YMMV / Hero Factory

• Broken Base: CCBS - the Character-Creature Building System introduced in 2011 that completely revamped the theme. Many found it to be too simplistic compared to BIONICLE and the overall smoothness of the pieces to be too big of a departure from the more detailed pieces BIONICLE and the first wave of Hero Factory had used, also criticizing the tendency for the Hero sets to be pretty similar, while its supporters defended it for the high articulation it brought to the smaller sets and stronger joints after the disastrously brittle socket design the first wave of Hero Factory and the last three years of BIONICLE, and pointed out it was perfectly possible for complex builds to be created using the system.
• Complete Monster:
  • Secret Mission #1: The Doom Box, by Greg Farshtey: Core Hunter was originally a hero with an good friendship with Preston Stormer until he decided to leave Hero Factory under the belief it had nothing for him and that no one cared for his future. Starting off as a small-time criminal, he would eventually become obsessed with Hero Cores, and began to hunt down heroes to rip out their cores, killing them in the process, which he would gladly show off to the other heroes. Core Hunter would eventually decide to seek out the Doom Box in the hopes of threatening to use it to become the ruler of the galaxy, during which he leaves Jimi Stringer to die after he had helped him fend off an space creature. Eventually escaping capture during the breakout, he would briefly stay in Makuhero City to kill any heroes he could find and take their cores, before eventually deciding to retrieve the Doom Box fragments he stole, during of which he kills Geb when he attempts to help the heroes. After the Doom Box was reformed and Arctur teleports him to the place the box was forged so it can be activated, Core Hunter attempts to kill Stormer, but ends up killing Arctur instead, but he doesn't care and proceeds to activate the Doom Box to absorb its power, uncaring if the universe is destroyed in the process. An ruthless, power hungry criminal with an thirst for power, Core Hunter serves as one of Hero Factory's most dangerous foes.
  • Savage Planet: The Witch Doctor was originally an instructor named Aldous Witch, who had a secret desire to possess a Quaza Core. When he was exiled for attempting to install a Quaza Core into his body, Witch travels to Quatros in order to illegally mine for Quaza. Upon creating the Skull Staff, he would use it to transform into the Witch Doctor, before using it to painfully enslave the animals of the jungle and force them to mine for Quaza, which causes the planet to slowly start breaking apart and dissolve, which will kill all life on it, to Witch Doctor's utter lack of concern. Sending a fake distress signal so he can steal an ship to escape the planet with the Quaza, he has two Fangz brutally attack Rocka when he arrived on the planet, severely wounding him in the process. When a Raw-Jaw attempts to convince Witch Doctor not to mine for any more Quaza, he painfully brainwashes the Raw-Jaw into submission. When the Alpha 1 team tries to stop him, he sends the animals to kill them while preparing to leave the planet with the Quaza, leaving everyone to die, and then build a powerful army to take revenge on Hero Factory for exiling him. A selfish, cruel tyrant with a complete Lack of Empathy towards the animals he enslaves, Witch Doctor would gladly destroy an entire planet full of life in order to become more powerful.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The villains are usually considered some of the better characters designwise and personalitywise, but these next few especially:
    • Witch Doctor isn't particularly well-liked as a character, but he's widely considered the best set in the line due to being the largest and most complex build with a fantastic motif.
    • Core Hunter is popular for being a legitimately menacing antagonist who is surprisingly effective amongst the villains (and manages to rack up a body count besides). His aesthetic helps.
    • And, to a lesser extent, Voltix, who looks like he'd be a silly gimmicky villain, but is actually one of the more competent and dangerous antagonists, having set the breakout in motion in the first place.
    • The Kaiju in general during the last wave of Hero Factory for their more outlandish yet cool designs, which possibly is why they have arguably the most amount of fanmade creations based off them, but the two most popular of them are the Splitter Beasts and Queen Beast. They also boast significant badass credentials, routinely showing up the heroes' battle machines.
• Evil Is Cool: Ironic given the theme, but just take a look at the Ensemble Dark Horse entry, and that’s not even mentioning the rest of them like Corroder and Toxic Reapa.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Invasion from Below is so detached from the rest of the series and considered such a step down in quality that many fans prefer to ignore it so that they can pretend that the franchise got a different send-off.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Toy-wise, the first series were really just BIONICLE toys with a different name. Then came the 2.0 wave which brought a completely different build system and a major amount of new bricks that then became Hero Factory's staple.
  • In terms of storytelling, it became a lot easier to take the story seriously after Greg Farshtey (writer of the BIONICLE books and comics) began writing the Hero Factory Secret Mission series. They still stand out from the BIONICLE books in that they're not bogged down with continuity (most are stand-alone stories), but compared to the show they deal with some of the more nuanced factors of the story such as the question of why heroes might turn to villainy and what values a hero has to embody to properly deserve their title.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: During Brain Attack, our heroes get a shock when the threat appears on their own planet rather than some distant beast planet. Come the next season, and the monsters top that by rising from beneath the planet.
• Narm: Stormer's flashback of the Von Ness incident in "The Enemy Within" features his former leader, Thresher, dodging the drone's blasts in slow motion, screaming in a ridiculously deep voice before being hit by a projectile, grunting in pain goofily.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Some BIONICLE fans (like parts of the BZPower community) have been annoyed that both Hero Factorys toys and storyline were simpler than those from the franchise it replaced. This mentality has lived strongly for all of the line's run, until news of BIONICLE returning in 2015 surfaced.
  • Reception for the toys has warmed a little due to the 2011 Hero sets having much more joints and articulation on par with the later BIONICLE sets.
  • 1.0 Hero Factory Heroes were already on par with the previous semester's BIONICLE sets of the same price in regards to articulation points. The villains were also as articulated with the sets of that price from 2009. So, in fact 2.0 made the line have more articulation than BIONICLE's last year, with the cheaper sets introducing knees and elbows.
• The Scrappy: Rocka, due to the spotlight he's been receiving since his debut in Savage Planet. It didn't help that in 2013 he got two sets in two different waves, while Nex and Stringer were completely absent from the year lineup.
• Sequelitis: Invasion from Below. Cheaper animation, weaker voice-acting, plotholes, continuity errors, and a god-awful ending brought upon by last-minute Executive Meddling. Sent the franchise to its grave.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The Breakout waves and storyline following Savage Planet and Ordeal of Fire. The former two storylines were confined to a single wave each and had pretty simplistic Hero builds, while also coming across as fairly standard adventures. Breakout was spread across two waves and depicted a greater variety among the heroes and villains, while the story involving all the captive villains breaking out of prison was a considerably momentous event in the story that ended with a thrilling Cliffhangar (which admittedly was never resolved).
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Carried over from BIONICLE; standardized unisex parts mean no Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
  • Taken up to eleven with Breez 2.0; while the 1.0 set was also rather androgynous, the design of the helmet at least vaguely suggested femininity. The 2.0 set, however, is extremely masculine and very reminiscent of Gali Mistika.
  • Also reminiscent of Toa Mata Gali from 2001, with the squarish face mask, visor, triangular mouth cavity, and near-identical body proportions, so it's really just following a long-standing tradition in LEGO action figure themes.
  • Completely justified: They´re all robots, so there is no reason for them to have any physical gender traits; and what constitutes a "female personality" is up to much debate.
• Vindicated by History: At this point of time, a good amount of people believe this. There's still the time old debate of whether it was a worthy follow-up to BIONICLE, but most people now appreciate it as it's standalone thing. It also helps that from 2011 onwards, the pieces for the sets were much more sturdy and less brittle than those from the later years of BIONICLE, and that they work just as well for BIONICLE MOCing as the pieces made specifically for BIONICLE - notably, the fanmade canonical model for Artakha◊ was made of both BIONICLE and Hero Factory pieces.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Rise of the Rookies and Ordeal of Fire have pretty solid CGI. Later episodes clearly had their budget cut out a good bit.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The franchise started following a "you make up the ending"-style storytelling in its second half, which has angered many fans, as they took some of the Cliffhangers as evidence of the story getting better and more continuity-heavy. Perhaps the most infamous case is the first season's Big Bad Von Nebula returning and getting his hands on the Hero Factory's blueprints, a storyline that ended right when it started.

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