Aanchir

The figure designs here seem pretty strong in terms of appearance and accuracy, but overall I can't help but feel like this pack lacks the "oomph" that the Ninjago Brickmaster set has, with its much more unique character designs and far more elaborate printing, including printing on the sides of the legs and/or arms for almost every character. Here, 3/4 of the characters are redesigns of previous minifigs (granted, two of those redesigns were long overdue and improve greatly on the versions that preceded them), and all but Umbridge have unprinted legs and arms in existing colors, rather than new prints or even recolors. What's more, the Boggart Snape minifigure even uses the same face print as the Snape minifigure from regular sets, whereas in the Ninjago pack even the Oni Mask of Hatred (which appears in two other sets) was given a brand-new printed facial expression. And Slughorn's hair seems to be not only the same color but also the same printed pattern as Jim Gordon's from The LEGO Batman Movie. As a whole, this pack only includes 10 new printed and/or recolored elements, whereas the Ninjago pack had 15. Assuming that the designers could have had access to just as many new elements for this pack, I think they may have been better off choosing characters who might actually need that many new elements and/or an extraordinary level of printed detail on those new elements (and as such, who would be harder to include in regular sets). That said, I am going to disagree about the 2010 Madam Hooch having better torso printing. To be honest I think it's a big improvement in this case to eliminate the printed waistline. While I'm not against printed waistlines on female minifigures on principle, I think they only really make sense for characters in more form-fitting outfits, rather than those with loose robes like Madam Hooch wears in the movies. It is a bit peculiar that she has a printed waistline on the back of her torso and not the front, though — not that it makes a big difference when she's wearing her cape. Good review overall, though! I can see this being a popular set with LEGO Harry Potter fans, especially those who are only beginning their collection with this year's sets and missed out on previous versions of these characters.

There's a good chance that the main products (other than limited exclusives like this) will be playsets — in the very least, we know there will be minifigures of some of the characters based on the Tracer teaser video that came out earlier. But at the same time, bigger robot characters like Bastion and Orisa would probably be completely or mostly brick-built even in playsets, same as bigger robots and mechs in other themes like Ninjago, Nexo Knights, and Super Heroes. They are too big and bulky to work very well as traditional minifigures or skeletal Battle Droid/General Grievous type figures, and molded "bigfigs" are typically reserved for characters who need a more lifelike appearance rather than characters that are mechanical to begin with.

Whoa, this might be one of the most creative ways I've seen of building a MOC with detail both above and below the water line! Great trees as well! And I love how well this vignette tells a complete story and requires no additional explanation to understand exactly what is going on. Phenomenal work!

Yeah, it's not unorthodox for supporting characters (especially female supporting characters…) to go missing in a theme's planned final wave. Consider how the 2013 Ninjago "The Final Battle" sets didn't include any version of Nya whatsoever, or how the 2008 Exo-Force "Deep Jungle" sets didn't include Hitomi. If this WAS the intended final wave, then size/budget constraints alone would have required the designers to be selective about what characters made an appearance.

I was impressed with these designs even when we first saw them, but seeing them from more angles, the level of detail is amazing. Almost every one of the figures has printing on the sides of their arms and/or legs, and none of them seem to reuse an existing print — even Harumi's Oni Mask of Hatred has a different expression than in the main sets! The gender balance in this set is also nice, although as unrealistic as it would be for a primarily boy-targeted property, I kind of wish that Mohawk had been swapped for one of the female Sons of Garmadon bikers seen in the TV series, just by virtue of the main sets not having any female 'grunt-level' bikers. Hope I can find an affordable way to get my hands on this!

Overall it's pretty rare for there to be a lot of Halloween-related sets besides the low-priced seasonal items at LEGO stores (in the case of this year, the BrickHeadz Witch). 2015 was something of an anomaly, what with the launch of the Scooby-Doo theme, a ghost-themed wave in LEGO Ninjago, a skeleton-themed wave in LEGO Bionicle, a Monsters series of collectible minifigures, and a Halloween-themed build for the Creator 3-in-1 Changing Seasons set. But there wasn't really any other year with a similar variety of new spooky stuff all coming out in the second half of the year. But that's extraordinarily rare — even 2012, when the Monster Fighters theme came out, didn't have nearly that much variety of spooky stuff. Also, there are several non-Halloween-specific sets with decidedly spooky vibes that have been released in the past several months: off the top of my head, the Skull Arena from LEGO Minecraft, the Jack Skellington and Sally set from LEGO BrickHeadz, the Emily and Noctura's Showdown set from LEGO Elves.

This isn't the first time LEGO has been absent from NYCC. They also had a gap in attendance in 2012 when they instead put that part of their North American marketing budget towards the life-size LEGO X-Wing unveiling in Times Square. If I had to guess what might have taken priority over NYCC this year, I'd suspect that LEGO may be planning a surprise appearance at BlizzCon to unveil the Overwatch building sets. BlizzCon happens next month, and on their Saturday schedule, in addition to the main "Artist at Work" behind-the-scenes panels for each of their big game properties (including Overwatch), there's a panel titled "Overwatch: Building a Hero", summarized as "Ever wonder how Overwatch heroes are made? Join the developers as they show us what it takes to make heroes come to life." The description is ambiguous enough that it could be describing either game developers or physical product developers such as LEGO, but the use of the title "Building a Hero" for something SEPARATE from the character design panel earlier in the afternoon makes me think that it's going to be something different than a regular game or character design panel. Someone on Brickset forums says that Marcos Bessa has debunked the rumors of BrickHeadz ending, but I don't know their source. It'd be incredibly weird for a theme's final year to be as big as this year's BrickHeadz lineup, though. Most themes wind down towards the end, rather than ramping up and then blinking out abruptly.

Honestly I think The LEGO Movie 2 will probably play a bigger role in precluding new action and adventure themes for at least a little while than any of the licenses mentioned, particularly since so many of the new action/adventure themes in the past decade have been "big bang" properties. The whole idea of a "big bang" theme is that LEGO makes its launch one of their biggest priorities across all their departments… but to date, in years that new LEGO movies launch, those tend to take priority over any other new themes, even new licensed properties. Also, as far as licenses go, we still have no idea how extensive the Overwatch sets will be or what demographic they'll be targeted at — just that they will encompass "a range of price points". And it's not as though we don't have existing themes leaving the scene that might free up room for additional in-house and licensed properties: Elves and Nexo Knights both seem to be ending this year, and the same can probably be assumed of The LEGO Batman Movie. The Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts and Jurassic World lines may also diminish in size, as licensed themes have often been known to do in non-movie years. Overall, though, the sheer variety of subject matter and marketing strategies that the Action/Adventure Themes category encompasses makes it hard to predict when or how a niche might open up for a new one. It's not a category as clearly defined as castle/knight themes, which for several years now have been released according to a more or less predictable pattern regardless of potential overlap with licensed themes, or Space themes, which have pretty consistently taken a back seat to Star Wars in the years of or between new Star Wars movie releases.

Apologies. I didn’t recognize it as a joke, particularly considering how often I see AFOLs complain about either kids today being dumber than kids in previous decases, or LEGO designing sets and instruction manuals as if they are. I was in no way trying to brag or show off, just to push back against the tendency of adults in general to disparage younger generations and the quality of the stuff targeted at them.

Bummed that Stitch didn't make it, since I have a lot more childhood nostalgia for Lilo and Stitch than The Flintstones (and tend to love cute buildable creatures/characters in general). But I'll grant that the Flintstones project was brilliantly designed in terms of feeling both authentic to the source material and like a real LEGO playset. I was never too excited for the treehouse, since my taste in treehouses tends to skew more towards a sense of colorful fun and whimsy like we see in Elves, Creator, and Friends treehouses rather than this model's gritty earth tones and survivalist lifestyle, but it being approved should at least help keep fans of non-licensed projects happy.

The price seems fairly reasonable to me considering how much of the build appears to be made of rather large pieces (layered 3x12 wedges, 6x12 plates, 8x16 plates, 8x8x6 mountain bricks, etc). If the piece count seemed to be mostly small, basic bricks in large quantities like 21030, then yeah, $130 would feel excessive, and I'd expect a more reasonable price point to be $100 or lower. But 12.3 cents per piece isn't unheard of by licensed OR non-licensed standards, and there have certainly been no shortage of Star Wars sets with a worse price per piece, including ones like Home One, Jabba's Palace, and Ewok Village. Anyway, I think the designers did a really good job here. It's very recognizable even from its brief appearance in Rogue One and includes enough interior detail to recreate some very familiar scenes.

Yeah, I agree that Nexo Knights makes more sense in Action/Adventure. Like Ninjago, it's very much a collision of myth-and-magic rich fantasy (magic tomes, necromancers, vampires, occult monsters), high-tech science fiction (laser cannons, holograms, hover technology), and modern-day cultural references (movies, video games, TV news networks). Purely based on definitions, I would be sooner to question whether Aquazone belongs here, since it has no obvious fantasy elements like monsters, magic, or strange superpowers. The closest it comes is its oxygen-providing Hydrolator crystals, which aren't too much more fantastical than the energy-providing crystals in various Space themes, and the inclusion of modern-day Earth creatures like sharks, rays, and octopus despite the setting being neither blatantly Earth-based NOR obviously extraterrestrial. At the same time, I understand the value of keeping the underwater themes together aside from the licensed or real life based ones.

That definitely describes a part that's coming out, but no telling if it will be for a Ninjago character or something totally different like Super Heroes.

With some of those like Fusion they were clearly handled as risky experimental ventures (small number of sets limited to a specific market without a lot of new costs associated with the physical side of the product). I don't know if Fusion overall was a massive failure, but the Fusion Create and Race set definitely was, being pulled from both shelves and the app store ahead of the rest of the line since the experience was generally regarded as sub-par. That said, with some of those sorts of ventures, particularly those involving physical/digital integration, the benefits are just as much about learning lessons that can be applied to future innovations as about how the products themselves end up performing.

If the name is in fact Series 19 it will certainly be a non-licensed series, but no telling whether it might have a "theme" not tied to any specific product line like the Birthday Party theme of Series 18 or the Monsters theme of Series 14.

I was recently reviewing some series from past years and it occurred to me that ever since LEGO switched to just one non-licensed series per year, the series number has corresponded to the year of release (Series 17 in 2017, Series 18 in 2018, Series 19 in 2019). I wonder if that's deliberate? I imagine that sort of system would probably help more casual LEGO fans keep track of new series… after all, even as a really dedicated LEGO fan I've been known to lose track of which series came out in which years or what the current/latest series number is…

A stokes basket would be a neat new element, though at the same time I can sort of see why LEGO continues using the outdated stretcher piece — even growing up the 90s it was the type of stretcher I was familiar with from video games, cartoons, etc, and for most of my life if you showed me a stokes basket even in the context of a firefighting toy, I probably would have had no idea what it was or thought it was some strange foreign version of a stretcher. Even when technologies update it can take much longer for the iconic image people associate with those technologies often stay the same — after all, just think about how long the image of the rotary phone remained well-known and understood even though touch-tone telephones have been the norm since the 60s, or for that matter how many electronic devices today still use the image of a floppy disk to represent saving, the image of a traditional phone handset to represent making calls, the image of a physical envelope to represent e–mail or instant messaging, etc. And this is especially true for technologies people aren't used to seeing on a routine basis. Even with toys aimed at really young kids who haven't had as much time to learn what stuff was like when their parents were young, think about how massively outdated so many of the technologies in Fabuland sets (cars, trucks, garage doors, planes, windmills, motorcycles, refrigerators, telephones, lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, etc) were even by 80s standards! And growing up over a decade after Fabuland's beginnings, I was still subjected to a lot of the same media (Richard Scarry, Dr. Seuss, classic Disney, etc) that probably had a profound influence on the Fabuland aesthetic, picking up a lot of the same cues about how to recognize objects I might not often see in real life!

Or LEGO just has a clearer idea of what people of different ages tend to enjoy. Recommended age ranges aren’t always based on complexity — even the earliest, mind-bogglingly simple Architecture sets of 2008 like https://brickset.com/sets/21001-1/John-Hancock-Center and https://brickset.com/sets/21000-1/Sears-Tower were recommended for ages 10+. And anyhow, if it were just about ability to build the set, no set would need an UPPER limit on age recommendations. Yet LEGO knows that a 10-year-old is unlikely to get the same enjoyment out of a Juniors set as a 5-year-old, and that a 20-year-old might prefer a Creator Expert building over a Creator 3-in-1 set. As for the Creator Expert branding, that’s more or less just a rebrand of the once-nameless category of sets that Brickset calls “Advanced Models”. It’s less meant to suggest you need to be an expert builder to make them than that they have a level of complexity and/or detail that older builders tend to enjoy more than the expressly kid-targeted builds in themes like Creator 3-in-1, Friends, or City.

I definitely intend to keep trying to come up with Elves stories and MOCs. One nice thing about a theme ending is that you have complete creative free rein instead of having to worry about whether future stories and sets either contradict the adventures you have envisioned or cover similar ground that make your adventure scenarios feel redundant. Like, I really want to think about what kind of adventures Emily and her elf friends might have that would bring them to unexplored parts of Elvendale we’ve seen on the magical map, like the Desertlands or to the mermaid homeland out at sea. And as an Emzari shipper I also want to think about how Emily and Azari’s relationship might continue to evolve in the future. Also, what became of the other three sisters from the legend? There’s got to be some stories there! What other sorts of fantasy creatures and settings could Elvendale have that we haven’t yet seen? Ancient ruins? Baby Pegasi? Lighthouses? Sea serpents? Volcano castles? Catamarans? Dryads/tree spirits? Monuments? Oasis towns? Shops selling armor and adventure gear? Stone giants? Sunken cities? Wishing wells? Schools of magic? Even though LEGO Elves told a complete story without touching on those things that doesn’t mean there’s no room to create new stories that do. It’ll be a fun challenge! And I’m not ready to say goodbye to this world and it’s characters quite yet.

Neat to see a scene from American history that doesn't revolve around one of the many wars we've been in! Good recreation of the scene as well!

To be honest, what strikes me about the intended market is something very different — namely, that the branding seems vastly more gender-balanced than the hyper-masculine branding of other themes based on the same building system like Technic, Bionicle, and Mindstorms. In fact, I think the fact that this topic was created here in Special Themes rather than in the Technic forum really showcases how much different an impression it creates. And anyhow, I don't feel as though targeting adults with something that's essentially a desk toy is that different than the market strategy for LEGO Architecture — except that again, Architecture tends to skew more masculine and serious in its branding, whereas this theme's branding is more artsy and playful. Architecture sets, of course, are also perfectly static display pieces with little to no play element beyond the building experience and their value as parts packs, whereas these have both a mechanized play feature and some additional creative play potential (as far as the Ink Koi skin pack goes, with its adult coloring book pattern). Beyond that, I think a lot of people are overstating how specialized the foil parts in these sets are. Certainly they're designed for these particular sorts of models, but flexible parts can be extremely versatile in MOCs due to their lack of a fixed shape, and anyhow it's not as though LEGO themes never make such extensive use of parts with very specific intended uses. Pirates in particular comes to mind, with most LEGO pirate ships employing boat hull, rowboat, mast, sail, cannon, and rigging elements designed particularly for use as boat hulls, rowboats, masts, sails, cannons, and rigging. Sure, these parts have other potential uses, just as these new plastic panels might, but that doesn't change how specific their primary intended uses are.

Sure, there's all kinds of places it could be, and I doubt LEGO is ever going to want it pinned down to one specific place — it's just that the North American east coast encompasses a lot of places that are compatible with the time difference from LA and Tokyo as shown on that sticker. I suppose "may be canon" was poor word choice on my part, though.

Awesome MOC! Personally I always envisioned more curvy, streamlined high-speed trains as the best fit for the Heartlake City aesthetic, but it is neat to see that a more vintage sort of train can also be adapted to a Heartlake City setting. One thing I might suggest is to perhaps incorporate more contrasting colors. While Friends definitely does tend to include more purples and pinks than City/Town, it also tends to have a big emphasis on color harmonies. For instance, consider how the plane in Heartlake City Airport juxtaposes Medium Lavender with contrasting Flame Yellowish Orange accents and LOTS of white, or how Heartlake Private Jet has a triadic color scheme of Medium Azur, Flame Yellowish Orange, and Bright Reddish Violet. By contrast, this train's current color scheme is almost monochromatic, with only a few Bright Reddish Violet pieces offering a contrast in hue. I think perhaps the best way to remedy this on this model while keeping the same overall look might actually be to add some Bright Yellow, Flame Yellowish Orange, or Warm Gold accents sort of like that gorgeous Atlantic Coast Line train @zephyr1934 linked above! As a bonus, the decorated 2x2 tile you're currently using already has some Flame Yellowish Orange accents, so adding more bricks in that or a similar color will help that element fit in even better! Believe it or not this actually appears as though it may be LEGO Friends canon, at least for the sets — the clock sticker in Heartlake Grand Hotel shows the time as 3 hours ahead of Los Angeles, putting it in the Eastern Time Zone (UTC-05:00).

Very cool MOC! Though, I do think the balance of the colors somewhat detracts from the "Classic Space" aesthetic, particularly how little grey there is. I wonder if it might look better with the "pizza slices" in grey to better evoke the wedge-shaped wings of Classic Space vehicles and to better contrast with the main circular section in blue. Bonus points for the Classic Space style droid and yellow spaceman taking the place of R2-D2 and C-3PO!

Brickset gets its minifigure data from BrickLink, which has long had a fairly generous definition of what they consider a minifigure (for example, brick-built droids from Classic Space sets have long been listed as minifigs on BrickLink, as have other figure types like Duplo and Fabuland figures). It goes without saying that the Minifigures theme has typically stuck to a much stricter definition of "Minifigure" — the furthest any have deviated from a standard head-torso-legs build is Maggie from The Simpsons series, who has both a unique head and a unique one-piece body. Yet even in that case her head and body are analogous in function to a traditional minifigure head and torso. This is partly a practical consideration — since each series of minifigures gets a shared instruction/checklist leaflet, it would be inconvenient to have to have separate instructions for wildly different builds in the same series (although, some of the more recent series there have been up to seven figures requiring more specific instructions due to increasingly varied neck and hip accessories).