Kazi Black Pearl Review

[Captain Pirate Man]

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Let me start by saying I grew up very much a Lego head. So yes I do consider myself to be a loyal long time “Legoist.” At some point during early 20’s, my (EVIL) step mother, lol, sold my entire Lego collection in a garage sale, without my knowledge… I now have kids and they very much LOVE Lego’s, so my interest in them has returned as well. Every time we really talk about building our Lego collection, I can’t help but miss MY Lego collection. Some of the highlights of that collection were Skull Eyed Schooner, Eldorado Fortress, and the original Imperial Flagship. I also had pretty much every pirate island and Imperial fort along with many Castle and Woodsman sets from the late 80’s and early 90’s. Fortunately many of my minfig’s did survive and are still in my possession, but that is it….

Fast forward to 2014, looking online into Lego’s for my kids, I discovered many knockoff Lego companies. The two things that drew my attention was A. price and B. the sets themselves. It’s no secret that buying Lego brand Pirate ships are VERY expensive at the moment. My wife and I decided to have a “Lego” Christmas. We are buying MANY official Lego products including The Lonely Mountain, The battle of Five Armies and many other large Hobbit sets, along with multiple smaller Hobbit and Friends sets. But for our pirate sets we made the decision to build up our collection (since we pretty much started from scratch, minus the minfigs of course) with Chinese knockoff companies. We are expecting MULTIPLE ships and sets from Enlighten, Kazi, and Sluban. Today I am starting my reviews with the Kazi Black Pearl.

The Kazi Black Pearl I purchased for about $100 including shipping (let me add I received it in about 1 week, which is amazing for a Chinese product.) Despite the hefty price tag, I could not pass up this ship for two reasons A. the sheer size and B. the even hefty price tag for the Official Lego Black Pearl (which is typically $200 or more for a SMALLER ship). Let me add, the Kazi Black Pearl is a more of a knockoff of Lego’s Imperial Flagship, than it is the Lego Black Pearl. It does look like the Black Pearl, but it is also more of an original design than it is a complete Lego copy cat. I do not own the Lego Black Pearl, so I can’t do a complete compare and contrast, but as stated earlier, I DID have the Skull Eyed Schooner (which was the biggest and baddest Lego ship on the block for over 15 years.) Plus I have also watched and read many reviews of of ALL of Lego and nonLego “style” Pirate ships, so I feel fairly confident in my opinions. Which having said that, I will get to my point; the Kazi Black Pearl is the biggest and baddest Lego style ship on the market. This ship, along with the Lego Imperial Flagship is the only 6 piece hull ships on the market, so this ship is clearly bigger than the lego Black Pearl and Queen Anne’s Revenge. Does it have all the bells and whistles those other ships offer? No probably not, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its fair share of bells. But having said that, this ship is by no means without flaw, but many of those flaws can be remedy by a decent amount of Lego knowhow.

Let me start with the good, this ship is surprisingly well built, designed, and sturdy. It really is a solidly built set. None of the parts feel like they could just give out on a moment’s notice. Now that doesn’t mean that this ship could survive steady play from a 5 year old (because it could not, but more on that later), but as long as you don’t drop it, it’ll stay together pretty well. Also, and I can’t stress this enough, it looks freaking awesome. It really looks like and feels like a BAD to the bone pirate ship. Honestly I wish I still had my Skull Eyed Schooner, they would make for some EPIC high seas battles (although I’m not sure I would bet on the Schooner.) While the overall brick quality of Kazi’s products is not as high as Lego’s, it is by no means bad. If Lego is a 10, these Kazi bricks are an 8. If I put a bunch of these bricks in my kids Legos, I doubt she could pick them out (except for one says Lego and one say Kazi.) The actual quality of the bricks is NOT one of the weak points of this set, it’s actually one of the strengths, hence the sturdy final build. To be quite honest, even the most loyal Lego enthusiast would benefit from adding this ship to your fleet. It will only make you fleet better, impossible to hurt it.

Now on to the bad, the minifigs are AWFUL. Honestly you could not ask for worse minfigs IMO. Based on Lego minifigs being a 10, these are a 2. Their only redeeming qualities are their accessories. They do have nice hats and weapons, but the actual figs are terrible. I couldn’t even put the hands on some of them; the holes just didn’t seem big enough. Whatever money Kazi put into making their bricks pretty good, they clearly recouped those costs on the minifigs. But fortunately for me, I just tossed these crap figures aside and put on my Pirate Lego guys, so the minifigs don’t really bother me much. Another thing I don’t like is the sails. They are made of plastic or some kind of vinyl, not nearly as nice as cloth sails. But as with the minifigs, I am making my own sails, and can easily remedy this problem. Another aggravating aspect to this set was the piece count. I want to say I was shorted 5 or so pieces, and was giving the wrong color of another 5 or so. Luckily for me, I can raid leftover Lego pieces, so again I could fix this problem. But honestly I shouldn’t have had to. My final two complaints are more of grievances, not terrible things, but things that could be better. First off, I did have to slightly modify the design a couple of times. As I was building it, I just had a couple of ideas that it would be better if you do it this way instead, so I did. My final grievance is the captain’s quarters. The ship actually comes with a pretty good quarters, with some good odds and ends, but they are virtually impossible to access. It does have a back opening access point, but it’s not nearly as well designed as Lego counter parts. So basically you end up using the windows and doors mostly, which makes it VERY hard to access. But on the other hand, the rear of the ship is VERY solid, and not likely to fall apart, so maybe it’s 6 of one, half dozen of the other?

14 and up Rating:

For older kids and adults I have to give this set a 9. The ship alone is worth the price, it is really that beautiful. Again I’m basing this rating upon Lego pirate ships being a 10. The things that lower the score are things like the minifigs or Kazi quality control issues, but not much on the actual ship. But once my small changes are complete, this set will feel like a perfect 10, at least to me.

Under 14 Rating:

For kids under the age of 14 I would give this set a 2. As a standalone set, being played with often, I would not recommend this set. Without my ability to “fix” the problems or look at the big picture, I would be very upset. If this was the first “lego” set I ever bought for my child, it would probably be the last, because the minifigs make it almost unplayable.

Final Verdict:

My overall score for this set is a 7.5. It is equally beautiful and ugly at the same time, but at the end of the day the beauty outweighs the ugly, at least for me. Again, not the best idea for a kid, but older collectors should love it. As I stated before, even the most loyal Lego fans would only benefit from adding this set to their fleet. At the end of the day, all of these cons can be fixed even by the most novices of builders.

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Edited November 28, 2014 by Captain Pirate Man

[Kwatchi]

Thanks for the taking the time to do the write up. I'm afraid I am personally a bit of a purist, but I still appreciate the effort you put into this.

[Captain Pirate Man]

Thanks for the taking the time to do the write up. I'm afraid I am personally a bit of a purist, but I still appreciate the effort you put into this.

Thanks. I realize this is more of a Lego only type site. Lego are the kings, no doubt about it. But as consumers, competion favors the consumer.

[rodiziorobs]

Thanks. I realize this is more of a Lego only type site. Lego are the kings, no doubt about it. But as consumers, competion favors the consumer.

I picked up some Kazi mini-builds a few years ago, when I was barely out of my dark age. I was ready to start buying Lego again, but didn't want to pay the prices. I saw the Kazi and thought, "heck, half the price (or less), what harm could it do?"

The build designs were decent, with good techniques. The minifigure, as you said, was appalling. But I also had problems with the quality of plastic. Many arrived cracked, or cracked during building or were so obviously mis-molded that I could not use them, for being either too loose or too tight. Also, there were huge probems with color inconsistencies in almost every color. Black, light grey, yellow and red are the ones I remember.

I didn't have much of a collection then, so whatever was useful got integrated into whatever Lego I had. But in the years since, most of the Kazi has been thrown out--not because I am purist to the point I can't stand even owning the pieces, but because they keep failing.

Thanks for the review! It's good to hear that they worked out for you. Maybe--hopefully--in the years since I bought them they have improved their manufacturing quality.

[clm]

Edit: I bought these kits because I was 'curious' and there was very little hard information about the kits... more are on the way heh.

I also got this kit late January for $67 shipped from Aliexpress... It looks ok on a shelf but it really has a horrible design with very low play-ability.

Kazi went overboard with the modular build idea to the point some modules are hard to seat onto the correct studs due to the heavy clutch of some of the black pieces. This is most prevalent in trying to attach the stern cabin to the hull.

The pieces themselves are varying quality the black pieces being the best the gray lower and the clear parts totally rubbish. The clear parts all stress cracked around the bottom putting them together, and most of the round gray parts show stress marks at the bottom. I only had one black Technic-style pin break on the second build. Oddly the worst pieces were not the clear parts... they were the 1x2 grill mod bricks (clone of LEGO part 2877) they were made from the gray and have almost no clutch and were somewhat distorted.

The masts are absolutely horrible and really need a Technic axle run through them from top to bottom, they collapse all the time... It doesn't help that the shrouds are not long enough to clip securely into the clips on the hull or the fact those clips have nothing reinforcing the top of the clip so they pop off with extreme regularity. I guess the collapsing masts could be considered a play feature? :p

Talking about play features. Eh... you have limited access to the cannons on the cannon deck that sit far to low to fit through the cannon ports without dangling... the cannon ports are all placed about one brick higher then any of the LEGO ships but the cannon carriage sits on the bottom of the hull leaving the port at least half a brick too high for any of the cannons. There is nothing under the cabin or in the bow like the LEGO Imperial Flagship even though the cabin appears like it was designed to be removable with all the tiles under it. Then there is the cabin without any way to access the interior without something like forceps... Which I guess is ok as the included printed map tile looks like a nondescript black blob, some form of removable roof on the cabin still would have been nice though. They have some (anachronistic) Winchester rifles mounted on the bow railing... about 10 feet in the air which you can easily see is far out of reach for a Minifig in the LXF file. And as for anachronistic... the great swords and crossbows also look rather out of place with the Winchester rifles...

The Minifigs are near complete rubbish although I was able to get hands in all of the arms, if you get one just try hand after hand, some should fit as the hands and arms seem to be all over the maps in regards to size. Three of the minifig heads are pretty nice three of them look like the face is printed too small. The hats are all nice though... As are the cutlass as they appear to be a slightly metallic dark gray plastic. The telescope are one area that did not work in the instructions however. In one step you take a plume a 3L bar and a telescope and are supposed to assemble a cannon fuse lighter, you can not assemble it as instructed because the telescope does not have a hole for the plume in the end indicated in the instructions, you can however assemble it if you flip the telescope over.

Overall I think the only thing this kit does well is sit on a shelf and look intimidating, it would likely survive any encounter with any other pirate ship due to its full 2 stud thick hull... although it would lose it's masts when the other crew sneezed at it. That and it would not be able to do much damage to the other ships do to only one exposed cannon on the stern actually being able to aim anywhere but straight up in the sky due to raised cannon ports. At the bare minimum if you were to buy it I would recommend reinforcing the lower shroud stays and adding Technic axles through the mast... along with swapping out the clips on the back where the rudder mounts.

Would I buy it again knowing what I know now? No, not unless it was even cheaper then I got it for. Although depending on how much black LEGO hull pieces raise to it might be a way of getting some for a moc.

P.S. I know it's sacrilege to model clone brands in LDD.. bit it gives you a way to see how bad it is easily? :)

PDF Manual and LXF Model, trans red = parts that are not available from LEGO

(PDF) https://www.dropbox.... Pearl.pdf?dl=0

(LDD) http://home.earthlin...Black pearl.lxf

(basic mods needed on the ship to keep it from collapsing.. green and blue indicating new parts)

http://home.earthlin...k pearl mod.lxf

Chris

Edited February 13, 2015 by clm

[Captain Pirate Man]

I hear you, and you are not wrong in your review. I pretty much used the dreaded krackle to address the design flaws, especially the masts. But to be honest, that didn't really bother me, because I just plain love the sheer size of this ship. But once I glued up some of the weak points, it became the pride of my knockoff fleet, which includes every enlighten ship and the biggest one sluban makes. Which the sluban is by far the worst due to it's just plain ugly design. The enlighten are pretty close to Lego quality, but I still prefer the black pearl overall. Once I glued the weak points of course, because as you ssid it does have some major flaws, but they ca be fixed.

[clm]

Those flaws can be fixed easily for a display piece, and I have fixed the masts myself. Although I fixed them without any glue using a small supply of LEGO pieces and axles. The deeper issues are not so easy to fix and would need a fair redesign. For instance access to the cabin. I have mine sitting in the living room in display mode on a shelf

One of the clone brands I am eager to get a hold of is the Woma/Bricktek "large pirate ship" and will likely get it next month. But it's amazing how quickly eagerness turns into buyers remorse though, I just received the Jie Star 30009... The bricks are fairly high quality with even greater clutch then Enlighten but the design is.. boggling. Hull is nice and solid with hinged decks for access, then the cabin has no back wall and massive stacks of wedge plates in the walls... finishing up with the worse rigging I have ever seen, I was hoping for a large hull ship at this price but it turned out to be a two section small hull. Plenty of reddish brown though :p

Chris

[Captain Pirate Man]

I glued the rear entry points that give you access to the cabin as well. It still doesn't give you much access to it, but at least now the pieces don't fall a part when I open the back hatches.