We are in a semi-tribal nature filled world built literally over the remains of a once technologically advanced society. Our protagonist that doesn’t know a thing about her origin is tasked to find why the animal-like machines have gone suddenly aggressive and fight them with elemental weapons and some heavy weapons like the “Fire spitter” and the “Disk launcher”. Later we find that the deity from the elderly leaders of the tribe is in reality a terraformation AI that has been sabotaged by a shadow-themed rogue subordinate that is responsible for infecting the animal-like machines and plans to awake killer robots designed to clean all life on the surface.
Seriously, I’m surprised this isn’t discussed enough. When I search for Bionicle inspiration on Horizon all I find is great machine MOCS and only a single tweet mentioning the resemblance of the story with Bionicle and Princess Mononoke. Moreover, the developers of the oncoming Bionicle Masks of Power cited Horizon as one of their inspirations.
But, is it a ripoff? No it’s not, but the similarities are too many to be entirely a product of chance, obviously the developers of Horizon were inspired by Bionicle’s lore, though I haven’t found any mention at all in any gaming page or wherever.
Personally, I think you could replace Sawtooths for Muakas, Shellwalkers for Manas, Snapmaws for Tarakavas and so on and we would have a third fanmade MNOG.
I mean the stuff that you mentioned from Horizon and by extension Bionicle are hardly unique ideas.
Also might want to add some spoiler tags in here cus you just revealed a lot of the really big late game plot points. I just finished my first playthrough of this game like a week ago so if i’d read this then I would have been beyond annoyed.
I know the game has been out for a few years now but the second one coming out soon will bring in new players, so might want to take that into consideration.
I’ve never played Horizon, so I wasn’t aware of any of the similarities.
I suspect some of your points could be oversimplified for emphasis, and I’d have to play the game myself to really decide. But surface-level, I think the similarities are sort of neat.
Given Horizon’s widespread popularity, it gives me some sense of retroactive vindication that Bionicle’s story and success weren’t a fluke. There is stuff here that resonates powerfully on a conceptual level.
On their own, I would agree, but the culmination of all of them in one game is too good to be a coincidence. What really pushes it over the edge for me is the cleaning robots. It could just be deceptive word usage on Vidal’s part though. From what I have read here, it’s basically 01-02.
They arn’t like the Bohrok in any way other than they remove biomass though.
They arn’t cleaning robots they are an army of self replicating killing machines that use biomass as fuel. All bio mass, they consume it and then use it to power themselves and create more of them. Evntually to the point that the literally consumed everything making the planet sterile and then shut down due to lack of fuel.
On the surface there are of course similarities but again it’s an idea that has been done before and many times before Bionicle was a thing.
There are in truth more similarities to Princess Mononoke than there are to Bionicle but I woulden’t say that it was a ripoff of that film either.
I’m on the same pages as Festive-Alacus, saying that this rather means that Bionicle isn’t that unique. Your list contains:
Semi-tribal world
Apocalypse
Robot Animals
Protagonist with amnesia
“Elemental” weapons
AI god
Terraforming
Dark lord who wants to destroy the world.
1: Tribal means only that there are groups of people with clothes and buildings with similar design to ancient tribes/covilizations (aztecs, native americans, huns, africans, cavemen, etc). Why do you think they used Bionicle as a middle man for this concept?
2: Apocalypse is a very popular and generic concept. Bionicle wasn’t the first one tó use it.
3: Robot animals. Again, they’ve been done before, and they aren’t that hard to make up either. “Imagine: there are dinos… but they are robots!!!”
4: Amnesia is one of the most used trope for introducing the Protagonist, because it makes the introduction of the world very easy.
5: For one, elemental weapons aren’t that original either, but also from what i’ve seen, those weapons are as elemental as a Molotov cocktail, while Bionicle uses elemental magic and the weapons aren’t necessary. So they aren’t even similar in this regard.
6-7: I don’t know the story of HZD, so I can’t really comment on these, but there are more options to come up with these ideas other than “it was influenced by Bionicle”
8: Again, a very very very popular trope. Sauron. Shai’tan. Unicron. Every third superhero antagonist.
Also note that these ideas aren’t in a vacuum. What I think happened is that they had a simple idea: " Native americans on robot dinos" and they branched out of it. What about futuristic natives? Then why are they in a less advanced state? - Apocalypse. How do we make the animals enemies? - The Big Bad Guy turned them into bad and controls them. Etc.
HZD was a very good game and was very reminiscent of Bionicle. Maybe the similarities are there because there are not that many franchises with tribal societies living together with robots?
Ok, the “cleaning robots” was a hot take, but it’s actually closer to Bohrok than you suggest. I mean, Hades was a subordinate AI to Gaia made with one purpose, if Gaia’s terraformation went wrong, then Hades would awaken the Faro robots to erase all life on the planet so Gaia can start over again. It’s not exactly like the Bohrok, but they have the same task, to erase all life, but with different motivations.
And, as Racie02 pointed out, “Firespitter” is just too much.
Bionicle did not coin “fire spitter.” It’s just an intuitive name for something that shoots fire. I’m sure there have been dozens of fire spitters in various media and many predating Bionicle.