Not that these aren't great, but personally... I don't think they're appropriate for that year's setting, and I think it's important that the characters fit the story they're in, especially with adaptive armor that in theory could make them look like anything. Karda Nui is a very depressing, even kinda gothic setting, like all the life and color's been bled out of it, and I think it's appropriate for the Toa to be affected by that to some degree. Lewa's lime green and Kopaka's white connect to their roots while popping beautifully against the grey underlayer that ties them to the new location. Where they made a mistake was going back to Metru colors in the second half, while giving the bug Makuta brighter Toa-like colors, even yellow. It's completely mixed up. I think just giving Tahu and Gali their old red and blue backed by grey or silver and giving the Makuta dark green and.... maybe reddish brown or dark tan would've made a world of difference.
It really would have went a long way to making things stand out! And while I understand the gothic sort of inspiration, I almost would have rather seen that aesthetic reflected in new part details rather then colors. If there is anything that Bionicle and Gothic design have in common it's greebling! I think Gali's shoulder could have been an excellent example of this in fact, I have a custom bohrok shield that I call my "mosaic" shield, and it in part has a gothic feel to it, I could easily have seen that used on Gali to invoke a similar shape to the shoulder she got, but more inline with the setting of Karda Nui
Even without changing their builds at all, changing the only silver + main color builds to their Mata/Nuva colors + a little silver looks so much better. don’t even mind the Mistika masks all that much, but even just color shifting Gali Mistika from dark blue and silver to medium blue, light blue, and maybe 3 or 4 silver bits (like the Inika limb armor) is a massive upgrade
I despise Grey in Bionicle. A month ago I found a giant bin of my old Bionicle "MOCs" (10 years old me destroying perfectly good sets and smashing them together) and I tried to remake them into a sensible shape. Half of the characters are Grey now.
When i got into bionicle around 1-2 years ago i had onua mistika from when i was a kid and my brother gave me onua mata and until i saw their names i had NO IDEA they were the same charcter, but I gotta say orange pohatu goes hard, idk they tried something new with the dark grey & silver as secondary colours but i guess it didnt turn out that well, or it might be just the darker colour and masks. Ive seen tammy calamity recolour gali and tahu to their mata colours with a new mask and they look amazing imo
0:23 "While new at the time, while novel and having some new peaces, kinda wore out their welcome pretty quickly." The same couldl be said for the ball sockets of 2008. Boy thoe peices definitly wore out quickly (I'm counting cracked as wearing out to make the joke work)
I liked the phantoka color changes, the pop between the grey and the bright secondary color was really inspired. The Problem was the choice of colors for the Mistika ones. If I had it my way I would make Gali the Medium Blue (and change the mask to anything elsse) and Tahu in the OG Red. so they were uniform with the phantoka. Maybe switch Pohatu to yellow or his tan secondary color. I am honeslty still convinced these designs were ment as updates for the toa Mahri/inika team but were switched to the Nuva characters.
The Mistika having an official combo model representing an Order of Mata Nui member (Trinuma) makes me wonder if it could be good to repurpose the Phantoka and Mistika designs as a Toa-like subgroup of the Order
2008 was the year I quit bionicle, don't liked the designs and colors (Tahu, Gali, Onua) only came back years later because I liked the designs of some Hero Factory savage planet sets. I absolutely agree, they would've looked better in their original colors only the masks still looked weird
Masks definitely looked weird for their characters! But the nice part about experiments like this is that we can swap around for whatever custom parts we want!
Same. It doesnt help that Lime joints of the only two sets I got that year (Lewa and Tanma) were incredibly brittle, while the cost of the sets jumped from the previous years. With time, I have come to not like the Phantoka masks as well, cause I saw much better designs done by fans.
I think it would be more fitting if you had titled this “More accurate, fewer parts” as opposed to less. The parts are a countable noun. You should use “fewer” for countable nouns instead of “less”.
I still don’t own any of the Mistika Toa yet, though I wanna changed that soon, my only major critique is Onua lacking a wider frame build, like Pohatu does. The masks, while not what most had hoped they looked like, are really cool masks and I personally can see aspects of the characters’ original in each. Maybe not in terms of design details or direct similarities, but more so in style and vibe. Outside of that, giving Gali a secondary weapon/tool would be one other thing I’d change myself since Onua and Tahu both got some sort of shield
honestly aside from the not looking like the toa nuva what bothered me about the mistika especially were the proportions... tIs it just me who thought the proportions looked totally wonky?
Gali's "adaptive" mask always looked well weird to me, and it's a shame because I think they could have kept some of those stylistic themes while still making it more familial to the original masks.
I completely agree!! I added a couple of the classic traits back to my lightly modified version of Rothanak's noble Kaukau (made for Av-Matoran) I featured it and my other three Av-Matoran builds in a video recently!
i have a problem with studio 2.0 where i cant find some bionicle pieces for an example i cant find the piraka lower leg piece or the G2 unity connector piece, does anyone know how to fix it?
I believe they are in some custom parts packs, search Google for KingSidorak's Sidopak 4, it has a bunch of official pieces and a parts installer built in
2008 made me lose my interest and 2009 dealt the finishing blow. I had the majority of sets released before that and with 08 and 09 i had like maybe 3 each?
