Mandate

I noticed that a fair while back. It's nothing new, really (the lack of vehicle). We didn't get all four Elemental Dragons in one wave either, although admittedly that was pretty different. Skylar could very well become my favorite character, depending on how they pull off his/her personality and voice actor (suppose I shouldn't be worried about the latter really, but still).

Who uploaded the set info though? eBay is pretty untrustworthy. If this was Amazon, maybe I'd trust it, but if you're just going to say "a listing" and give us no information, not even a link or a screenshot, then there's no actual way we can tell if the Source isn't just another retailer making up garbage information, which is VERY common (especially if you ever watched an episode of On Ebay Today ) A seller using a certain description isn't indicative of anything final, and frankly I would say it's just a retailer making up some weird info just to make it sell.

Couldn't you just do a Sith mind wave trick and get us all in? Or does that only work for Jedi?

Ultrabuilds, however, were a big flop for LEGO. So much so that the Chimabuilds were cancelled in the US for the second set of them. Even if they were pretty unpopular by themselves, nothing screams "BAD!" like sets getting cancelled, an incredibly rare occurrence and even worse considering the US is where LEGO gets a hefty amount of their profit from.

I wouldn't say it's a "p" either. I'm waiting for confirmation on most of these names, while ones like Griffin are hard to have gotten wrong it's just better to wait until the official release before making any assumptions about gender or letters, etc. Especially after the whole Jack/Jake Raines thing (yes, I was lurking back then. Surprised I remember it) a few years back with PQ, that really goes to show that LEGO can have finalized names used in media still changed prior to launch. Still, that event could be entirely unrelated.

If they do that it's going to blur the lines between the plots too far for my taste. NINJAGO took some cues from BIONICLE (very few though, I know of only 3, one was debunked before it was revealed [thus it isn't a cue from BIONICLE other than the original notion] and the whole mostly-robotic-tiny-bit organic robot thing with Zane [not really organic at all, unless Julien was very specific in getting the look of Zane *shudder*] is getting changed next year)

It's not even an "n" on the end of it. Compare it with Sleven, even if you factor in the distance between the two it doesn't make sense.

neither of them galidor 4evar In all seriousness though, I'm not really sure. It depends on the story direction they were going with. If it was just going to be more "heropad" "heromech" "hero city" and "HEROiKEA: IT'S A HERO HERO" but amplified and swapped around with "villain" and then a whole bunch of extra Quaza variants then no thanks. If it was going to be yet another wave or two of Scouts and Titans then no thanks. And if it was a continuation of IFB, NO. That being said, if they mess up the new BIONICLE I probably would have been happier with a collection of Friends Ultrabuilds over both of them (I have never bought a Friends set, but I would actually buy these for sheer novelty)

Whether it will be a more mature one is yet to be seen. A lot of LEGO's past "big" themes have had horrid starts for plot and maturity, namely HF and Chima. Chima is... working out, from what I've heard. After the last time it started getting mature it took a big dump on itself and I gave up after that. And HERO FACTORY's plot was more or less axed with Brain Attack. I don't care if it was part of continuing the plot, but it was a silly move. Brain Attack's general performance from what I've seen ranged from "good" to "absolute disaster" (even in the Constraction community). I didn't really mind it, I only picked up Rocka (impulse buy, nothing more I swear). It (Brain Attack) was made to look cartoony in style, it had a tacky B-movie theme draped on top of it, and quite a few of the builds were incredibly unpopular (we still have an abnormally large amount of space on the shelves at the local Target dedicated to Ogrum alone), namely the Creatures. It doesn't surprise me LEGO decided to cut HF for a new Constraction line. Honestly, if the new plot isn't a train wreck disaster (not implying it will be), LEGO could successfully milk this for a few years. Let's just hope they don't do three-year-long story arcs again, and that they actually develop a unique look for BIONICLE with CCBS. Right now I'm unimpressed with the style, although I suppose it's expecting too much out of LEGO to change CCBS in any meaningful way with how much standardization it's comprised of. edit: clarified some things

Ah, thanks for that.

So, can someone please explain to me why 1,000 year old robots seemingly forgot about Metru Nui until they found it? (I honestly have no clue about that plotline, forgive me for getting the entire concept wrong)

Sorry, I know my current post is late, but the rotors don't spin in opposite directions. Look through the build, it's physically impossible.

Not "chima" orange. That orange existed before Chima. I don't even recall any Chima sets using this specific orange as a main color, the lions used Bright Yellow (or at least I thought they did) and the Tigers are using the normal orange.

They had better not space the episodes out like this next year. I had a lot of problems with Season 3, as good as it was it had a gigantic number of flaws, most can be attributed to the short amount of time they had to work on the plot this year (unlike previous years) and the spacing of the episodes. There was a stupidly large amount of plot holes (Nya tells Lloyd the hard drive was stolen, when they arrive at NNC Borg tells them the hard drive is stolen, and that they can't erase him now. No one tells him that they already know. How the ninja find out the hard-drive was gone anyway? It's a blind guess at the very most, but the worst offender is Enter The Digiverse. We are told prior they cannot erase the Overlord virus without the hard drive, but lo and behold they manage to erase him anyway. It COULD just be due to he fact that everything is interconnected, and thus if the hard drive is powered and the seat-things are powered, they can connect to it. However, I don't recall this ever being stated), and a frustrating amount of unexplained things, such as how the Overlord (and a certain someone) survived. The current explanation is that in NINJAGO if you build a tower with advanced technology were someone died, they come back to life. There was a complete lack of pacing, mainly because of the two-episode formula. The Overlord was made into a helpless damsel in distress time and time again. What happened to the crazy, insanse, Joker-like Overlord from The Stone Army-RoTSM that had everything perfectly planned out? First the Overlord requires Cyrus Borg, then PIXAL, then the Nindroids, then Pythor, then Pythor again, Pythor yet another time, and for the rest of the season it alternates between Nindroids and Pythor. And the complete disaster of a finale (in terms of continuity) that was The Titanium Ninja, where even though Aaaand do I need to mention the ridiculous retcon they did with the Serpentine? It destroyed Skale's character completely. No matter how many times Skales was shown to be wrong about a myth or legend, he always denied it existed until they found it. Honestly, when you dig right through Rebooted, it barely stands up on its own. I liked it a lot, but I can't get past all of the ridiculous errors, silly retcons and unexplained plot points.

Kranx was Omega, not anyone else. Clutch Powers is ending up a part of LEGO's more obscure history; Galidor, etc. Although it wasn't as big a failure as Galidor, it wasn't enough to warrant a second movie. It's likely it will never be touched on again, save for the random reference (NINJAGO did one, but that could be retconned at any point, or completely altered after they did a gigantic reversal on half the plot of the original series ). I wouldn't go around declaring any line with one wave an "obscure" part of TLG history. Some lines just are successful, but not successful enough. Ultra Agents isn't one of them. Ultra Agents, Ultra Agents! Gotta catch 'em all

No, my comparison was with NINJAGO (don't bother bringing up the similarities of NINJAGO, the only one there at launch was Cole's color being black. Zane being a Nindroid was revealed in the second year, and even then only this year did they make a big spectacle out of it. And it's being changed next year. Ninjago being the sole continent in an endless sea was only revealed later on, and in the same episode at the end changed by Garmadon, and five episodes prior we learn of the Dark Island) I don't recall BIONICLE using undead (or stylized to be undead, as is the way of BIOG2) enemies. But frankly the whole "elemental heroes versus death-themed enemies" is getting repetitive now. It started with NINJAGO, the Chima did it too, now BIONICLE is doing it. There's nothing wrong with having undead enemies, Castle did it pretty well. But when you drag in the Elements, and then some kind of mystery plot device that needs to be contained, it's getting overdone after three themes have used it in the space of five years.

New story in a nutshell: "six elemental heroes must collect six golden elemental plot devices to defeat a rising evil that has to do with the dead in some way" Boy, that sure sounds familiar. (yes, I'm aware of the fact that the Kanohi were golden in the first year, but that was completely different in the manner they had to be collected and the fact that the "rising evil" was an already established rather than rising evil that had nothing to do with skeletons and would have conquered Mata Nui had the Toa not arrived when they did)

Nope. We never get IRL photos of the sets before a convention? Or even leaked versions of IRL photos? I don't recall it ever happening in the past.

Personally the Helicopter looks bad to me, but I love the motorbike and Drillex. Spyclops... eh, the lack of moving legs and that hideous face (good that it's in a cheap set though, Insectoids MOCs incoming from all sides!) are a real downside to me. Unless of course, I ever want to make some Insectoids MOCs Would be really good as some sort of "explanation", eg the Insectoids were once human

I spy with my little eye, is that a transparent mask on Antimatter!?

Curved sloping bricks are different to curved shells that have curves on every side and jut out at awkward angles that make it look bad even inside its own building system (admittedly, the lack of back-covering on the shells has improved with new parts and better techniques, but it's still a gigantic problem). Bricks like the ones in the X-1 Ninja Charger add defined lines to the car, clearly-defined edges yet giving it an overall smooth dynamic shape. The sad part about this is that this is what CCBS was made to fix, it's LEGO's Tertiary Universal Building System, designed to avoid the horrendous offender of specialized parts that was BIONICLE, and replace this specialization with a standardized building system that only requires minimal specialization for aesthetic purposes and is wholly compatible with LEGO's Primary building system (SYSTEM) and Secondary building system (Technic). Granted, Technic got off to a bit of a rough start too, but Technic was compatible with SYSTEM from the very beginning. It had the studs and tubes, but it also had pins and pin holes. It could be used to stabilize a LEGO MOC and provide support, it could be used to add in gears, etc and bring about set functions. It didn't (and still doesn't) require specialization because it was made to fit LEGO's current designs. CCBS, however, was made to replace another system, and be better on a whole than the previous one. The problem with this is that CCBS succeeded and failed over its predecessor; it brought standardized functionality at the cost of complexity. While this is being fixed, it's still an ongoing problem, especially when you take a moment to think of how awkward the new BIONICLE sets are going to be with the large backpack and the arms so far behind the chest. And I believe I've already mentioned how bad the Shells are for armor plating, there's almost no ways to use them without them looking gappy. It most certainly doesn't look stylized either, something BIONICLE did do very well. All of this is why I don't want to see NINJAGO using Ultrabuilds. They're cool in theory, but after the hideous faces of Chima's Ultrabuilds, the armor-like plating, and an utter lack of proof that they will be good (no, Hero Factory and BIONICLE 2015 don't count as examples, those are Constraction themes, not reimaginings of SYSTEM/human characters), I would rather them try to improve CCBS over time for such a concept than force another theme into submission with it. Sorry for the mostly off-topic semi-rant. Anyway, about the skull-stacking, that's what I was implying. You can still "stack" them per say, but not in the same way you could with tiles

CCBS doesn't mesh very well with SYSTEM either, the strange shapes and odd curves of the shells detract a lot. Notable example is the Earth Mech, while it's a very good Mech and the shells fit with it's style the fact that the shells are a single piece with a lack of any kind of traditional SYSTEM integration throws it off. Anyway, I think the whole "snake torches" thing about the skulls is probably right. It also allows stacking of skulls to make mountains out of mole hills

Well, the hands were introduced waaay back in 2011, and haven't been exclusive to HF either.

It's especially ironic with CCBS because it was meant to be standardized enough to prevent problems like this from occurring... Honestly, I don't want to see any Ultrabuilds with NINJAGO. There's far too much of a chance of them messing them up (Chima Ultrabuilds face's looked absolutely hideous, and back armor was a gigantic problem), they worked somewhat with Chima because every man and his dog wears some kind of armor, whereas in NINJAGO, even the ninja's most bulkily armored outfits, other than Kendo, don't come remotely near the level of armor-y as CCBS comes across.

If that's the LOSS gear function, as clever as it is I think I'll only get Pohatu and the Protectors.