Editors note: Due to Baxor’s time constraints, he was unable upload photos, so I recommend keeping my First Look news post of Onua handy. If you bear with this caveat of Baxors review, I’m sure you will find some interesting observations, including some I completely missed. I’ve made minimal corrections to the article, but Baxors attention to detail required only the most minimal legal changes, like adding the ® symbol that I’m sure he would have done if he knew how to. You can see his original article here on the forums.

Hello all! Baxor here, reviewing the 71309 Onua, Uniter of Earth.

Stats: 71309 Onua, Uniter of Earth costs $20 and contains 143 pieces. LEGO® says he is 8 inches tall, but my ruler keeps saying its 8 ? inches. He comes with a gold/trans-purple Uniter Mask and black/silver Mask. He wields a hammer/drill on a stick with a stud-launcher.

Elements: This set contains fewer Hero Factory parts than any sets of 2015. As well as making another torso piece (and thus amending the open Ball-and-Socket issue of last year), it contains only eight Hero Factory Armour pieces and a new single-piece chest-plate. It contains four gold Protector Pieces, two of the new ?Crystal Shard pieces? (as I’m calling them), in gold/trans-light-blue colour, two transpurple ribcages from the August 2015 sets, two interesting two-toed Hero Factory foot pieces (making only its second appearance ever!), a drill piece, and last, but not least, the new, shortened Membrain, now in trans-light-blue. Also, strangely the chest-plate (actually, all of the Uniters chest plates), bares Onua’s Toa Nuva symbol. I’m not sure if this is just a casual reference for the fans of Classic BIONICLE®, or a sign of bigger things to come, I don’t yet know, but seeing it on the armour building it the first time (in all the pictures I’d seen, I’d somehow missed that little thing), made my heart leap for joy.

Aesthetics: We interrupt your BIONICLE review to play a quick round of Jeopardy.

TREBECK: And the answer is: he is a class 1 bad-arse.

CONTESTANT: Who is Onua, Uniter of Earth?

Indeed, it’s true, this is the best figure I’ve thus far seen in BIONICLE 2015(or, I guess it’s 2016 now. Technicalities.) While still looking buff and masculine, they’ve also allowed the quiet and wise Toa of Earth to loose some girth.

The distribution of colour on this model is flawless, and I believe part of the reason it looks so good is because of the dual-coloured masks. I’m happy to say that I can’t decide which mask to put on Onua (the gold or the black), because both look so good.

Despite the fact that, with Onua’s Master figure, I didn’t like the addition of gold, the distribution on the lower and upper legs of that same colour is beautiful. It also helped that the Crystal Shard pieces contained trans-light-blue, which complemented the dark trans-purple well.

My favourite aesthetics is the use of the skull rib-cages for shoulder-armour. The dark trans-purple colour on top of the gold Protector Pieces is great. I figure that, if LEGO is going to add both purple and gold to the Earth-Toa colours, a healthy distribution of surface-level gold is good. Also, it now is starting to look like the old colour scheme (Black and grey), has become black and silver. Whether or not it is intentional, I think all four colours, trans-purple, gold, silver, and black, all represent underground elements well. I already mentioned in my review of Onua’s Master figure that the trans-purple reminds my of amethyst, but the black reminds me of obsidian, and silver and gold (obviously) remind me of silver and gold. I think it symbolises well the oneness with Onua and his element.

I was relieved that there were no solid-purple pieces on Onua’s Uniter figure, only trans-purple.

I do have a few issues with this model, though only one has to do with aesthetics (I’ll talk about the others in the My Opinion section). The issue here is that the sets appear to have Gone Ignika. While, in itself this would not have been so bad (though it would have been a little disappointing), what’s worse is the fact that they’ve replaced it was a DohGear, which allows the waste to swivel. Even this wouldn’t be so bad if the DohGear worked well, which, unless you grab his legs and twist, it doesn’t.

Best and Worst Element: The torso/DohGear piece would have to be the worst element. Not only are you stuck using it as a torso, but the way the two pieces attach, you can’t separate them without breaking the plastic (or at least that’s my theory. I haven’t tried it myself because I don’t want to buy another.)

The best element would have to be the Crystal Shard piece, because it can be used for anything from armour to an eye to feet to the end of a gun to decoration on that gun.

Cool Stuff: I’ve already mentioned the DohGear, so I’ll talk about the new . My complaints about the mask-ejection action, as I have recently discovered, are not actually issues with the system, but with the masks themselves. Only Onua’s mask, Ekimu’s Mask of Creation, and the Skull-Spider masks worked perfectly up to this point, ejecting the mask forwards. I believe that with the Uniters, LEGO has amended this issue.

Because of the Elemental Creatures, the Membrain has been cut short, so now that little spiny thing doesn’t come out of it. I actually took the new Membrain and switched it out with both Lewa’s and Ekimu’s (the spine prevented their mask-ejection system from working well), and they both worked perfectly. This has effectively killed two birds with one stone.

The only other cool thing on Onua is his hammer/drill on a stick’s stud six-shooter (pardon my alliteration). This stud shooter can be reloaded with a piece which hangs by Onua’s ankle

My Opinion: Although I absolutely love this model, I do have two central issues with it, and both of them are structural complains. For one thing, the DohGear seems to (a), not work very smoothly and (cool.gif is aesthetically annoying. The second thing is how his arms are held up. They are both held up by only a single red axel binding each, and this is an issue I fear will be problematic in the future, considering the leverage the arms can lever on these two pieces.

Rating: 4/4. In my opinion, this set has no equal in New BIONICLE, and few equals in the old one.

In conclusion, I’ve got four words for you: Post. Your. Comments(please). Till next time, this is Baxor signing off!