What made BIONICLE Generation 2 Fail? (I say fail because it was essentially canceled, since they had another year planned as far as I can tell but still discontinued it.) Well first we should look at BIONICLE Generation 1 for answers. What made BIONICLE so successful can be show in just these 3 things:
1: Marketing
2: General aesthetics
3: Story and Tropes
1:Marketing
When did BIONICLE come out? Well December 2000 if your in pretty much everywhere but North America, and “Mid-2001” for NA. What was going on at the time? The internet was growing day by day. So what did Bionicle do? It CAPITALIZED this! (Really look at this list: BIONICLEsector01) They had more games than you could shake a stick at! Which in a world where the internet was a fairly new place was incredible. This led to some brand recognition for BIONICLE and not just Lego. Compare the too 2015-2016 where its merely met with “Meh” this is because EVERYONE has flash games these days. Along with that Gen/1 Had Cool realistic BATTLE SCENES! depicting epic fights between Incredible Heroes and Diabolical Villains! The Bionicle team thought up brilliant, novel ideas that were executed awesomely! 2001:Robots Fighting animals to save the people they did not know! 2004: Warriors chosen from the common people fight against the corruption of the leader of the people who is in truth their greatest enemy! 2005: after the heroes rescue many of the people from the city they are forced to return and find it overrun with giant spiders and the heroes are transformed into monsters! EVERY year they came up with something novel that was executed exquisitely!
2:General Aesthetics
This category is probably one of the better aspects of Gen/2 as Jangbricks pointed out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB0BZdyS8hE) the Gen/2 sets have more pieces however in My opinion there is still one thing that Gen/1 has over Gen/2 in this category… Piece design. Here in Gen/2 yes we got a new add on each year (for the 2 years ;_
which were most definitely nice pieces however aside from the masks these were the only pieces that had any real texture to them. Compare that to Gen/1 were everything was textured, everything was detailed. This made them (to me and the people I’ve seen and talked too) look much more realistic and lifelike. (also Gen/1 had vehicles…)
3:Story and Tropes
Where to begin with this… this is by far the area were Gen/1 and 2 split the most. With Gen/1 (as I pointed out earlier) they used truly novel ideas and thought of match ups of heroes and enemies that really made BIONICLE stand out. Whereas Gen/2 has heroes fighting… spiders… and skeletons… although Umarak was a nice reference (dark hunters.) But thats not all the BIONICLE had, It also had a A dark and realistic story I’ll use the illustration of… the MARVEL MCU. What is it geared towards? 8 year olds? 12 year olds? NO it is geared for adult audiences and then they take out parts until parents will let their kids go and see the movie with them this means an extremely resilient fan-base. You have the people with the money (adults) and the people who will have the money (kids.) So what does this say about BIONICLE? Well Gen/1 had the same relative Idea. “Ok how do we make it so that we get all groups to want this toy? We cant make it so that its completely childish or else the kids will outgrow it and the parents wont touch it anyway.” Now Gen/2 what did they do? They Cartoonized it. (though this was a similar problem for the movies in gen/1) Along with that Gen/1 was a hail mary. Lego put as much as they could afford into it and it payed off. Gen/2? (nope just another pretty much ninjago spinoff)
So what could Gen/2 have done better? I think it should have gone for older audiences and I think that if done right Bionicle Gen/2 could have been the first ever Lego theme designed for adults. This is an idea that I’ve been juggling for a while and I still think that Lego NEEDS to do this. The last Bionicle wave was 6 years ago (excluding gen 2) and it started 15 years ago. With a decent fan-base still following.
But that’s just my opinion, whats yours?