character or species from one year to another, it's given an explanation in-story (like Pewku growing to a larger size between the Bohrok-Kal and Rahkshi story arcs), but the discrepancy in Ka's appearance was never explained.

Those are just some examples I can remember right now. I'm sure there are many more.

So a few days ago, I was thinking of all the alternate universes in Bionicle when I remembered that a few years ago (2012 or 2013), the Hero Factory website had this little blog thingy in the corner of the website that listed off a few alternate universes (the story behind it I believe was something along the lines of Stormer or Zib, after the Mirror World adventure, wanting to catalogue other alt. universes).

 

So, after looking through Wayback Machine, the BZP mainpage, and a few lackluster HF wikis (HS01 plz come back, we miss you ), I couldn't find anything on this 'Alternate Universe Blog', so my question is, does anyone else remember these, or am I just going insane? And if they did exist, does anyone remember/know what the alt. universes were in particular, or have any screencaps of them by chance? Or how about roughly when they were added to the HF website?

It was on the LEGO Club website, I think, not the Hero Factory website. But I'm having a hard time finding anything about it. It might have needed a club code.

I miss HS01 also...

Has anyone mentioned the new App yet? I'm just looking at Umarak's building instructions, and there's a plug for a Bionicle App with the Mask of Control as its icon. I guess we're getting a new game?

Yep, but there hasn't been any news about what it will be like. I'd guess it's a sequel to the "Mask of Creation" app, so probably something with similar gameplay, but hopefully also bringing in some new gameplay mechanics to spice things up. If we're lucky it might have more exciting level designs, since I think that'd make a lot of difference.

My MOC Wairuha Master of Wisdom got 57 upvotes. While I haven't been through all my posts, it's probably safe to say that nothing else I've posted has come anywhere close.

EDIT: Looking at the highest reputation content link above, it's actually the ninth most upvoted post on the site, so yeah, definitely better than anything else I've posted.

Becoming a news reporter is possibly the highest point for me. It gave me a way to make the time I spend looking for LEGO news on the Internet feel more useful. I do have some regrets, of course. I never ended up writing up a recap of my time on the LEGO Inside Tour because I was afraid it would seem more like bragging about all the cool things I got to do than an actual news story. And I still haven't figured out how to upload images via FTP, though I have plenty of time to figure that out. But overall it's been amazing just being able to feel useful to the community.

Of course, I also enjoyed spending time with other BZPower members at BrickUniverse Raleigh, BrickFair Virginia, and BrickFair New Jersey. By now I've pretty much come to expect that at any convention I attend.

I love how Pohatu puts on a tough guy persona when he's around the other Toa but is secretly the most afraid of all of them.

Well, afraid of a few things, at any rate. Pohatu's near-fearlessness was mentioned in his bio way back in 2001 (and remains a part of his G2 characterization) but his only fear at that time — water — never really came up as a plot point. Whereas G2 Pohatu has been forced to confront both of his secret fears (the dark and scorpions).

*grumblegrumble Ninjago isn't out in the US this month apparently grumble grumble*

 

Yeah, I'm guessing they're coming in March since they're not on the February LEGO Store Calendar. The same thing happened this year so it's not unprecedented. Good news is, this means it'll be easier to plan out purchases since by the time the sets are out we'll have seen the summer sets at New York Toy Fair!

 

Translucent Pearl Kakama which I'm pretty sure is the only one of its kind.

I got a few pictures of it, if anyone wants some more I can provide them.

 

Pretty sure all gold and silver Kakama (along with all the other gold and silver masks from the 2002 mask packs) are like this. It's a property of the colors they used, Yellow Flip/Flop and Silver Flip/Flop. Solid-colored when lit from in front, translucent when backlit. Great photos, though — I haven't seen a lot of photos that show off this ability quite this well.

But now, they seem to be saying that the Protectors' mask of time is the G1 Vahi shape, and that is the top half of the mask. Which doesn't make very much sense.

I don't think they've said anything to even imply that. The Mask of Time we see on the actual comic pages is an obvious placeholder. Even before we knew the bit about the Protectors' Mask of Time being the top half, it would've been safe to assume that the mask in the comic was not the G2 Mask of Time's actual design simply because of the way it's not even drawn, just hastily photoshopped into the panel.

Here's how I picture things going down: The artist does not have a reference for the Mask of Time in that scene. They might not even know that there are separate top and bottom halves of the mask, just that the script says "Mask of Time". They decide to use the G1 Mask of Time as a placeholder until LEGO sends them a finalized referece. LEGO never sends them a finalized reference, therefore, the placeholder makes it into the pages of the published book. And suddenly everybody is imagining a placeholder to be canon.

It's a similar situation to this teaser poster from 2009, except this time there's no story team member in constant dialogue with the fans in order to reassure us that the specific figure/mask pictured means nothing and the artist simply didn't have access to a finalized design for the figure/mask that was supposed to appear in that scene.

It's a contradiction, sure, and a potentially confusing one. But sometimes you just have to roll with the simplest explanation. Which in this case, I think, is "the mask in the comic panel is not the correct design".

I honestly never realized I could post video game stuff in this sub-forum. I thought it was for sets only. I think other people are in the same boat as me? So hypothetically that would mean activity here wouldn't decrease?

Really? Huh. I thought it was pretty clear that all LEGO discussion, whether about the sets or video games, goes here, same as how discussion of Bionicle video games is in Bionicle discussion. But if that really is a common misconception, maybe it's worth a shot after all...

My worry then is, how much other discussion (besides video game discussion) are we currently missing out on due to other related misconceptions, and is there any sensible way to address all of that at once? After all, video games aren't the only non-set content that this forum and the Ninjago Discussion forum currently encompass. There are also books, TV shows/specials, magazines, web-based media, and other kinds of media related to lots of different LEGO themes. Some people in this topic have suggested the possibility of having a general "media discussion" forum. I had been worried that approach might absorb too much content from not just these two forums, but also the Bionicle Discussion forum (where people don't seem to have much of a problem discussing media). Yet if people currently don't realize that this site has any place for media discussion... then something has to be done differently.

Another possibility: could just changing the forum names be enough to erase these misconceptions? i.e. changing "Bionicle Discussion" to "Bionicle Sets and Media Discussion", "Ninjago Discussion" to "Ninjago Sets and Media Discussion", and LEGO Discussion to "LEGO Sets and Media Discussion"? It's less succinct but it would make it harder for people not to realize that media discussion is not only accepted but encouraged in all three of these forums.

A Chima forum was opened without all this silliness and is now being closed because no one used it. That's that. Why can't something similar happen with this proposed sub-forum? If no one uses it then close it.

That can definitely happen. Judging from the voting in this topic so far, it probably will happen. I'm just frustrated that in the interim it'll mean even less activity for the subforum we're in right now, and potentially added confusion to discussions that might touch upon video games without being strictly and exclusively about them. I don't want us to get to a point where I can't make a comment about Nexo Powers in discussions of the LEGO Nexo Knights TV show or sets without being redirected to the Merlok 2.0 topic in the video games forum.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I think Dimensions is totally a video game.

I don't think anybody ever tried to argue that it's NOT a video game? I was just emphasizing that it's both a toy AND a video game, and it doesn't make sense to treat it as just one or the other, nor to separate discussion of the physical and digital components.

 

At the same time, the new tidbit about the Protectors' Mask of Time being the top half leads me to wonder how the Bionicle team might realize the Mask of Time in the sets if we ever get to a point where they intend to do that.

I thought the G1 Vahi was the bottom half of the G2 Mask of Time? That seems to be the most intuitive way to make a second half. Unless they turn it upside down or something really weird.

 

My point is, in a set that might not be very practical — we don't know if the G1 Vahi mold is still available, and regardless, it's not designed with connecting to another mask (or to a G2 head) in mind. I suppose you could have the top half stretch down and have an anti-stud so you can connect the bottom half to the top half the same way you would with a G1 set's "mouth". But it makes me wonder if LEGO might actually redesign the bottom half AND design a new top half for it. *shrug*

I hope the finalized Mask if Time for G2 looks a bit like a Vahi, for easter egg sake.

Well, yeah, I certainly hope the G2 Mask of Time bears SOME resemblance to the G1 version, same as the Toa's masks bear SOME resemblance to their G1 counterparts' masks. That's not really an easter egg, it's just showing your work and (as they said at the NYCC presentation) "respecting the roots".

At the same time, the new tidbit about the Protectors' Mask of Time being the top half leads me to wonder how the Bionicle team might realize the Mask of Time in the sets if we ever get to a point where they intend to do that.

I disagree, somewhat. If a character's overall color scheme is consistent enough, the golden mask becomes a complimentary color and looks nice. If the character's other colors are all over the place, though, then the addition of the mask can make the color scheme fall apart and lose whatever focus it has. And if you add a differently colored animal head on top of that, it can become downright chaotic and messy.

That's fair. I do definitely think that the gold masks look better on the 2016 Gali and Lewa than on the 2016 Pohatu, since the LAST thing this version of Pohatu needs is yet another color, let alone less Dark Orange. But I don't think the silver creature heads make any of the gold masks look worse, because the characters who are matched up with silver creatures already have silver as a major part of their color schemes. I don't think the creature heads and the Toa masks HAVE to match just because they're adjacent when combined.

Gali, Lewa, and their creatures all have really consistent color schemes, IMO, so I don't think a splash of gold on the Toa's faces really hurts them any more than it hurt the 2001 or 2015 Toa when they got their golden masks.

What you said about the Hero Factory sets does not apply, because the Brain Attack sets were not specifically designed to go along with and enhance the video game; the video game was instead designed to go along with and enhance the toys. The difference between those is obvious.

So if the Brain Attack situation is really the opposite of LEGO Dimensions, as you make it sound, and all LEGO Dimensions discussion (including discussion of the sets) would go in a video game discussion forum, does that mean all Brain Attack and Breakout discussion (including discussion of the online and mobile games) would go in a set discussion forum? After all, the games only exist to enhance the sets!

Regardless of whether the video games or toys came first, it makes no sense to have a double standard and have associated toy and video game discussion lumped together in the same forum for one theme but split apart into separate forums for every other theme.

There is one obvious solution, though: to not create a separate forum for video games. So far I've seen no compelling reasons for doing so, except the spurious notion that somehow the current forums can't support video game discussion and a video games subforum could. It takes more than just a dedicated forum to make people want to discuss something — otherwise, the LEGO Discussion, Ninjago Discussion, and Legends of Chima Discussion subforums would be thriving every month of the year, instead of just when there are new sets, new video games, or a new TV season to discuss. And if discussions of LEGO video games and online games don't tend to last long, it's not because BZPower members don't know where to find them.

We can try making a LEGO video games subforum. But I can't see it accomplishing anything except throwing a wrench into the current forum divisions and making the existing LEGO discussion forums even more starved for activity.

Hope this did good for the reboot's publicity. Any one go?

 

-NotS

I went, but I didn't really build anything. I was mostly there to look for a book, but I did take a look at what a lot of the kids who'd been by had built, and talked a bit with the people who were still building.

Something I forgot to mention in my earlier post:

 

How does everyone feel about gold masks on sets with primarily silver accents? Something that really stands out to me with Lewa and Gali is how out-of-place their gold masks seem.

IMO, the gold masks look way better when they DO stand out than when they blend in with the armor. After all, part of the point of a gold mask is for it to stand out as something unique and special. If it blends in with the character then it doesn't stand out nearly so much.

This is especially true with the 2016 Toa since I think the look of a silver creature head over top of a gold mask is way cooler than the look of a gold creature head over a gold mask. The former looks like an elaborate and decorative helmet worn over top of the mask, and the latter just makes it look like the characters' foreheads have been stretched out.