Overall, the guide is a very stylish and pleasing package. “BIONICLE” is embossed on the front cover and highlighted in gold. Most of the eighty pages are graced with large and engaging full-color images. As such, The Official Guide To BIONICLE™ should be a great introduction to the world of BIONICLE for many young readers.

The Guide’s strength is also its weakness though. For those who have followed BIONICLE these past two-and-a-half years, there is little here to recommend it. For the most part, the information and images presented here are very familiar. However, with their recent exit from BIONICLE.com , the Guide does appear to be the only official place with information about the BOHROK, KRANA, BOHROK-KAL, and KRANA-KAL.

Update: Thanks to all the readers who pointed out that the BOHROK et al. are in Chapter 2 of the Wall Of History.

The Guide is laid out roughly in chronological order. The emphasis is on the characters though and not the story. Story elements are interwoven with the character descriptions.

There are some peculiarities within the guide. The MATORAN are listed with their new names (e.g. “JALLER”) but displayed in their old body styles. Each of the characters’ names include a pronunciation beneath it, but some of the pronunciations are different from what has been heard on the CD-ROMs. Can you tell the difference between “oh-NOO-ah” and “oh-NOO-wah”?

The back of the Guide touts its “New characters” and “Secret BIONICLE™ info”. The new characters are the RAHKSHI of course. The secret info must be the clues for the “Search For The Seventh Toa Sweepstakes”. The clues are printed in the MATORAN script at the bottom of select pages and a decoder is provided near the beginning of the book. All totalled, there are eight clues about where the SEVENTH TOA is not .