I wasn’t too sure how popular/unpopular this opinion was, so I tried to be discreet.
Anyway, today’s opinions:
The G2 Masters have a similar problem as the Mistika Toa, namely the overuse of metallic parts.
IMHO, they should have used fewer silver/gun-metal parts on them (Especially Gali and Pohatu), along with the gold on Tahu, Onua, and Kopaka.
Gali in both of her G2 forms should’ve remained regular (“Mata”) blue with trans dark blue.
TBF, I love the color of dark azure in general, but I think they should’ve stuck to her original two colors. (the ones mentioned above)
Since it was a brand new color in CCBS, they couldn’t make more parts in that color for budgetary and manufacturing reasons.
However, we already had a bunch of CCBS shells in regular blue years before Gen2 arrived, so I think it would have been a better move to rely on those.
All of the Masters have shells in new colours, not just Gali. If anything she may have cost less than some of the others; Lewa, Onua and Pohatu all received multiple recolours rather than the single one Gali got.
You’re correct! For some reason, I thought Tahu and Onua were exceptions because I misremembered how many red, black & purple parts we had gotten from previous CCBS sets.
Thank you for correcting me!
New Opinion:
I genuinely like mini dolls from the Friends and Disney sets.
I think they’re cute and even have some features that, design-wise/aesthetically, are more pleasing to the average eye than the regular minifigures. (E.g, Waist articulation)
It was a better decision for Vakama to turn evil than Matau. I don’t exactly follow Greg and others’ reasoning for why they’d prefer if Matau turned evil.
Besides, had Vakama not turned evil, Time Trap wouldn’t have hit as hard as it did.
Case in point, this line:
Makuta looked into Vakama’s eyes. They were the eyes of a being who had been driven beyond madness, only to return. They had looked upon a darkness as deep as any Makuta had known, and yet somehow turned back to the light. They were not the eyes of a being who was bluffing.
I think the fire knight mech and guardian dragon from ninjago are pretty lazy (like me). They are 90% recycled parts. The five below has $5 or less botanical sets with more piece variety than a $150 dragon from lego which blows my mind.
Actually, I agree with you here. All of Ninjago’s sets feel worse than the 2011-2013 sets. They lack visible gimmicks/play functions in favor of static details, often lack secondary joints (ratcheted/ball-jointed knees/elbows), and barely resemble anything ninja-related (you could slap half of the mechs in any anime and they’d look fine).
Lego really needs to bring back knees and elbows in mechs, it’s not like they’re “too complicated” for 12-year-olds; they’re usually around $50-60 at retail anyway so it’s not as though too many kids are buying them for themselves if they’re as video game addicted as Lego claims.
As Ninjago has gone on, the series has kinda lost most of the Ninja theming. The main heroes are dressed like Ninja but barely do anything Ninja-related, from what I’ve seen of the sets (I will admit I haven’t really payed much attention to the show these days) they seem more like power rangers or superheroes
But this is kind of off topic anyway, so here’s an unpopular opinion for you: There are way too many Lego mech sets these days
The AT-ST would like to have a word with you. Star Wars needs more mechs. The Nute Gunray mech, the Yoda mech, the Jabba mech…the possibilities are literally endless.
This is about right. Part of it may be they don’t want to offend Japan or somethin like the Maori with Bionicle, though Ninjago is actually really popular in Japan so idk if that would actually happen. Another aspect may just be there’s only so many “ninja” things they can do, like sneaking around, doing acrobatics, etc., and they’ve already done so much of those things that Lego feels they gotta start broadening the scope of Ninjago.
I suppose the only real way to get back to the ninja feeling of the first few years is to start inserting more Asian culture than just the shape of building roofs… which would be rad, but also risky. Adapting some classical myth to Ninjago would be really cool because we’d be exposed in the west to more eastern culture, but if the writers do it poorly (which, unfortunately, happens to so many adaptations these days) it ends up offending both east and west.
Anyways, my hot take is that Lego should stop making sets as detailed. That is, go back to making absurdly shaped oddball sets like they did in the 2000s, instead of making sets that receive only the compliment of “wow look at all the detail on that.” Lego kinda plays it too safe I guess… no more crazy stuff like Exo-Force or Space Police.
The AT-ST is a walker, not a mech. Walkers are non-humanoid, but mecha are generally humanoid in design. That’s why Gundam doesn’t feature analogues to the AT-AT or AT-RT, and instead has human-like battle armor scaled up to beyond the size of Transformers.
According to what? The word mech/mecha is just short for mechnical or mechanized. It’s true that Japanese designs trend towards humanoid, but the definition has never been that exclusive. Same goes for the West. For example, both Battletech and Armored Core explicitly use the term mech to describe any big pilotable machine in their universes.
Ok, I concede the point. To tell the truth, I don’t know too much about the definition of mecha. I’ve just usually seen it applied to stuff like Gundam, whereas Star Wars calls all legged vehicles “walkers” instead.
Since my previous post was deleted without comment, I’m going to reiterate the point I was making.
LEGO’s insistence on giving every theme a mech line (read: humanoid Nexo Knights-style single-pilot mechs that increase in price at an exponential rate) has got to go. It’s killing interest in the individual themes and it’s become a large amount of what I see at resale shops - nobody wants these sets after they buy them. It’s eventually going to stop selling because LEGO has oversaturated the market with these uninspired clone sets that never improve upon the design or change it up in any meaningful way.
It’s like if Bionicle made every single set the Av-Matoran. They weren’t well-received at launch, they got less and less popular as time went on, and were eventually dropped entirely in favor of the bland CCBS sets beginning in Hero Factory’s second year. One can only hope a similar trend follows the mech line. Either LEGO sticks to only making mechs like toothdominoes makes (or just hires Ransom Fern already) or drops the idea entirely.
