It’s 2014, and I hear some good news: the Lego Bionicle action figure line, which he cherished throughout his elementary school years, was being brought out of retirement. Even though the line had ended four years before, this kid still had his old Bionicle collection, and he still MOCed with the pieces, even though his supply was limited. Then the images are revealed, and they’re…pretty decent. Sure, the figures use CCBS, thereby making them feel different from the classic Bionicle, but the designs were pretty cool, and they even retained some aspects of their 2001 counterparts. It was enough to please anyone who had grown up with the original line.
Of course, when you’re a high school freshman, you’re not exactly rolling in dough, so I was only ever able to get my hands on Tahu. Part of the problem was that, by that point, lines like Ninjago, Hero Factory, and Chima had filled in the gap that Bionicle had previously left, so to have Bionicle back while those themes were still around was…overwhelming? No, that doesn’t feel like the right word. But it still felt different, to have the situation be that way.
And what didn’t help was that the new Bionicle wasn’t connected to the original line. Back when the original line was still going, I had gotten accustomed to seeing new versions of the Toa every year, and a new set of bad guys for them to fight as part of the package. So to see another set of six Toa, in new forms, felt like the norm. At first, I thought that this was a continuation of G1. But, alas, that turned out not to be the case. This Okoto island wasn’t part of the Matoran Universe, or Spherus Magna, or any of the worlds from G1. This new line was a complete reboot. It was disappointing at the time, but in hindsight, I can understand this decision. Since G1’s lore got rather complicated near the end of its run, it would’ve been hard to draw in new fans, especially kids of the 2010s that hadn’t heard of Bionicle before.
And yeah, the theme itself got pretty lackluster pretty quickly. The villains we got that summer were…alright, but they were no Piraka, or Rahkshi, or Barraki, or Makuta, or even Skrall. It just felt so generic. And then the 2016 Toa came around, and those may have been the least interesting designs from any Bionicle year. This is kind of a nitpicky point, but the fact that Lewa’s weapons were held to his hands using blue pegs…
That was a pretty awful design choice, in my opinion. I didn’t need to buy the set to know that those weapons would just flop around when I tried to move his arms!
Not to mention, the fact that Lego tried to merge the gritty, realistic asthetic of G1 with the smooth, simpler style of G2, and it didn’t mesh very well. And, like I said, the designs just weren’t very interesting.
Then we get to the villains, in the form of Umarak and the Elemental Beasts. Those were just…ugh. It’s easy to see why the line ended so quickly after this wave. If the lack of marketing didn’t keep consumers away from these figures, the mediocrity of the sets might’ve.
I’ve seen people on these boards discuss what the cause of G2’s failure was, and the general consensus is because Lego didn’t market G2 very well. They knew that the G1 fans held the original theme in a very high regard, so they assumed that they would be delighted to see it return in a new form, and that they would be the source of positive word of mouth. But…that didn’t work out. Partially because the G1 fans hated G2. They hated the dumbed-down story, they hated the mediocre set designs, and they (unfairly, if you ask me) hated the usage of CCBS. It was as if they couldn’t find anything good about G2. But there were redeeming qualities to it. The fact that the CCBS joints didn’t break was a positive in and of itself. Almost every G1 set that I collected from the 2007-2010 time period had pieces that ended up breaking (or at least cracking). And Lego clearly listened to the complaints about their quality control issues, so they improved it with CCBS.
Also, to be frank, I’m grateful Bionicle even got a second chance at all. I’ve witnessed a lot of themes come and go over the years. Exo-Force, Knights’ Kingdom, Nexo Knights, Chima, Monster Fighters, Pharaoh’s Quest, Mars Mission, Castle, Kingdoms, Space Police, Indiana Jones, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Dino Attack…I could spend all day talking about the different themes I’ve seen. But a good deal of them were cancelled and never revived again. Sure, there was the whole Rebooted situation with Ninjago, but that was, like, directly after the theme’s initial cancellation. Bionicle was brought back from the dead YEARS after it was canned. I imagine it took a lot to convince Lego to do that.
And of course, the Bionicle fandom is still active. It has its toxicity, sure, but at its core, it’s full of people that still care for a theme that ended ten years ago. It never stopped giving, and people are pining to have it back. They’ve even gone so far as to make Lego Ideas sets that showcased their love of the theme. The most famous example was Sokoda’s set that actually managed to make it to 10,000 supporters…and then get rejected by Lego. 
I was one of the many Bionicle fans that was disappointed by this. But there are a good deal of other Bionicle projects out there. Just today, I found one that was pretty cool:
If this was made into a set, I would most likely buy it. I love how it has little figures of each Toa Mata, and each Toa Kaita, and even Takua and the Manas crabs. And the big ball of shadow that is Makuta. If Bionicle were a System theme, then surely there would’ve been a set like this back in 2001.
But what most people seem to want is an actual Bionicle constraction theme back. And yeah, it would be nice if constraction did come back in some way. But, as people on these boards have pointed out, G2’s failure proved that constraction won’t do well in this day and age, where Ninjago, Star Wars, and superheroes are dominating the Lego market.
And there’s something else that G2 has proven, at least for me. It’s that, as much as we all want the OG Bionicle back, it won’t be possible to recapture what made it so special. I believed that G2 would contain the same lightning-in-a-bottle that G1 provided, but I turned out to be wrong. Again, you can blame whatever you want-bad marketing, dumbed-down story, whatever. I’m sure we’re all hoping that G3 (if it ever comes around) can fix these problems. But G3 still won’t be able to be a beat-for-beat redo of G1, or a continuation of it. So we shouldn’t expect it to be. Instead, it’ll be something completely new. And we should accept it for what it is, on its own merits, rather than wishing it’s a retread/sequel to G1.
TLDR: It may not have been fun to see G2 have all the problems that it had, or see it fail, but from that experience, we can learn not to set our expectations too high, and to be more open-minded about whatever G3 might have in store.