Lyichir

I've obviously never bought one of these and as such wouldn't know, but I would imagine these sorts of kits also come with an instructional guide for the facilitator so that they can make the best possible use of the materials. So in that respect they're not buying just random brick.

This is interesting. Earlier this year my family made an order including a couple of Power Functions items (forget which specifically) and in their place we received a $60 Ninjago set and a $60 Star Wars set (greatly exceeding the $20 or so worth of Power Functions we had ordered). Like in your case, customer service was very helpful in sorting that out. And it was the first such error we'd ever had ordering through Shop at Home. I had considered it to be just a random occurrence, and it very well might be... but I suppose it's possible that it's indicative of a more widespread issue with packing Power Functions orders. Who knows?

Hm... any chance of a co-pack, akin to 71311 Kopaka and Melum Unity Set in the Bionicle range? I don't know what chance there is of that... but it might help explain a smaller wave, and could be a nice chance to get figures of smaller characters like Yoda or R2-D2.

Actually, come to think of it, 75113 Rey does come with some Dark Tan elements... but they're hard for me to visualize off the figure, and as such I have no idea how they'd look on Pohatu.

I really like the new Pohatu's color scheme. It gives him a real scrappy appearance, like his armor is weathered and patched together. I will admit that the Reddish Brown on Ketar is not that great, but Pohatu only has three Reddish Brown parts, with one on his back and two on his weapon. If I had to make a single change it would be swapping the Tr. Fluor. Green shells on his arms for silver ones, because the transparent shells on transparent beams break up the flow of his arms and make his hands look almost like they're not even connected.

I agree with this, and it's the main reason I actually prefer the combined forms of the Creatures with the silver heads. Sometimes you actually want to have contrast, and the silver-headed Creatures provide that and make the result (with silver and transparent creature heads and gold Toa masks) even more ornate-looking than gold alone could be. That said, the Onua review pretty much cemented my feelings on the set—the only major flaw is a lack of distinctiveness compared to this year's Onua. When considered on its own merits, the new Onua is great, and I like him a lot more than this year's Tahu and Kopaka.

Most likely? A wave that had to be hastily developed when when the Ninjago movie was delayed.

Fiction-wise, I doubt it's designed for protection in the first place. Ekimu may know how to fight, but he's primarily an artisan, not a warrior.

Oh man, I didn't think about that. That's definitely a possibility. Either way it's a nice, neutral color that'd be great for all sorts of themes.

Actually, I just noticed that there seems to be an unprinted shield in the Knight's Cycle polybag. Looks to be either Dark Stone Grey or Silver Metallic, both nice basic colors for a wide variety of themes. Would that suit your purposes? If not, then as I mentioned earlier, removing prints is not that hard and AFOLs have been doing it for a long time. EDIT: Almost forgot about the unprinted black one from the new Batman v. Superman set with the Batmobile. It seems like this part will see wide use, which makes sense given its versatility.

This is a really interesting change, and one I wasn't aware of. Thanks for the pics!

IP is most likely an abbreviation of intellectual property—in other words, a real-world car licensed by the manufacturer, rather than an original unbranded design by Lego. I don't think you can read any more into the placeholder name than that.

Regarding the connection point on the back of Allegra's head: I'm pretty sure she's supposed to have a ponytail that attaches there. It seems like you might be missing that part? I don't see it in any of the pictures.

For people who were hoping for the shields to be stickered so that they could have them unprinted, from what I've read it's not THAT hard to remove a print from a part. It may not be "purist", but if you're desperate to have a transparent unprinted shield, brasso should do the trick (and there are probably plenty of other methods, some of which might be even more effective).

Maybe... but I would've appreciated other parts in gold more. I mean, I would love to have the Vorox armor in Warm Gold—it'd probably look better on Tahu than the Skull Villain add-on, and would probably look good on Kopaka as well. Kinda hoping that the summer Ekimu set might include that, at least... I do like the look of the crystal add-on. As others have said, it's a good transitional part, with crystals on one side and a classic piston texture on the other.

Yeah, you just lost just about all sympathy I might have had for your view. When you said "the end of CCBS", I was already skeptical, since the CCBS took a Constraction category that had spiraled out of control and gave it a logical order and a modular system of parts. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that you might mean that you wanted sets more like this year's Toa, that use basic Technic connectors with ball joints and the like to achieve unique builds and proportions in lieu of generic CCBS beams and the like. I'm okay with that. There's a place for that. And while sometimes it doesn't work as well as a design that relies more heavily on CCBS, and I wouldn't ever want that to replace CCBS entirely, it can work great in tandem with the solid foundation CCBS provides. But you don't seem to want a system that relies more on basic parts and connectors. You just want a return to the waste and overspecialization of years past. No. No no no. That would be just about the worst thing that could happen to the new Bionicle and to Constraction in general.

Don't see what you mean by "not bootleg"—Enlighten is one of the prime examples of a bootleg product, especially since they often copy not just parts but entire set designs.

Again, you can point to Skylanders SuperChargers for the answer. That IS a multiplatform game, like Lego Dimensions, but the Wii U and 3DS bundles included exclusive Donkey Kong and Bowser figures that could be used for that game OR as Amiibo. The same could conceivably be done with Lego Dimensions—the question is whether it WOULD. I would say it's not likely, since outside of providing the figures bundled with the main game there's no easy way to avoid confusion as to which figures go with which version of the game, and that ship has sailed now that the main starter packs have already been released (especially since, unlike Skylanders, Dimensions will apparently continue to use the same starter pack for years instead of replacing it with newer versions over time).

Official pics? Not yet. It looks like Elves might be getting a March release like it did this year, meaning official pics are probably still a little ways off.

I mean, that's kind of what the Skull Villains' weapons and armor was, with its intricate, geometric linework. And for them, it worked—largely because they DIDN'T have a lot of clashing greebles like pistons or the like. The piece just doesn't work that well on Tahu in my opinion, because there are already so many other textures at play and pretty much all of them are gold. I hope to try maybe swapping them for the crystal pieces to see if he looks any more "unified" that way.

Not quite. As the description says, it seems to work by TURNING the center bit so that it alternately pulls and releases the chains attached to the Globlins.

Most of the people I've seen complaining about that have been MOCists, most of whom probably loved the look of the sets initially but later learned that the many contrasting textures Bionicle used over the years didn't really go together that well at all. I've seen very few complaints about the pistons alone (save for on parts like the new torso shell where they seem excessive and their "function" isn't totally apparent), and many more about how that texture clashes with other textures. The new Tahu is a good example of this. His color scheme isn't that bad. His build isn't that much worse than any of the other Toa. But he's got so many different textures going on (the art deco lines and torn metal sheets of the Skull armor, the greebly leg shells and torso, the crystalline fragments of the new mask and new shell details, and the smooth simplicity of standard CCBS shells) that other aspects of the set suffer for it. The dominant gold in his color scheme might have worked to unify the set's color scheme and look, but because so many of those gold parts have contrasting textures, it looks like a bit of a mess. I don't mind the textures on the new Toa that much. The new "Technic shells" on the creature sets work well and call to mind the mechanical details you might see in a normal Technic set, although I still think they're too thin to work well as leg shells as they're used on Kopaka and Tahu. The torso shells have a good blend of greebles and smooth surfaces as far as I'm concerned, though I'm disappointed by the lack of connection points. And the revival of the Vorox armor is something I've wanted for a while, since it is a great part for integrating the smooth aesthetic of CCBS with the more greebly aesthetic of weapons, shell details, and other parts. Really the only texture that bothers me are the two different textures on the shell detail from the Skull Villains—what worked for a series of sets that used them more exclusively does not work when mixed with the more common textures in other sets. It's the same thing that happened in G1 with parts from sets like the Barraki. Kalmah's leg shell was horrible about this because its highly useful connection points made it a commonly used part in later years, even though no other parts that matched its texture appeared alongside it.

Wouldn't a more castle-ish version of a heraldic emblem that was previously only been available in KK2 be a good thing for castle fans who disliked that theme? Or are the animals used for those characters somehow forever tainted by the association with that theme? Sometimes I don't understand Castle fans at ALL.

Lightsabers don't really "poof" things. I think the lava monsters just "poof" when they sustain a certain amount of damage—it doesn't have anything to do with what sort of weapon they were hit with, and Lance's weapon might have a very different effect if he used it against a human combatant or some non-living object.