I have a spare of everything for G2 except the twotoa (which I didn’t personally care for) and Umarak’s Shadow Spawn. Feels good.
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I just built both Vahki combiners. I don’t have all the intended component sets, so I used these guys for both (besides color and weapons, the Vahki are identical clones anyways, so it doesn’t make a big difference).
Let’s take a look at Kranua first!
This thing is… odd. The proportions are wack, with huge legs and a wide torso against tiny arms and head.
Speaking of the legs, their construction is pretty interesting! With a little refinement, this could work well for a large figure.
The arms aren’t good. They’re way too short and 2 Mata arms stuck together like that just doesn’t look great.
These were the leftovers.
Now, let’s look at Kraahu!
This one’s certainly better. It’s a big, 6-legged Vahki.
The 6 legs lead to a lot of poseability.
I found the torso construction pretty interesting. The gears serve no purpose, they’re probably just there to fill out the gaps a little.
Leftovers:
Overall, these are not too fantastic. Kranua is pretty bad, and while Kraahu is definitely superior, it’s not a very worthwhile build either. I think you’ll have more fun with 3 seperate Vahki!
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I honestly kind of enjoyed kraahu when I built it, and Id probably consider building one in a full uniform color/staff/leg match if I had the parts. Definitley agree with you on kranua though, the legs were pretty cool, but the figure as a whole was pretty bad.
also anybody else notice how their names are just tahu and onua, but the first letter is replaced with “kra-” instead?
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At least phonetically, the Toa Metru combos Kraawa and Krahli match Lewa and Gali too
Weird
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And Krahka is like Kopaka
Apparently there was also a 2004 promotional set called Kraatu too but it wasn’t a combination model
Neat
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Here’s something I noticed while building Kranua. While they don’t do it (luckily), the model has the perfect opportunity to make an eternal connection that can’t be disassembled anymore.
This is part of the torso. The gray part goes onto the blue hip and locks in with the 2L axle.
Now, if you were to insert a 3L (or shorter) axle in there…
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SMH my head they did it for exo-force and the theme died a year later. We could have had Bionicle end in 2005 and gotten HF 4 years early.
Imagine HF with lime joints. It couldve been awesome.
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Out of all Bionicle combiners, the Swamp Stalker from 2008 is one I see getting almost no attention online. I didn’t even know it existed until very recently. It’s built from the three Mistika Makuta, is it any good?
The finished model definitely looks like a pretty heavily armored reptilian Rahi. It’s got articulation in the legs and tail.
My favorite part is the head, I like how the shield piece is used. Unfortunately the head is fixed, but the jaw can open and close.
Bitil’s head is used on the underside.
Quite a lot of parts go unused:
I can see why nobody talks about this thing, it’s just not much. There’s some interesting building techniques and it’s always nice to get more Rahi, but this one doesn’t really hit the sweet spot.
Is it interesting? Sure. But is it worth risking some broken sockets to build it? Nah…
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At the very least, I massively appreciate this unique parts usage; that’s one of the things that I look for in a combiner model.
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Shame they couldn’t manage more parts. Looks like it would’ve been possible to make another set of legs even.
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Built the Kabaya Rahkshi combiners last year and just now got around to writing this short review of one of them:
This first one is known on BS01 as the Fighting Type Rahkshi, and it’s probably the better one out of the two in terms of its form. The legs are made from Rahkshi back assemblies, and it’s got a double-length staff. The left hand uses an interesting technique with a Rahkshi lower torso secured in such a way that it’s not technically connected but won’t fall out. Here it is from the back:
The main issue with this model is the legs; 22 years of aging and loosening ball joints has not been kind to these parts, so if you don’t sort of prop the legs up on themselves, the poor guy collapses forward and faceplants. All in all, I’d call this model a 7/10; it’s pretty cool-looking, dynamic, and uses the parts well, but does tend to collapse if you don’t pose the legs properly.
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Time to build the Manutri! An underwater penguin Rahi that was weaponized by Karzahni, this model can be made with Nuparu, Matoro, Carapar and Mantax.
Disassembling the component sets leaves you with an impressively large selection of parts. Surely they’ll be put to good use, right?
Uhhhh…
There’s a vague penguin resemblance, I guess…
This thing is a mess. The build is a jumbled chaos of parts and it’s quite fragile in some places like the head.
There’s not much in the way of poseability, and the high Cordak blaster attachment gives it some balancing issues.
I like how these claws are used to form a beak. But that’s the only positive thing I have to say about the Manutri, unfortunately.
The leftovers:
Building the Manutri has given me more appreciation for the Swamp Stalker. That was a decent enough model on its own, I was mainly disappointed by how it didn’t make good use of the available parts. The Manutri does the same thing, but the resulting model is just plain bad if you ask me…
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Holy moly, that’s a lot of unused parts. Could probably build another model with all those…
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