{Zaxvo}Well said Greg. Well said. I'm not really sure where I stand in the debate. I enjoyed the Mata Nui saga, but when we moved to Metru Nui, I enjoyed that even more. ToM raised a good point about the environments--they set us up, and then we never heard about them again. Wrinkeldon X's also raised a good point about the tone/diction used, and I agree with that too.
However, in the end, I'm enjoyed BIONICLE and I enjoyed how it ended. I enjoyed where it went, and I enjoyed where it came from...I never really disliked something. Yes it could have been better (what can't?) but it was an amazing ride the way it happened.
Thank you Greg.
Wow. We have a lot in common. I, too, feel exactly that way. If I just didn't read every single post and just zipped down to the bottom, you would have ended up with exactly the same message.
See, I was just as hooked by 2001 as you guys were. But I found writing on Mata Nui to be very confining, because none of the answers to any of the mysteries were there. So if we had stayed there, we would still be telling the "Toa fight something, go underground, defeat it, and basically learn nothing. Rinse and repeat" story in 2009.
What I probably would have changed is 2005. In retrospect, I would have had 2004 be maybe half a year, dropped '05, and then gone right to the '06 story. We stayed on Metru Nui in 2005 largely because a lot of time and expense had gone into designing Metru Nui and it seemed wasteful to abandon it after just one year. But the '04 story was designed to leave it after one year, which is why '05 was so confusing in terms of continuity.
Could the transition from 2003 to 2004 been handled differently/better? Sure, if this were JUST a story. But I had Metru Nui sets coming out in January that I had to promote. I didn't have time to do, "Ongoing tension between the Toa Nuva and Turaga and the truth comes out in dribs and drabs" -- I had to promote the new sets, and the new sets were from the flashback story, so it had to start abruptly in January, 2004.
A LOT of the criticisms I see on here of the story are dead on the money -- but they miss the point that the story had to promote toy sales. So the option to do a lot of the things you guys suggest simply did not exist. It wasn't a case of the story team saying, "Should we approach it this way or that way? How can we build up to this slowly?" We had toys to sell in January and July, and story had to mold itself to fit that. If you are looking at it as story and nothing else, it is easy to find fault. But it was never story by itself, guys, it was part of the overall marketing plan. So if you want to rip current story for some of these things, go right ahead, because now it is a story on its own -- but it never was before, and so some criticisms of it are just off-base without taking the context of the work into account.
Wow. We have a lot in common. I, too, feel exactly that way. If I just didn't read every single post and just zipped down to the bottom, you would have ended up with exactly the same message.
What I probably would have changed is 2005. In retrospect, I would have had 2004 be maybe half a year, dropped '05, and then gone right to the '06 story. We stayed on Metru Nui in 2005 largely because a lot of time and expense had gone into designing Metru Nui and it seemed wasteful to abandon it after just one year. But the '04 story was designed to leave it after one year, which is why '05 was so confusing in terms of continuity.
Could the transition from 2003 to 2004 been handled differently/better? Sure, if this were JUST a story. But I had Metru Nui sets coming out in January that I had to promote. I didn't have time to do, "Ongoing tension between the Toa Nuva and Turaga and the truth comes out in dribs and drabs" -- I had to promote the new sets, and the new sets were from the flashback story, so it had to start abruptly in January, 2004.
A LOT of the criticisms I see on here of the story are dead on the money -- but they miss the point that the story had to promote toy sales. So the option to do a lot of the things you guys suggest simply did not exist. It wasn't a case of the story team saying, "Should we approach it this way or that way? How can we build up to this slowly?" We had toys to sell in January and July, and story had to mold itself to fit that. If you are looking at it as story and nothing else, it is easy to find fault. But it was never story by itself, guys, it was part of the overall marketing plan. So if you want to rip current story for some of these things, go right ahead, because now it is a story on its own -- but it never was before, and so some criticisms of it are just off-base without taking the context of the work into account.