Okay so, Veeky Forums keeps saying that Bionicle is the true deepest lore of all settings

I feel nostalgic and always want to buy some for nostalgia sake, but they are so easy to assemble or stupid pricy.

There were several series of books dedicated to telling the story of Bionicle. Honestly their lore can get ridiculously intricate.

You can always replay the old point and click games. They're lovely.

YO YO PIRAKA

TAKUAAA
TAKUUUAAAAA

All of my lore knowledge comes from the Flash or Shockwave game on the Lego site that let you roam the island as one of the tiny guys and it ended with a cliffhanger with evil ball monsters. It was rad as fuck.

I've heard that the new ones are made of ridiculously low quality plastic as well

PIRAKA, GO PIRAKA!

Pretty sure the new ones take place in a separate universe to bionicle. Not sure though.

>Pretty Sure
>Not Sure

WHAT IS IT user

>what exactly IS a bionicle?
Some hardcore fans would tell you there's no such thing as "a" Bionicle because that's the name of the franchise, not the characters or toys. But in normal people terms, most Bionicle characters are mostly mechanical cyborgs who keep a planet-sized robot functioning while it goes on interplanetary travels to study cultures and reform an exploded planet. But none of the people living in the robot are actually aware of this.
There's also tons of fuckers living outside the robot on chunks of the exploded planet, most of them are organic people and animals with mechanical augmentations and armor. But there's also fully organic creatures and all sorts of energy, fire, mud, spectral and other monsters because the writers pretty much threw everything into the lore they could think of.

>do they live?
Yes, but there was a bullshit post-script retcon that revealed the main "species" only gained sentience because one of their wacko creators tampered with their AI.

>how do they reproduce?
They don't, they're just made. But those living outside the giant robot fuck like normal.

>what do they eat?
Most races consider eating uncivilized. They suck out the energy from foodstuff through their palms.

>They don't, they're just made. But those living outside the giant robot fuck like normal.
Their masks are made, their bodies are born from that mask if the movies and comics are to go by.

Yes, as a kid I watched all the movies and owned comics from the start. White toa is best toa

The "new ones" had good, sturdy plastic, it's the ones that came out in the second half of the 2000s that crumble. The problem with the new ones isn't the quality, it's that there actually are no new ones because Lego dumped the entire line years ago in favor of shitty ass Star Wars figs.

It's just a bunch of guys who haven't moved past their childhoods yet.

The setting's lore was innovative enough as far as toy lines are concerned,and it's vocab borrowed heavily from Maori language. Basically a bunch of mechanical robot tribes doing quests and shit for their potato god

>liking Vegeta Robot

Bionicle is just a portmanteau of biological and chronicle. Technically their is "a" Bionicle, and it's the story that little matoran called the chronicler was writing in the flash (and I think GBA) games
>white toa
>doesn't remember Kopaka's name
LEAVE THIS PLACE HEATHEN

>implying he wasn't talking about Matoro

Nuvaplebs out.

You know they had to change the names of the little guys because the Maori national culture foundation or somesuch thing sued them for using their words for toys. They're now called matoran and I don't remember what they were called before

Wasn't it stated somewhere that the interludes between each adventures could last hundred of years, and that most characters in the series are thousand of years old?

Their bodies have no relation to the masks, the "resurrected through their masks" is only shit they made up for the movies but has no bearing in the rest of the canon. The main writer of the books and comics only came out years after the line's ended and revealed the characters are just kinda built in some machine or factory and brought to life, somehow.
As for the animals, those are made by Makuta dumping viruses into pots of Energized Protodermis and out pop birds and lizards and tigers with tank treads for legs.

Tohunga?

Matoro was never cool. Even Nuju was better.

Don't be lava bones, anons.

Irregular reminder that the G1 Bonkles setting isn't a thing to be taken at face value.
Instead, it should be considered a mishmash of ideas to cut into pieces and use only those pieces that suit your plans the most.
Just like LEGO in general.

Yes, that. All I could remember was that is was something that rhymed with turaga

>tfw the only toys from my childhood I've kept is my Bionicle collection
Bless my past self for refusing to allow my mother to give those away. I still love them.

Pic related will always be my fav, and it's the only one that is in an easy to access place as well (my closet, in contrast to the others which are stuffed in a box somewhere)

So. why do they have emotions? why do they need to eat? aren't human weaknesses rather uneffective for a machine solving a purpose?

Because nobody at LEGO could into settings, that's why.

>Veeky Forums keeps saying that Bionicle is the true deepest lore of all settings.
It's not.

The time-scales are messed up. Almost all characters are 100,000 years old to begin with. Takua is canonically the oldest Matoran, at just over 100,000 years old.
All of the present-day plot from 2001 to 2008 takes place within the span of one year. But the 2004-2005 flashbacks happened 1000 years in the past and encompassed only a couple months at most. If you look at the official timeline, there's several thousand year gaps where nothing significant happens.
It's even more wack when dealing with organic characters. The planet Spherus Magna blew up 100,000 years ago, but a lot of the survivors are still alive. Gresh was born before the planet split apart, but in the present day he's still treated as a kid.

It's the "bio" part of the title. They're like cells, living parts of a living organism. It's not for nothing that the series regularly emphasizes values like harmony and cooperation. They were made with some measure of free will, and it's through exercizing that they can accomplish their destiny or whatever.

The in-story justification is that the Great Beings, their creators, were crazy. Their solution for their planet exploding was building a giant robot the size of a smaller planet, which blew up. So they built a bigger one, this one as tall as Earth, filled it with island, cities, ecosystems and multiple races of artificial beings, then sent this giant robot into space to come back 100,000 years later to glue the exploded bits of their planet together.

But this was only explained later. Bionicle didn't have a set lore or backstory other than that they were secretly living in/on a giant robot. That was the basic outline, and there was a massive universe bible where the writers brainstormed ideas. The story started out as one thing, then gradually evolved into another and they just kept expanding it until the lore became the mess it is now. The first few years were mystical fantasy adventures where nothing required justification. Then it became action-oriented science-fantasy where everything had to have some bullshit explanation.

Plenty of people in the deep setting thread believed otherwise. I just want them to post in this thread.

>keeping your sets assembled
>not disassembling everything and stuffing it into a bin to poach parts for your MoCs
Brutaka's frame does make a pretty good base though

THE MASK IS MINE
*epic slowmo jump*

The lighting makes it look like it's made of that knockoff model plastic.

youtube.com/watch?v=bXmwQwHkqMs

There are some disassembled ones, but I'm too much of a filthy casual to get too daring with building original ones.
I did fancy up my Brutaka on several occasions back then, though

Bionicle's lore is deep for a toy line. Lego never attempted something like it before and probably never will. The reboot sure as heck didn't even try. Even the original series wasn't a well built-up or well thought-out universe, but the fact that they wrote all this stuff for the backstory of a toy series is what makes it special. The writers, while not always competent, were dedicated as fuck and had complete faith in their vision.
Apart from that, the most unique thing about the lore is how gradually it was revealed. Most older fans who lost interest early on probably have no idea about the larger story because all of that came much later. There were hints at a bigger lore since the beginning, but these were only elaborated on years later. One of the main themes of the story was that nothing is as it seems. So basically not only did every successive year expand the lore to increasingly greater degrees, they also constantly shook up the status quo.
The original backstory was revealed to be a lie, some of the villains turned out to have been good guys all along, the island the people called their home wasn't their home after all, the wise elders were secretive fucks, and it turned out the heroes weren't almighty gods, they were living safety measures who were denied the chance to lead personal lives. The audience learned all this stuff along with the in-universe characters. We were seeing their world through their eyes, so at the beginning we were just as ignorant or misled as they were. And that's pretty impressive for a Lego toy.

it still amazes me that they played that shit from the beginning

It's missing these.
youtube.com/watch?v=RQpobHVoEV8
youtube.com/watch?v=CgKiI052vt4

>buying legos to never build anything original out of it
what's even the point

You watched the Lego movie. Some people are the dad.

Kickbot always looked stupid to me, the reverse torse made him look hunched over.

I bought them because I wanted to play with the ones in the box art.

I'm more of a lorefag, so I stopped giving a damn about building original shit after a while. I like preserving the figs as representations of the characters and because I could never categorize the parts so they kept getting lost. Also, a lot of the joints are so brittle, taking them apart would destroy them.

>Also, a lot of the joints are so brittle, taking them apart would destroy them
I remember a time the joint parts could endure all kinds of abuse. I think it was around the barraka era they all turned to shit

Mfw having heaps of different generations to put together into a god structure bionicle

What 12 year old lorefag doesn't want to show his fandom by making a bunch of shitty new transformations and OC donut steels to act out retarded spin off stories with? They practically begging you to with the protodermis and hordika venom plotlines.

BEST WORST MOVIE

>Bohroks aren't his favourite

Lego royally fucked up their plastic around that time. I took pic related out of years of storage, and as awaited, the lime joints are cracked all over the place and his limbs are loose. They may as well be made out of crayons.

YOU WERE ALMOST MAKUTABONES

WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN HERE ALONE?

We're supposed to be at the Kohlii match?

There's so much from that movie that's just fried into my head. It was bad but I loved it. I always thought it was weird how the matoran had abs, though.

>tfw when I thought the bohrok were super cool but was too much of a poorfag to get anything beyond a couple toa the entire first arc
I only ever even got anything during the Metru arc because I shoplifted them

>abs
Hali is best musclematoran

I, for one, always liked Rahkshi more.
youtube.com/watch?v=eN2v0gNu19Q

This post explains the sense of scale and intrigue well. I'm sure there are some good story writing and product planning lessons one can extract from the Bionicle franchise for both individuals and coorporations.

It's not just the toys, either. There was a comics line that ran for almost their entire run, a set of novels that did the same, a shitton of web serials that talked about what the characters were doing before and after their arcs.

I started to sit down and summarize the story arcs, but realized nobody cared. There's also a FUCK TON of backstory for each character, it's absurd.

Seriously, tons of lore in Bionicle if you like reading.

Vahki are master race
youtube.com/watch?v=JGV5GZ2ZKzU

It's already fucking done on Biosector.
It's better to see all the horror in a wiki form.

Why wouldn't they have emotions? Just because they're mistly synthetic doesn't mean emotions are pointless, so they have them for the same reason we have them.

True. What's also admirable is how they hyped up characters like Mata Nui and Makuta through years of secrecy and myth. Most toy franchises would just straight-up release a figure of the bad guy for immediate profit. Whereas Bionicle kept Makuta a mystery for three years and Mata Nui for eight, all the while setting up the world through the Matoran's fictional folk iconography, their beliefs and rituals instead of plainly spelling it out for you. They were selling a world and story as well as a toy product.

You're misunderstanding the initial question's context; it's the context of purpose-built machines doing functions inside of a fuckhuge robot, not the context of being mechanical.
Anyway, that's one more proof that bonkles are a mismatched mess of a setting.
Should've kept every arc as its own setting instead, without connecting everything.

The answer was "it's because they have souls"
No really the creator was very christian and openly said he wanted to build off christian themes

>the creator
You're speaking of Farshtey, ain't you?

>tfw writing some shitty grade school paragraph assignment about my favorite things
>Talk about Bionicle
>Say my favorite is the brown kickbot, Potato
Wish I could find that dumbass thing.

>Should've kept every arc as its own setting instead, without connecting everything.
But most arcs and settings were deliberately meant to connect and build up to the big reveal. The problem was that along the way they kept adding so much stuff and changing so many ideas, not to mention members of the production staff also changed midway through, that the story got disjointed by the end.
Really, Bionicle would work much better if you ignored the whole deal about Spherus Magna and the Matoran being meant to be unfeeling robots, and kept the Great Beings mysterious instead of revealing what they are.

>He has never tried making his own rahi beasts
what is wrong with you.

>99% of tiles has gone missing over the years
>all figures long since disassemlbed by siblings
>only got into tabletop in my late teens
>tfw never got to run a mech game where players could physically built their own robots and disassemble beaten foes for loot

I know there's a virtual building tool for pc, but that's shit. 3D software is to cumbersome to just throw players at it.

Literally the only kit I had break several joints

"You have more rocks in your head than a Po-Matoran," is one of those insults that sounds ridiculous yet somehow deeply hurtful.

Lucky you I guess. Toa Hahli and Lesovikk from the same wave, and all the sets released between '08 and '10 are suicidal. Every single joint from every single set just splits.

...

>tyranids before i knew about 40k
i fucking love these guys and their lore. do those 40k rpgs that adapt the bionicle verse convert tyranid rules for them too? (hivemind, etc?)

>Matoro was never cool
MATORO DIED FOR YOUR SINS!

Go play Exalted, then read all the lore about Autochthon and Alchemical Exalted. It's literally just that.

Yeah but was he real?

How I wish you could punch someone over the internet right now.

>White toa is best toa

Who was that? Cause the only christian I know of to have had a hand in Bonkle is a person named Christian Faber. And as far as I know, Lego never allowed religious themes, which is why the concept of an afterlife was only briefly alluded to.

Man, that's some 1984 shit right there

YO

YO

PIRAKA

youtube.com/watch?v=K1CTPC02n0c

People joke around but the piraka were nothing to fuck with. They were insane and schemed to kill each other daily

>Bohrok are Tyranids
Not necessarily. They were all about exterminating life, rather than "recycling" it. If anything, Bohrok are like Roley Poley Necrons.

Visorak are a much closer comparison to Tyranids, with Roodaka being a Norn Queen while Sidorak served as second in command, the Swarmlord.

Also, The Piraka's affinity for wacky technology they do not understand really reminds me of orks. So do their hunched postures with their gigantic jaws.

>You will never go on a great journey to reclaim an ancient mask, eventually evolving from a simple matoran to a mighty Toa warrior
>You will never experience a consummate feeling of friendship and solidarity with your Toa brothers and sisters
Why even fucking live?

No shit? Can I get a link, please?

THE GANG IS ON THE LOOSE, NOTHING YOU CAN DO!

I remember calling the hotline as a kid and listening to the different Piraka's abilities and stuff.

God damn, that's good nostalgia

>play Exalted
Never actually do this

The Mata Nui "bionicles" are mostly synthetic lifeforms built out of a combination of organic tissue and mechanical parts, I don't remember if they have to eat but they don't reproduce.
The "bionicles" from Bara Magna (the last 2 toy lines) are organic lifeforms like you and me who eat, breathe, and fuck. (yes, it's canon that glatorians fuck, although Greg F referred to it as "biological reproduction" for the 9 year olds) However it's common for them to have mechanical implants and prosthetics and due to Bara Magna being a mad max hellhole they're pretty much always wearing full body armor, hence why they happen to look like robots too.