Mmm, LEGO castle has taken a turn this year. What you see here is a preliminary image of set #7946, the large flagship set for the castle range in 2010. Usually, when prelims are leaked from The LEGO Group, fans and collectors have a negative reaction to them. Often there is no justification for these negative comments as the pictures are often small, blurry and half covered by the TLG watermark. Not to mention that a preliminary design often contains certain elements that are 'stand-ins' and will not be found in the final design. The minifigures are sometimes not the final design either and sometimes use pieces found in other themes or even a liberal use of stickers to convey what the final design will look like. Stickering of figs never fails to spark huge arguments regarding whether or not TLG is (OMFG) going to start using stickers on all their figs and will ultimately go out of business because of it.
The images have been online for a couple of days now and only a few fan sites are comfortable discussing what they're seeing but insofar, the 2010 castle line up is getting pretty not bad reviews. Surprisingly.
My opinion is: I'm excited. There is less of a fantasy element to the theme, not that I don't like fantasy, I just prefer a more realistic element. The new line up harkens back to a day of my childhood where I used to play with my Star Wars action figures, Transformers and my LEGO castle sets.
From what i've seen so far i'm not impressed. I'm no fantasy buff, but over the months I really came to appreciate the Fantasy Era subtheme of the Castle genre, and I think -this is something many will say- it'll be hard to follow on from.
ReplyDeleteI do agree about the kind of symbolic return to the older days of the theme however, and that's evident with the sparring human factions and I think the set design. My biggest concern is the packaging and art used here- compared to previous years, it's incredibly bright, so i'm not sure if that will alienate some or not.
A hard act to follow is right! I thought most, if not all, of the sets in the last castle theme were terrific. My biggest nitpick about them probably was that the fans thought that it was all about LOTR and forgot that dwarfs trolls and the various other creatures were around LONG before JRR 'invented' them. TLG was simply using the current interest in LOTR to sell sets, but IMO the idea has run it's course and needed to be refreshed. I don't think my comments are clouded by my dislike of LOTR but I could be wrong.
ReplyDelete