REVIEW - The Mata Nui Online Game Retrospective - How MNOG Defined Bionicle

 

In a time before time began, aka 2001, Bionicle came onto the scene while I was the wee age of 8. While I had decent experience with Lego, it was something I started to grow out of back then. Something about the overly toyish and colorful assortments of bricks rubbed my childish brain as a little too "for toddlers". So unless it was for Star Wars, I didn't care.

 Bionicle, naturally, changed all of that. While the Bionicle crew were still the same old colorful pieces, its unique aesthetic and the fact that they were all buildable robot action figures gave Bionicle a feeling that ascended past traditional Legos. Or even Lego technic, seeing as later on, Bionicle would drop being a subtheme of "Technic" altogether.

 The toy line itself was a pretty big deal, but something that made it feel ascended past its already ascended status was how it was a toy line with some deceptively well thought-out world building and lore. Bionicle's far from the first-ever toy line to have a story or lore to go with it, even within the Lego sphere, but it definitely runs with the concept harder than any before it. Even to this day, the only toy I can think that has lore to match Bionicle's is Transformers. And that has dozens of reboots and retellings under its hood.

Thus enters the Mata Nui Online Game, affectionately abbreviated to "MNOG" by fans, as silly as it sounds when you pronounce that abbreviation out loud. Mah-Nawg. It was released on January 1st along with the first wave of toys, and was developed by Templar Studios, which pretty much has this game and its sequel as their sole claims to fame. Oh and some other 3rd Lego game, but that's not the subject today.

MNOG was a web game playable directly on the Bionicle official website itself, and it actually got slowly updated over the course of the year, to give a sense of Bionicle as an ongoing epic that you got to see unfold in real time. I'm not entirely certain of how many updates there were or what each update entailed (other than an educated guess that the brief adventures in each village, plus the finale, were what the updates were), but the finished product basically plays like an open-world point-and-click adventure. The only overall goal being to solve each village's problem and then confront the finale.

Web games have a certain reputation that comes with them, especially licensed ones that are ultimately trying to be a commercial for something. And while MNOG definitely is that, the way it goes about selling plastic masked robots to young children feels so much more "artful" than your typical browser game. Which especially around this time, were usually a lot more loud about trying to attract a demographic perceived to have little to no attention span by featuring bright colors and loud sound effects. But MNOG has more faith in a child's intelligence than that. It knew Bionicle was for BIG, SMART kids.

The opening shot is attention-grabbing, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. It presents the player with a giant, opened pod washed up on the beach, with footprints in the sand walking out of it. Even if this is your first exposure to anything Bionicle, it grips your intrigue to keep exploring on your own. Should you choose to follow the footprints, you'll find a mysterious distant figure before losing sight of him.

And of course, since this is Toa Tahu here, or for the uninitiated, a cool-ass robot guy, it's continuing to beg you into looking into it more.

It's here the game clues you in on the overall loop. You'll be encountering roadblocks, and the solution is usually never too far away. In this case, the bridge to the city of Ta-Koro is down, so you'll need to pull a lever to bring it back up. But along the way, you're likely to get into your first conversation with Jaller, seeing as he's right there on your way to the solution.

The game's conversation system isn't anything way out-there. You have up to three dialogue options, usually questions about the nearby happenings and setting. Some of the information given to you by the NPCs is useful for the task at hand, but a lot of it is fluff and texture for the world of Mata Nui. Little else other than incidental details, usually not even anything that outrageous. It's never important to know what exactly an Ussal Crab is, or that Onu-Korans ride them in crab races, but indulging this information was essentially a gateway drug to turning little pre-teens into infant lore nuts.

 And right off the bat, that's kind of the beauty of this game. So much of it is inconsequential in terms of being an actual point-and-click adventure. But it still has these tidbits to make Mata Nui feel like a deliciously deep and detailed place. And hardly anything exemplifies this better than the little observational deck on the other side of the beach from Ta-Wahi.

There's no reason to ever go here if your one and sole goal is simply to get to the ending. But it has two very important elements to the deeper Bionicle story, such as the engravings underneath the telescope and a cutscene that gives you a dialogueless recap of WHAT the story of Bionicle is even about, all told through using stone carvings as actors.

While perhaps a little obtuse without a voiceover or even subtitles, it still gets the points across. The god Mata Nui arrived on this world and gave it shape and life, said life forming communities that revered their creator. But that changed when The Makuta arrived, for one reason or another, seeking to destroy this benevolent god-figure and doing so by putting him into an eternal slumber. And without Mata Nui to protect them, The Makuta was free to unleash its shadows. But when hope seemed lost, six heroes are prophesized to arrive and put an end to The Makuta.

I think it says a lot about the intrigue of the Bionicle setting when it's just confident enough to ask kids to watch a wordless lore dump. Or even opposite- where it asks them to do a lot of reading in general. I probably take how much this game can sound like Terminology Soup for granted since I'm already well-versed with these words, but I think it's fine, seeing as this game is almost essentially acting as an interactive Wiki.

Point and click adventures of this era are kinda notorious for the obtuse solutions to puzzles. MNOG, on the other hand, basically never has anything that's so out-there that an 8-year old couldn't figure it out. Probably the worst it gets is knowing when to talk to Jaller so he'll make you a member of the guard so you can use the lift up to Ko-Koro. Just thing is, this only triggers at some point that isn't the beginning, I could never figure out exactly when he'll let you become a guard.

The problems are fairly self-contained, very seldomly asking you to venture very far from a village. The only instance being when you find the underground sundial in Onu-Koro and are asked to backtrack to Ga-Koro to talk to the astrologer there. And thankfully they spell it out if you've already done the Ga-Koro quest.

This game is still clever about it. You aren't just told to do things and you just go do them. When you arrive at Po-Koro, you're quickly clued in that there's a sickness going around and infecting the whole village. Despite this, there's still some people outside coughing on everything and everybody. How unrealistic! Nobody in their right mind would do that!

But either way, you're still left to deduce the issue, reading into the context clues of how, while this pandemic is happening, a new model of Koli Ball is also the talk of the town. And by the time you get your hands on one, you'll see that they're the source of the illness.

No problem in a village lasts too long, the only particularly involved one being Onu-Koro. But this is also minding this was a game that had to load things back in an age of dialup internet. I do remember the occassional scary hang-up that happens as the game struggled to load off of a 90s-era internet connection back in the day.

And I think one of the coolest payoffs for solving each village's troubles is when you just get to watch a cutscene. Like, when I think of spectacle as a reward in a video game, I end up thinking of the fight between Gali and Tarakava 

Like, this is a cutscene from a toy commercial webgame from 2001! Why's this go so hard!?! Do you have any idea how many times I reenacted this scene with my owm Bonkles as a kid!?!

All of this is fine and good, of course, but I think it's merely scratching the surface of what made MNOG so special. Because all of this paints the game as a fair enough little point-and-click game. Serving its purpose as a child distractor during computer class. Different, but not THAT out of the ordinary for webgames. It even has little internal minigames that are a bit more like what you'd expect from a toy commercial web game.

I'm definitely of the mind that games can be more than just a set of interactive mechanics. Kingdom Hearts is a fun action rpg if you boil it down to nothing but the interactive bits, but what makes it definitively Kingdom Hearts is the crack fanfictionesque esoteric setting.

Bionicle has something of an atmosphere to it, more than could probably ever come across flawlessly when you just watch the toy commercials on TV. But what MNOG does as a supplemental piece of media is that it delivers on that atmosphere.

It's one of the first games I've ever played that I've really. Sat back and just admired the sights. Not that I stood there and stared, but still. Paused for a moment and thought to myself "Whoa". The island of Mata Nui is a lovely natural haven, only interrupted by the occasional sculpture or village. There's a lot of scenes in this game that are just an empty shot of wilderness. It's a real window into what The Makuta is trying to destroy: all these beautiful natural vistas.

The style is absolutely timeless as well, most of the environments being made up of these shots with a lot of striking color choices. A lot of dramatic scene-setting creates some unforgettable imagery throughout the title, especially when they go monolithically minimalist with the look, but doing so with maximum visual impact.

If there's one thing I could say really sells this game, it's definitely how it exudes atmosphere. It doesn't even have a ton of music, especially outside of villages. Usually just making way for ambience. But I would hardly say it uses ambient music as a crutch, because even the droning, unnerving sounds echoing through the Onu-Wahi tunnels just has an unforgettable sound to it.

And when they do layer the music in, it's usually for being a good punctuation for the villages. Ga-Koro being serene and peaceful. Le-Koro being lively and energetic. Ko-Koro feeling cold and lonely. It gives such an exemplary example of what each village's culture feels like.

All this is helped by how intricately cultured each village is. They all have their own mood, and the spaces feel so quaint, but still very lived-in. The underground city of Onu-Koro is vastly different from the much simpler village of Ga-Koro, sat atop an array of lilypads.

I do think there is something to be said about the ways Bionicle "borrows" from indigenous Maori cultures, up to and including a lot of its early terminology just being Maori words lifted and applied without much thought. This isn't something that's the game's fault, so much as it's just a byproduct of what Bionicle was doing at the time. This is something Lego admitted fault to and would go back to correct a lot of it, but still worth mentioning.

But I don't think that should undercut the bits of originality that are in these cultures. Like how the mining village of Onu-Korans are the center of a big trading guild. Or how Ko-Koro, the village that lives up in the snowy mountains is rather isolationist, plus they usually pursue knowledge. The wind village in the jungle, of course, loves music, especially woodwind instruments. Po-Koro, the hometown of the in-universe sport of Koli Ball, is a village full of sports fanatics. It's very typical stuff for fantasy races, but I think it still pulls its weight to give each village its own texture.

And that's not to mention this game features the Matoran alphabet in it in a big way. It doesn't even break the immersion with convenient subtitles to let you know what all these signs say, they expect you to do your Bionicle homework! It's usually not super consequential, I was able to mostly get by on my rusty memory reading into context clues alone, but it's a neat thing they do. Also granted, I'm fairly certain the alphabet was also right there on Bio Ankles Dot Com, but still.

Perhaps some of the story could've used the same attention to detail, but it still has some of its own moments. It serves its purpose as some context for what you're doing, and it's not like there's any one thing I could poke at to say "this is what's wrong with it", it's just a LITTLE lacking in actual story meat.

But what it does have is a lot of neat setup and payoff. Kapura is a character you can meet out in the charred forest next door to Ta-Koro, commenting on how he's training to become quicker. Since apparently, he's such a slow runner. But you can recall during the cutscene flashback where the Ta-Matoran first encounter Tahu, you can actually spot Kapura as the guy trailing behind the others. Of course, all this quite literally hitting its peak when he meets you up in Ko-Koro, because his practicing has finally paid off, and he gets to join  you for the last leg of the quest.

Stuff like that hits a lot better when you keep in mind that this game would keep you in suspense of what was going to happen in the next chapter for upwards of a month before the next update came out. Back in the day, there's about an 10-month gap between first meeting Kapura and seeing him again in the mountains. It really rewarded kids for paying attention!

It's also interesting reading into a lot of these things in retrospect. Unlike kids in 2001, I have the benefit of living in a world after Bionicle has wrapped up and ended (twice), so knowing things like the identity of the secret 7th Toa makes things like Vakama's line about waiting for "Another" hit in a way I didn't expect.

There's things like knowing what the Red Star is, and how important it would be later. And of course, the numerous hints towards the Bohrok that were going to be coming out the following year. Climaxing at the ending having a bit of a cliffhanger when you stumble on the Bohrok hive.

There's also getting into "The Makuta". Just, conceptually, "The Makuta". *The* Makuta may just be one of the villains I've been most fascinated by. Like baby's first eldrich horror.

Before he was a species, before he was some guy named Teridax, even before his status as Mata Nui's brother felt a lot more literal, Makuta was an odd beast. When replaying this and rewatching the first movie not too long ago, something my mind has really latched onto was how he was sometimes referred to as "THE" Makuta. Even in this game, where Makuta is sometimes given the pronoun "it". Something about it feels so Other, in a horrifying kinda way, with everything else that The Makuta embodies. The Makuta isn't an entity in the conventional sense, but rather a living concept.

Like how Mata Nui is a spirit of creation, The Makuta is a spirit of destruction. Just as Mata Nui made the island the Matoran live on, The Makuta embodies the concept of why things decay over time. Whether it be through illness, or the fantastical concept of darkness that erodes whatever it touches. Or perhaps even reflecting society's dynamic of creating things only to destroy them.

It's outright stated in the text that The Makuta is Nothing, the void from which creation itself began, and the same void all things are destined to end up at once more. Which honestly makes The Makuta scarier than when they tried to play him off as the Bad God to Mata Nui's Good God. Because even the highest concepts of the highest powers we invent are nothing compared to the infinite vastness of non-existence.

My personal interpretation of The Makuta in light of re-experiencing this early concept of The Makuta is that it simply destroys, degrades, and disintegrates not just because that's all of what it is, but as a byproduct of being literal nothingness is that existence being there is something of a great annoyance. Like a bad rash you can never get to go away or a constant sound of nails scraping a chalkboard. Creation is something that has to be done away with right now so that The Makuta can get back to resting on the peace of non-existence.

True that this is treading on fanfiction quite a bit, but I think that's part of what's so cool about this early, more ambiguous Makuta. It's a blank template to project something you personally find scary onto it, whether it be literal or high-concept. And is that not such a compelling villain for a *Lego* toy line? Lego has so long been all about the romanticism of imagination, but your imagination is also very keenly aware of what terrifies you the most.

It's such a shame that the later into Bionicle's history you go, the less interesting Makuta becomes. Even by 2003 he became a lot more tangible. Plus a lot more conventionally "cool" and imitating. A guy that spoke in riddled tongues and posed his cause as helping Mata Nui, which still has its hits when you're aware of Bionicle's themes are being told from the perspective of a brain tumor patient, but still nonetheless A Guy.

Granted... sure, it's hard to look at this thing and say you could sell it on toy aisle shelves at your local Walmart for $39.99, but still.

MNOG did a lot to make Bionicle what it was, and put the story's identity in front of the very eyes of fans. It expresses so much confidence that Bionicle's story can sell itself without pretending to be something it isn't and just deliver on the atmosphere wholesale. It's a very wholesome and cozy game in that way, where most of its appeal is just soaking in the distinguished vibe.

It's not really "fun", at least not in the traditional sense. Its more gamey side-attractions feeling more like a more action-oriented distraction to break up the slower moments. As well as give a cool climax to each chapter. I feel like the only outright blemish it has is how the endgame asks you to do a tour of the island Twice. The goal each time almost being the same, just going to each Turaga, they expouse very similar, and in one aspect, literally copy-pasted dialogue, you collect your party of Matoran, and only then will you get a move-on to the finale. You do have fast-travel in the form of the flute summoning a Birdonicle, but it's a lot of still sitting there waiting on an unskippable cutscene over and over.  This could've been better if each village had something different going on, but the only difference I noticed was that there was a fence around Ga-Koro now.

And it feels like a blessing that the Bionicle fandom is as dedicated as it is. It's a big reason why this game is so well preserved to this day, being very easily available for download in a handful of ways. Which is something so great for, again, a toy commercial flash game. Something that's kind of at the bottom of the barrel in terms of game preservation.

MNOG reflects Bionicle in more ways than just. Being a Bionicle game, for one, and being a vehicle to tell its lore, for two. But in that it's something incredibly special. A niche that doesn't really have a modern equivalent. Bionicle arrived into the world, said its peace, and then, other than a very brief revival and the occasional shoutout, has just sort of. Been gone. A fact that definitely stands out with how much modern culture has such an undying infatuation with nostalgia right now.

MNOG and Bionicle were both extremely of-their-era. They came to exist at exactly the right time, and I'm not sure if such a thing could be quite as successful these days. At least not as wholesale. But I think that's fine, actually. It's cool that Bionicle got to be a cornerstone of a generation, an icon of the 2000s childhood. And I think it's equally fantastic that something as simple as MNOG gets to somehow be such a once-in-a-lifetime event. I just think that's part of what makes Bionicle and all its media just that extra touch of special.

Do I want Bionicle to come back? Sure, I'm a glutton for more niche and under-represented media that I love and enjoy. But I have also long come to terms that, even if it did come back, it would never be like it was again. And not just because we have G2 as a frame of reference, but because it was just. THAT much of a lightning-in-a-bottle moment.

There might not be anything quite like Bionicle ever again. There might not be anything quite like MNOG ever again. And that's okay.