Aanchir

Huh, interesting. I had thought the majority of the armor on this set was Titanium Metallic, but it turns out it's black. Can't say that makes it any better or worse in my book, as either could work for the "stealth" aesthetic, but it's still a surprise. Overall, I think the set's color scheme is nice. I imagine that the printed shell is Silver Metallic just to keep it consistent with the ones on the other mechs, and I can't say I mind the resulting look too much. I'm a little surprised how well the gold works when used so sparingly.

Beautiful set and great review. As plain as Jaw Beast's design is, his proportions and color scheme still give him a whole lot of personality.

I don't see a problem with listing the rotating turbines as an action feature. To be honest, when I saw this set I thought it was ridiculous that the flames were pointed forward like flamethrowers rather than backward like jets... after all, it is Furno Jet Machine. I considered modding this... and I guess I was not paying enough attention to realize the ability to convert the flamethrowers into jets and vice-versa was an action feature and a deliberate part of the design. Great to hear that the Hero helmets are fully compatible with minifigures, and that the eyes even line up! I look forward to trying them out on my sigfig! The torso build here is quite beautiful and is one reason that this is probably my favorite of the new sets. Of course, since these won't be out until March here in the United States, I guess we'll have summer set pics from Toy Fair to compare it to when it comes time for me to make my first purchase. I doubt that'll affect my decision much, though!

Good review! I somewhat disagree that there are no "army builders" here. Emmet and Gail would both be great army builders if you want to make a construction crew, since even their hair and faces are fairly generic if you separate them from the context of the LEGO Movie, and a little mixing and matching with face prints (and legs, of course, on account of Emmet's nametag) would bring you a very diverse construction crew. I love President Business's two-tone hair (Dark Orange and Brick Yellow/Tan). Bad Cop could also be an army builder for some people if you don't use his alternate expression. What color are Velma Staplebot's legs? They aren't Medium Nougat (Medium Dark Flesh), since that's her hair color, but they don't look bright enough to be regular Bright Orange (classic orange) in these photos. If I had to guess, I'd say they're Nougat (Flesh), a VERY rarely used color these days — even licensed minifigures tend to use Light Nougat (Light Flesh) as their skin tone, and it's almost never used as anything OTHER than a skin tone. Lincoln's quote from the trailer is a parody of his famous quote "A house divided against itself cannot stand", which was explicitly in reference to half of the United States allowing slavery and half prohibiting it. The original quote was a paraphrase of a biblical passage. More information here. You do make a good point that Gail is VERY different from a lot of previous female minifigures. Her face is as dirty as the most rugged male adventure hero minifigures. Also, it's never bad to get more minifigure faces with freckles! Lots of useful parts in this series in general. Coonskin cap, neckbeard, several new hair pieces, etc. While many builders for traditional themes will not have a use for such character-specific figs as is, many would be easy enough to turn into parts for other minifigures.

The new "For Young Builders" sets are intended to be transitional between Duplo and System, same as previous series like 4+, Jack Stone, and of course the beloved classic Fabuland. Of course, they are set apart from those in that they use standard minifigures and aren't as heavily stylized as Fabuland (which had a cutesy cartoon aesthetic) or Jack Stone (which went in an exaggeratedly streamlined, almost sci-fi direction). And some LEGO Friends sets DO skew younger than a lot of Star Wars and Super Heroes sets, but the same can be said of City. The simplest City and Friends sets tend to be recommended for ages 5–12, while the simplest Star Wars sets tend to be recommended for ages 6–12.

Yeah, that's part of the reason I like recent sets. The only set I've had with any STAMPs in several years was the Maersk train, and it had just one (the new Maersk ship also has them — I kind of wonder if Maersk has some sort of policy against splitting their logos and trademarks into separate sections). I don't know if the aging problem is as big a deal as it used to be, either. I guess there's no way to find out for sure until the stickers in recent sets have actually had time to age. But the stickers from my Power Miners, Atlantis, and even Exo-Force sets are still in good shape unless I've been foolish enough to try removing and re-applying them.

A McNinja family tradition! I might take part, since it shouldn't be too difficult. When's the deadline?

Probably something to do with Borg Tower being built over the wreckage of the site of the Overlord's defeat. I mean, "site of the defeat of an evil cosmic entity" is right below "Indian burial ground" on the list of "places that are sure to be haunted if you build on them". What's wrong with that? We get a new figure of the Ninja, sometimes two, every single year. Nya might as well get a new figure design after going a full year (actually, if she's in the summer sets, more like two years) without one.

Nobody has teased me about liking LEGO in quite a long time, if ever. The people in college who knew about it didn't seem to judge me, at least not openly. I didn't advertise it, but I didn't try to hide it either, so if I happened to be in a conversation where it seemed appropriate to bring it up I didn't inhibit that impulse. In general, if people I know in real life ever wanted to tease me, they've had plenty of better things to tease me about. Most people seem to feel like my dream of working as a LEGO designer is a great ambition, even if I'm now aware it may be hopelessly out of reach, and don't bring it up a whole lot because I just end up depressing myself. There aren't a whole lot of clichés I hear from non-FOLs when LEGO comes up in conversation. One of the ones I hear most often is "Have you been to LEGOLAND?", which tends to be people's first question when they learn I'm a LEGO fan (the answer is yes, once, for my 11th birthday). Other than that, what people most often tend to do is bring up something LEGO-related they saw in the news, which may or may not interest me in the slightest.

On the subject of Pixal, it seems that a good portion of the fandom has been quite inspired by her design. I was checking recent Ninjago art on deviantART earlier and found several drawings of the character. This, this, and this are some of my favorites. Of course, she's also controversial among some fans just on account of being set up as a possible romantic interest for Zane. Remember the Zane fangirls in the episode The Last Voyage? The writers didn't make that up out of nowhere... and given how few major female characters there are in the show, it's no surprise that a lot of writers in the fandom who are fans of romantic storylines have created their own original characters as romantic interests for Zane.

Actually, Evo XL Machine is the only one of the machines that doesn't automatically include a section to tuck the feet into. Yet another feature of Furno Jet Machine that I think is quite elegant. You're right that you might be able to add an armor piece like that to Evo XL Machine with some slight modding.

In a number of dialects, including several American dialects, there is no differentiation between the sounds of "Ah" and "Aw" (so for instance, the words "cot" and "caught" would be pronounced the same). I was quite surprised when I learned this myself. I grew up understanding that each had its own distinct sound, so it took a while to get used to the idea that some people don't pronounce them differently at all.

I'm fond of the transformed "flying chariot" version — using those wagon wheels as air intakes and towers as jet engines is brilliant. I can see how the alternate model might be a bit underwhelming though. While well built, it IS yet another gatehouse. And the minifigures don't seem to offer any exclusive face or armor designs either, though that's not a bad thing as far as army-building is concerned. I do think some of the building techniques in both models are quite classy. The stonework on either side of the gate itself is nice (we've been seeing a lot of that lately in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit sets), and the textures above the gate are very impressive. The "flying chariot" mode also incorporates a curved railing using similar techniques to those on display in 10223 Kingdoms Joust and 10224 Town Hall, which is a somewhat more complex building technique than we often see in Castle sets. This will be a great source of blue double cheese slopes and flags for people who want to retrofit their old Kingdoms sets into the new Castle color scheme, and I appreciate that the flags have the same pattern as the ones in the Gatehouse Raid, though I'm sure people would appreciate that more if they were printed instead of stickered. It's a shame this set doesn't seem to have connection points to attach to other castle sets using the current modular design, though for MOCists that shouldn't be a problem. It also looks like it has at least two Reddish Brown 3M bars (the shorter "lightsaber blade" elements used frequently in the Collectible Minifigures). I kind of wonder what role, if any, this structure will have in the LEGO Movie. Will there be a "Castle zone" of the movie's universe, or is it just in the city, and are the knights real knights or reenactors? Talking about Castle so much really makes me wish I had the space and budget to collect castle sets anymore... I used to love building castles when I was a kid, but these days Ninjago and Hero Factory eat up too much of my space and budget for me to commit to yet another theme (and my basement's too much of a wreck to build anything on that sort of scale anyhow). Maybe I ought to dabble in castle building in LDD more often...

It's kind of funny how many different opinions I've heard about the Legend Beasts. Very few people seem to like ALL of them, but which they like varies greatly. Opinions seem to differ the most about the gorilla — some people consider it the absolute worst, while others think it's one of the best. Personally, I like it, but I've never been good at picking favorites so I can't say how it ranks compared to the others. I can say that the first I get will be either the wolf or the lion since those have the new joints in the largest quantities. I've built the wolf on LDD with some substitutions and it's definitely a lovely design. Very sleek and streamlined design. The lion's a bit harder for me to evaluate since its mane and legs obscure a lot of its body in all the pics we've seen. It looks like the top of the box shows it from the side, so if I see it in a store I'll be able to compare the wolf and lion more effectively.

Well, we'll see. One other issue with the skeleton torso these figs use is that the shoulders are higher up than the ones on the Ninjago skeleton torsos. This means armor that covers the shoulders severely limits their range of movement, except (presumably) armor like these sets have which is designed to fit over this torso's shoulders. I encountered this problem when I tried to whip up some "placeholder" Hero minifigures for a couple MOCs a while back. Actually, the upper and lower jaws ARE different pieces. It's most apparent in the pics of Splitter Beast vs. Furno and Evo, since the two heads are built differently — one uses "jaw mold A" for its upper jaw and "jaw mold B" for its lower jaw, and the other uses "jaw mold B" for its upper jaw and "jaw mold A" for its lower jaw. I'm having a hard time telling for sure if that's the case. Certainly there are no connection points designed specifically for regular minifigures, since the heroes are mounted in by their armor. But their armor should fit on regular figs. So the question is, how tight is the cockpit around the heroes' hips? It should only take a bit of wiggle room for a minifigure to fit. My brother also points out that a minifigure could be held in by the controls if all else fails.

I thought the torso piece used for the heroes was already apparent to everyone. What do you mean by "a shame"? I think it's a pretty ingenious parts use myself, although I was initially a little surprised they didn't use the thicker and more angular skeleton body piece from Ninjago (normally, minifigure armor will wobble on an old-school skeleton body since it's thinner than a minifigure body, something the Ninjago skeleton bodies addressed, although I can now see that the torso armor will probably fit tight around the flat end of the shoulders to prevent wobbling. Not just small, but more importantly, they have well-defined edges and corners. Small stickers with rounded edges, or which don't cover a surface from edge to edge, can be infuriating to line up correctly on a piece. But these look like they shouldn't pose a real problem.

He's Nuju Metru from BZPower, and he's still active there, though as far as I can tell he hasn't posted a full review (text+pictures) anywhere. Great MOCist. I've met him at Brickfair although we've never chatted a whole lot... that's more my fault than his. I'm a bit of an introvert and always feel really awkward at Brickfair even when I'm having a good time. EDIT: Ninja'd.

Could just be a preliminary version of Stormer Freeze Machine. That's the most likely possibility, I'd say.

I had little doubt there would be stickers after seeing the high-resolution images from Walmart.ca, and that doubt went away entirely when I realized they were included in the piece counts of Furno and Evo's machines. I don't mind at all, personally. There are some instances where applying stickers is bothersome, but small surfaces with straight, well-defined edges and corners are not one of them. The set looks awesome in these photos, and the jumpers and mini-robots are nicely designed.

And here's the alternate build! https://fbcdn-photos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/s720x720/1469992_10151823121003403_1841700271_n.jpg

Well, the Toa Nuva and Av-Matoran used the same connector piece, actually. It was only the Makuta and Shadow Matoran that used the L-shaped piece. I'm pretty sure the Hero names on the windscreens are stickers, so that wouldn't be too hard to customize. The stripes and font are plain enough to replicate without too much hassle. You're right about the printed shells, though. Transparent Blue could maybe work, yeah, probably with a number of Titanium Metallic parts as well. I don't know how I'd like an Earth Blue mech for Stringer, though. It just seems like it'd be quite drab when I try to picture it in my head.

I don't see any problem with the crane in Town Square. The scale is quite realistic for that type of crane (much more so than the XXL Mobile Crane from the City theme's debut in 2005). And in general, I don't think LEGO Friends has had much impact at all on what kind of sets we see in LEGO City. A lot of people thought that it might in its first year when we saw things that echoed previous City sets like a horse trailer, a speedboat, and a camper van/RV. But this year, there's a camper van/RV in the Great Vehicles subtheme, and an even more elaborate one than the last one to appear in LEGO City. Clearly LEGO Friends didn't get in the way of that. Beyond a handful of vehicle sets, LEGO Friends doesn't seem to be stepping on the toes of LEGO City much at all. The content of LEGO Friends is typically very different than what we were seeing in LEGO City beforehand, so I don't think it's reasonable to assume that LEGO Friends is what's been stopping LEGO City from including useful new buildings.

Actually, one of the things I like about Legends of Chima is that you CAN mix-and-match the parts of several of the figures to get less specific characters so long as they have the same scale/feather/fur colors. With that said, some of the minor characters who are never called out by name in the show can effectively be used as "generic" figures. As with the lower-ranking Serpentine and skeletons from Ninjago, the only reason the LEGO Group even bothers giving names and personalities to many of these characters is so that they seem more desirable and can be given unique branding when sold individually as spinner/Speedorz sets. This way, kids will feel like their Crug, Lennox, and Winzar Speedorz have just as much unique identity as more important named characters like Crominus, Razar, and Skinnet. They get lots of wonderful facts about each character to memorize, helping to draw them deeper into the story. Plus, it helps to have specific names for the cards used in Spinjitzu and Speedorz gameplay. But as far as the actual storyline is concerned, the unique "identities" of many of these characters are effectively irrelevant. Note that the 2013 Ninjago sets, released after TLG stopped doing spinner sets, stopped giving names to any enemy figures other than General Kozu, instead merely identifying them by rank. The 2014 sets don't even offer that luxury — there are four distinct Nindroid designs, but only General Cryptor gets a proper name, while the lower-ranking baddies are referred to interchangeably as Nindroids. And one of these generic Nindroid varieties does go the "mix-and-match" variety, using printed parts from the other two Nindroid varieties together with a generic pair of short black legs. Even the Ninja heroes are identified more generically than they once were — starting in 2013, new costumes for the Ninja were no longer given distingishing names like "DX", "Kendo", "ZX", and "NRG": even unique variants are simply identified as Kai, Zane, Cole, Jay, and Lloyd.

Ah, OK. To be honest I'm slightly disappointed. I had misinterpreted the pics we'd seen of Splitter Beast before (I'd thought those talons/stingers on the back were more like wings, and for some reason thought there were four of them instead of just two) so the two resulting figures would BOTH be pretty formidable: one would be a burly land-based threat and the other an agile aerial threat. Instead, it DOES end up reminiscent of the Shadow Matoran in that the smaller figure is only really fearsome and impressive-looking when combined with the larger one, and on its own it seems a little bit plain. Granted, I understand that the idea I had might not have even been viable at the $20 price point. And funnily enough, this set gives us something I've been wanting for quite some time — a smaller-scale figure. So I suppose I just let my expectations of the set get a bit carried away. It's still probably my favorite of the "beasts". Seeing the hero mini-robots from the front, it's good to see their proportions are pretty good. The length of each leg is only slightly shorter than half the height of the figure, and since the knees of the hero legs have an inherent bend to them, I'd say that makes them not unlike the proportions of a typical 2.0 or 3.0 hero set. Not quite as short and stout as the 1.0 heroes, nor as tall and lanky as the medium-sized Breakout heroes. One other observation I would make about the back of Splitter Beast's packaging — there are no advertisements for a combi model or alternate model of any kind. That doesn't mean there won't be any — after all, the 2012 sets' packaging didn't show off the combi models either. And if we're lucky, maybe we'll see a return to the level of originality in the 2012 combi models. This year's combi models, in spite of their better-coordinated colors, were fairly bland "armor enhancements" to each of the heroes instead of completely original models with unique builds. The 2012 combi models were criticized heavily for having disjointed color schemes and not using a whole lot of the parts from each set, but they were certainly more imaginative. On an unrelated note, I wish I could find a site that had pics of the American packaging for 44015 and 44016, so we could know their piece counts. By my count each has 49-50 pieces, which is comparable to the better piece counts for the $10 price point in the 2013 lineup. The larger sets naturally have a better price-per-piece since they have more parts overall to offset the larger and more expensive parts, but the sets still seem more or less equitable.

Nin-JAH-go (with the stress on the second-to-last syllable) is how it's pronounced when referring to the theme or the setting. But the two-word phrase "Ninja GO!" appears frequently in the show, in the promotional songs, and in the gameplay directions for the spinner sets.