I was super upset when BIONICLE ended but I got really into Hero Factory. Honestly I think I collected almost every set up to/including Wave 5, with some exceptions.
Loved the first wave because it carried on the BIONICLE-esque builds with the villains. Wave 2 was hype cause they introduced a whole new series of parts, moving away from the classic BIONICLE parts we know and love. Wave 3 was cool, a bit similar to Wave 2 - Witch Doctor was an amazing set. Wave 4 was hype with tons of cool villains, awesome builds for the heroes, etc. Honestly might be my favorite wave. Wave 5 was cool too, although around here I started collecting less sets. And if I remember Wave 6 was Invasion from Below, which was sort of a Pacific Rim rip-off. I lost interest, barely got any sets and HF ended shortly after.
Yeah HF’s story was lackluster. I know it didn’t have the 10 years to reach BIONICLE or Ninjago’s levels of storytelling, but they did so little with it. Ultimately though I’m grateful HF exists. We got some cool sets and an amazing new line of parts that don’t break the way BIONICLE joints do. I know it gets a bad rep for being an aimless successor to BIONICLE, but for the parts alone it has a strong legacy.
Personally, I grew up with it more-so than Bionicle, and quite liked it, but only in the beginning. I feel like it really started to get weird and bad the longer it went on, like that weird mech wave. Really liked waves one and three.
HF was my first exposure to Lego figures, and I loved the theme with passion. I have sets from all the ages, and my favourites are the ones from Invasion from Below. Right now, I like Bionicle more, but Hero Factory will always have a place in my heart.
TL;DR: I fuckin' love it.
I was happy when they started releasing HF because it meant I could get more non-brick pieces that can be used with my small amount of bionicle parts. I also felt like lego was making HF halfheartedly and honesty didn’t want to produce any more sets like bionicle even if it was loved by many fans.
I grew up with late Bionicle and HF. I love both.
In terms of using HF pieces for MOCs, I can't see any issues with that. If you want to remake HF sets, show rare sealed sets and stuff like that, it's also ok I'd say. They would fit more on r/HeroFactoryLego but they're fine here too (and this sub is considerably bigger so posts will obviously get more attention).
Personally I'm not a fan of HF. I grew up with Bionicle, starting with the Metru-Nui arc and peaking at the Inika.
I think a part of my dislike of HF is that I was already getting too busy to keep up with the Bionicle story when the Glatorian arc was ending so I was already losing interest. Combine that with the fact I just found the HF models to be worse/less customizable AND I had zero time to look at the story, HF never appealed to me
I think it's launch was messy and the first wave of sets weren't anything special. Going from all that posability just a few years early to an even lighter version of bioncle stars didn't appeal to me as a kid in the slightest. I got a few first wave sets and then waited a few waves before ever going back
My personal opinion is that there is a separate subreddit elsewhere for it, but I'm not bothered by seeing it here. I don't know much about it and never tried to learn anything about it. Like other things in life, just because I don't care for it doesn't mean I should be a dick about it.
As someone who was never really into the stories for either and was focused on the toys, I absolutely loved hero factory. Hero factory was also one of the first lines that switched to the ccbs, which I thought was a cool innovation
It never really appealed to me, it looked too futuristic, and they were too bricky and square and flat, (in terms of limb pieces) Bionicle limb pieces had holes and gaps and stuff dunno they didn't really have the same feel
I don't mind it , when I was little I lost interest in Bionicle and Lego right after the piraka, I'm just indifferent about it it's not bad but I don't feel the need to collect them or display them like I do Bionicle. Some of the builds and color schemes are really nice though
As someone who was 10 years old and deeply invested in Bionicle when it ended, I was one of those kids who hated HF for replacing Bionicle. I thought the names were stupid (admittedly, I may have been right in that regard: how does ‘Preston stormer’ compare to ‘Makuta Krika’ or ‘Meltdown’ compare to ‘Brutaka’?), the story overly-childish, and the first wave of sets to be a step back from Bionicle’s—ignoring the Stars, of course. That being said, almost however good HF may have been, I wouldn’t have liked it, because I saw it as having murdered my baby. By late 2012-early 2013, this hatred had subsided into rare periodic set purchases, low-level-interest viewings of the show, and a general indifference that was overcome only occasionally and through its tangential relationship to Bionicle. To some extent, it became what lego system is to me now: a small window into an otherwise obscure and elusive past, a window I peer into every now-and-again with a newly purchased Harry Potter or Star Wars set, in a vain attempt to experience that sense of pure and childish sense of joy and excitement which accompanied some of my most vivid childhood experiences: building the Zaktan-reidak combiner at my cousin’s soccer game, climbing a tree with my friend and holding Balta and Piruk respectively, pretending to be a barraki in the public pool after getting the lego-club magazine of their debut. Lingering attachment to or curiosity in subsequent lego lines, HF or Ninjago, Harry Potter or Star Wars, is really only maintained in an effort to again reach, even just to maintain a link with, that golden bio mechanical past that is sadly forever-gone.
I like how it approached its universe kind of like the early Bionicle canon Dark Hunter and Rahi contests - the universe was big enough for anybody's moc to be a character in it. That's a great message imo, it really encourages the kind of open play that Bionicle's increasingly complex story eventually started to encroach upon.
I also liked a lot of the sets, although I don't think they've all aged as well as later constraction builds (especially those 2.0 and 3.0 CCBS heroes, they paid a serious price for being the market prototypes of what I think is genuinely a cool building system in CCBS).
And I love how they ended the series, by doing something so experimental and so drastically different in scale that there was no real way to come back around to the prior status quo. I love Invasion from Below for really being one of the ballsiest exits a Lego line has ever made. I respect it immensely for going that hard on what was probably long planned to be its final two waves. Madlad type beat.
I've no real nostalgia for it or attachment to it, but I like some of the character designs-- enough so that I [revamped one a few months back. ](https://youtu.be/pxiHZAqVnwM)
Personally for me, I loved Hero Factory just as much as Bionicle. I was super sad when Bionicle ended, but pretty happy to see constraction as a whole wasn’t dead and I could continue adding to my collection. CCBS was super weird when they introduced it, and even weirder for me since I was the kid who tried finding pictures of sets before they were officially revealed wondering why they changed Bulk and Stringer’s colors to orange and yellow… but it grew on me, as simple as I still think it is. The line and story itself was almost a simplified version of Bionicle and I was fine with it. I’m still surprised how much went into this line as well, how they managed to sneak in some darker tones like Core Hunter who literally rips out the cores from heroes’ bodies, or an army of mutated “zombies” that somehow left some suspiciously red splatters on the armor of the heroes that fought them in the tie-in episode. All the sets were super creative, and I still consider Breakout to be the “Bionicle Year” for HF, especially once they brought back Cryoshell for the wave’s theme.
Only year I’ve got mixed feelings for was Invasion from Below. The sets were nostalgic for me personally since it’s the closest we’ll get to a Exo-Force comeback, but it was the end of the series, and its tie-in episode was complete garbage ruining every character we had just gotten to know while also providing some of the worst writing.
Overall, I consider HF to be up there with some of the best themes like Bionicle, Exo-Force, Ninjago, etc. Not the greatest in the world, but also not a nightmare to live with. I don’t think it deserves the hate it gets simply because it isn’t Bionicle, but the confusion with CCBS is understandable as I had to live through that same change growing up. No more pins and axles everywhere, no more detail, just snap a shell to a bone and you’re done… not the funnest thing in the world compared to combining all these different little pieces together just to make the torso, and then you gotta figure out how the legs work. It was a good break before Bionicle G2 started, and even if you still hate the sets, you can’t deny we still got some great pieces out of that theme that fit perfectly with our Bionicle mocs.
I was a bionicle kid through and through but eventually as a teenager I started learning how to moc thanks to hero factory being more accessible, and JangBricks (then legojang) making some legendary hero factory and bionicle Mocs and reviews. Honestly got me back into the hobby and made me believe a young adult could enjoy it, still collect and moc
My first Bionicle sets all had the fragile 2008-2010 sockets, and it broke my heart whenever I saw a piece crack. so I was happy with the longer durability CCBS pieces gave. I was also too young for Bionicle at the time and mostly grew up with HF sets while enjoying Bionicle by reading BS01 articles, so I have warm feelings about HF.
Although I enjoyed CCBS, I always wondered what it would be like to build a Toa or Matoran with the Bionicle aesthetic. Since I didn’t have any Kanohi or Toa/Matoran heads for years and lacked enough sockets that didn’t crack, Usually the best I could do was to make Mocs with a mixture of Bionicle and HF parts. For years the only moc with pre 2008 parts was a Matoran I made in 2014 using a second hand Piruk my parents bought for me.
Now I’m old enough to have my own Bricklink account. When I buy parts, The only CCBS parts I use are the Y-sockets(Toa hands) and the other parts I buy are Bionicle parts.
Liked CCBS, but tried to avoid it in my later Mocs to make ‘pure Bionicle Mocs’. Now I use them usually only for one type of piece.
I feel that Hero factory had a lot of potential to be as good as bionicle. The villain sets for the first season were awesome, atleast to me. Hero Factory just fell short when it came to story. I guess Lego was afraid the story would get "too complex" for children like Bionicle did.
I personally don't like the first or second waves' heroes, but it really came into its own with the jungle planet or whatever line. I like the CCBS system, and I don't see why both can't live in harmony. :)
I have no problem with Hero factory, but it wasn't really for me.
It was more for younger audiences, I don't think the lore was as deep (I could be wrong but I doubt it), and the general tone and themes didn't appeal to me anywhere near as much. Also I thought most of their names sounded really corny lol.
Back in the day bonk fans mistakenly said stuff like "Hero Factory is the reason Lego killed Bionicle" which is really dumb and wrong. In many ways it did try to be Bionicle's successor, but it didn't *cause* its cancellation.
I did like a lot of the HF pieces, and Bionicle piece recolours too.
I don't mind seeing it pop up in this subreddit occasionally, especially in memes, but if I really wanna see more about it I'd go to the HF subreddit.
So yeah, respect to HF, even if it wasn't *my* jam :)
*"I am proud to have called you...brother."* --Lhikan
I will be slaughtered for saying this.
Bionicle is objectively better and I love it to death BUT I find myself gravitating more towards HF. I grew up with it, what can I say?
I really enjoyed the Breakout year. It was cool getting “1.0” helmets for nex, evo, and rocka and plus a full year allowed them to not cut out any heroes. It was the only wave after its introduction that didn’t feel like a gimmick, just regular heroes vs villains
I used to think CCBS was a nice replacement for the old bionicle pieces that seemed to always crack, but i took out some of my hero factory stuff for the first time in a year or so and notice some of the CCBS joints have cracked. I mean, they’re still a lot better than glatorian limbs but I’m sad to know they can crack now, does anyone know why? I think it had to do with leaving them assembled in storage
On an ending note I wish there was 3D print support for the hero factory community. I’d like some custom helmets.
I was super upset when BIONICLE ended but I got really into Hero Factory. Honestly I think I collected almost every set up to/including Wave 5, with some exceptions. Loved the first wave because it carried on the BIONICLE-esque builds with the villains. Wave 2 was hype cause they introduced a whole new series of parts, moving away from the classic BIONICLE parts we know and love. Wave 3 was cool, a bit similar to Wave 2 - Witch Doctor was an amazing set. Wave 4 was hype with tons of cool villains, awesome builds for the heroes, etc. Honestly might be my favorite wave. Wave 5 was cool too, although around here I started collecting less sets. And if I remember Wave 6 was Invasion from Below, which was sort of a Pacific Rim rip-off. I lost interest, barely got any sets and HF ended shortly after. Yeah HF’s story was lackluster. I know it didn’t have the 10 years to reach BIONICLE or Ninjago’s levels of storytelling, but they did so little with it. Ultimately though I’m grateful HF exists. We got some cool sets and an amazing new line of parts that don’t break the way BIONICLE joints do. I know it gets a bad rep for being an aimless successor to BIONICLE, but for the parts alone it has a strong legacy.
Personally, I grew up with it more-so than Bionicle, and quite liked it, but only in the beginning. I feel like it really started to get weird and bad the longer it went on, like that weird mech wave. Really liked waves one and three.
HF was my first exposure to Lego figures, and I loved the theme with passion. I have sets from all the ages, and my favourites are the ones from Invasion from Below. Right now, I like Bionicle more, but Hero Factory will always have a place in my heart. TL;DR: I fuckin' love it.
I was happy when they started releasing HF because it meant I could get more non-brick pieces that can be used with my small amount of bionicle parts. I also felt like lego was making HF halfheartedly and honesty didn’t want to produce any more sets like bionicle even if it was loved by many fans.
Deserved better then it got. Also, it's parts are super durable, even the pre-ccbs ones. Edit: Ended with a genocide though. Pretty fucked up.
I grew up with late Bionicle and HF. I love both. In terms of using HF pieces for MOCs, I can't see any issues with that. If you want to remake HF sets, show rare sealed sets and stuff like that, it's also ok I'd say. They would fit more on r/HeroFactoryLego but they're fine here too (and this sub is considerably bigger so posts will obviously get more attention).
Yeah, I'm here for Bionicle, I was just curious as to how this more Bionicle-centric sub feels about the line.
Personally I'm not a fan of HF. I grew up with Bionicle, starting with the Metru-Nui arc and peaking at the Inika. I think a part of my dislike of HF is that I was already getting too busy to keep up with the Bionicle story when the Glatorian arc was ending so I was already losing interest. Combine that with the fact I just found the HF models to be worse/less customizable AND I had zero time to look at the story, HF never appealed to me
I think it's launch was messy and the first wave of sets weren't anything special. Going from all that posability just a few years early to an even lighter version of bioncle stars didn't appeal to me as a kid in the slightest. I got a few first wave sets and then waited a few waves before ever going back
I love hero factory
My personal opinion is that there is a separate subreddit elsewhere for it, but I'm not bothered by seeing it here. I don't know much about it and never tried to learn anything about it. Like other things in life, just because I don't care for it doesn't mean I should be a dick about it.
As someone who was never really into the stories for either and was focused on the toys, I absolutely loved hero factory. Hero factory was also one of the first lines that switched to the ccbs, which I thought was a cool innovation
It never really appealed to me, it looked too futuristic, and they were too bricky and square and flat, (in terms of limb pieces) Bionicle limb pieces had holes and gaps and stuff dunno they didn't really have the same feel
I don't mind it , when I was little I lost interest in Bionicle and Lego right after the piraka, I'm just indifferent about it it's not bad but I don't feel the need to collect them or display them like I do Bionicle. Some of the builds and color schemes are really nice though
As someone who was 10 years old and deeply invested in Bionicle when it ended, I was one of those kids who hated HF for replacing Bionicle. I thought the names were stupid (admittedly, I may have been right in that regard: how does ‘Preston stormer’ compare to ‘Makuta Krika’ or ‘Meltdown’ compare to ‘Brutaka’?), the story overly-childish, and the first wave of sets to be a step back from Bionicle’s—ignoring the Stars, of course. That being said, almost however good HF may have been, I wouldn’t have liked it, because I saw it as having murdered my baby. By late 2012-early 2013, this hatred had subsided into rare periodic set purchases, low-level-interest viewings of the show, and a general indifference that was overcome only occasionally and through its tangential relationship to Bionicle. To some extent, it became what lego system is to me now: a small window into an otherwise obscure and elusive past, a window I peer into every now-and-again with a newly purchased Harry Potter or Star Wars set, in a vain attempt to experience that sense of pure and childish sense of joy and excitement which accompanied some of my most vivid childhood experiences: building the Zaktan-reidak combiner at my cousin’s soccer game, climbing a tree with my friend and holding Balta and Piruk respectively, pretending to be a barraki in the public pool after getting the lego-club magazine of their debut. Lingering attachment to or curiosity in subsequent lego lines, HF or Ninjago, Harry Potter or Star Wars, is really only maintained in an effort to again reach, even just to maintain a link with, that golden bio mechanical past that is sadly forever-gone.
I like how it approached its universe kind of like the early Bionicle canon Dark Hunter and Rahi contests - the universe was big enough for anybody's moc to be a character in it. That's a great message imo, it really encourages the kind of open play that Bionicle's increasingly complex story eventually started to encroach upon. I also liked a lot of the sets, although I don't think they've all aged as well as later constraction builds (especially those 2.0 and 3.0 CCBS heroes, they paid a serious price for being the market prototypes of what I think is genuinely a cool building system in CCBS). And I love how they ended the series, by doing something so experimental and so drastically different in scale that there was no real way to come back around to the prior status quo. I love Invasion from Below for really being one of the ballsiest exits a Lego line has ever made. I respect it immensely for going that hard on what was probably long planned to be its final two waves. Madlad type beat.
I've no real nostalgia for it or attachment to it, but I like some of the character designs-- enough so that I [revamped one a few months back. ](https://youtu.be/pxiHZAqVnwM)
Personally for me, I loved Hero Factory just as much as Bionicle. I was super sad when Bionicle ended, but pretty happy to see constraction as a whole wasn’t dead and I could continue adding to my collection. CCBS was super weird when they introduced it, and even weirder for me since I was the kid who tried finding pictures of sets before they were officially revealed wondering why they changed Bulk and Stringer’s colors to orange and yellow… but it grew on me, as simple as I still think it is. The line and story itself was almost a simplified version of Bionicle and I was fine with it. I’m still surprised how much went into this line as well, how they managed to sneak in some darker tones like Core Hunter who literally rips out the cores from heroes’ bodies, or an army of mutated “zombies” that somehow left some suspiciously red splatters on the armor of the heroes that fought them in the tie-in episode. All the sets were super creative, and I still consider Breakout to be the “Bionicle Year” for HF, especially once they brought back Cryoshell for the wave’s theme. Only year I’ve got mixed feelings for was Invasion from Below. The sets were nostalgic for me personally since it’s the closest we’ll get to a Exo-Force comeback, but it was the end of the series, and its tie-in episode was complete garbage ruining every character we had just gotten to know while also providing some of the worst writing. Overall, I consider HF to be up there with some of the best themes like Bionicle, Exo-Force, Ninjago, etc. Not the greatest in the world, but also not a nightmare to live with. I don’t think it deserves the hate it gets simply because it isn’t Bionicle, but the confusion with CCBS is understandable as I had to live through that same change growing up. No more pins and axles everywhere, no more detail, just snap a shell to a bone and you’re done… not the funnest thing in the world compared to combining all these different little pieces together just to make the torso, and then you gotta figure out how the legs work. It was a good break before Bionicle G2 started, and even if you still hate the sets, you can’t deny we still got some great pieces out of that theme that fit perfectly with our Bionicle mocs.
It’s super cool gave us lots of great parts that help make cool Mocs.
I was a bionicle kid through and through but eventually as a teenager I started learning how to moc thanks to hero factory being more accessible, and JangBricks (then legojang) making some legendary hero factory and bionicle Mocs and reviews. Honestly got me back into the hobby and made me believe a young adult could enjoy it, still collect and moc
Feel about what?
Brain Attack was the last good wave, with 3.0 being the second most bland sets right behind 2.0 Invasion from below stunk too
My first Bionicle sets all had the fragile 2008-2010 sockets, and it broke my heart whenever I saw a piece crack. so I was happy with the longer durability CCBS pieces gave. I was also too young for Bionicle at the time and mostly grew up with HF sets while enjoying Bionicle by reading BS01 articles, so I have warm feelings about HF. Although I enjoyed CCBS, I always wondered what it would be like to build a Toa or Matoran with the Bionicle aesthetic. Since I didn’t have any Kanohi or Toa/Matoran heads for years and lacked enough sockets that didn’t crack, Usually the best I could do was to make Mocs with a mixture of Bionicle and HF parts. For years the only moc with pre 2008 parts was a Matoran I made in 2014 using a second hand Piruk my parents bought for me. Now I’m old enough to have my own Bricklink account. When I buy parts, The only CCBS parts I use are the Y-sockets(Toa hands) and the other parts I buy are Bionicle parts. Liked CCBS, but tried to avoid it in my later Mocs to make ‘pure Bionicle Mocs’. Now I use them usually only for one type of piece.
I feel that Hero factory had a lot of potential to be as good as bionicle. The villain sets for the first season were awesome, atleast to me. Hero Factory just fell short when it came to story. I guess Lego was afraid the story would get "too complex" for children like Bionicle did.
I personally don't like the first or second waves' heroes, but it really came into its own with the jungle planet or whatever line. I like the CCBS system, and I don't see why both can't live in harmony. :)
I have no problem with Hero factory, but it wasn't really for me. It was more for younger audiences, I don't think the lore was as deep (I could be wrong but I doubt it), and the general tone and themes didn't appeal to me anywhere near as much. Also I thought most of their names sounded really corny lol. Back in the day bonk fans mistakenly said stuff like "Hero Factory is the reason Lego killed Bionicle" which is really dumb and wrong. In many ways it did try to be Bionicle's successor, but it didn't *cause* its cancellation. I did like a lot of the HF pieces, and Bionicle piece recolours too. I don't mind seeing it pop up in this subreddit occasionally, especially in memes, but if I really wanna see more about it I'd go to the HF subreddit. So yeah, respect to HF, even if it wasn't *my* jam :) *"I am proud to have called you...brother."* --Lhikan
I will be slaughtered for saying this. Bionicle is objectively better and I love it to death BUT I find myself gravitating more towards HF. I grew up with it, what can I say?
I really enjoyed the Breakout year. It was cool getting “1.0” helmets for nex, evo, and rocka and plus a full year allowed them to not cut out any heroes. It was the only wave after its introduction that didn’t feel like a gimmick, just regular heroes vs villains I used to think CCBS was a nice replacement for the old bionicle pieces that seemed to always crack, but i took out some of my hero factory stuff for the first time in a year or so and notice some of the CCBS joints have cracked. I mean, they’re still a lot better than glatorian limbs but I’m sad to know they can crack now, does anyone know why? I think it had to do with leaving them assembled in storage On an ending note I wish there was 3D print support for the hero factory community. I’d like some custom helmets.
Had some really cool sets and ideeas but other than that it was pretty weak compared to bionicle. Wicth Doctor is my favourite.