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- A Review - Subtitled: “Amok with Spoilers” You know, in preparation for Star Wars Episode 7, I rewatched every Star Wars movie. Except The Clone Wars, because, I mean, it’s just not relevant to me. After spending three days watching all six movies, and then the seventh one twice in a row, constantly just shoving endless Star Wars characters, planets, history, lightsabers, flat acting, etc. down my throat, I realized something. It was time for a break from Star Wars. So took a break I did. And for two and a half thousand years, Star Wars passed out of all my knowledge. Until, when chance came, it ensnared another bearer. And that bearer was...me. I...I went to see Star Wars a few days ago. ‘Cause, I mean, it’s a good movie. Let me have my fun, stop judging me. And I also bought this set, this “Battle of Tacos Dana”, with my mind fresh on Star Wars, like the fresh wintry landscape of...wait what’s that planet’s name? Was it really called “Starkiller Base”? Really? Alright, okay. So, buckle your space seatbelts, as I shamelessly replicate my last semi-successful review - the Imperial Shuttle. Here we go! Where’s that picture of a mountain… Oh, there it is. Meet Derwent Water, everybody, an absolutely beautiful and serene English landscape, where apparently the entirety of the planet, yes, a solar body, is sustained in. I knew I could fit a mountain in here somewhere. I’m not just going to disregard this location either - I will be comparing this image to this set quite profusely and unfairly. And I don’t care, because I love me some English landscapes. So, let’s crack this egg review open, separate out the yolk from the whites, toss away the yolk, stir up the whites, add a little bit of salt and pepper, toss ‘em on the frying pan, and make some eggs! Name: JackJonespaw. Oh, wait, you mean of the set? “Battle of Takodana” Hm. Real Creative. Randomly Generated Number: Seven Five One Three Nine Theme: First Composed by John Williams in the Late Seventies Year: I want to say 2016, but I really have no idea. Minifigurettos: 5 of them. Pieces: 409 Price: £49.99 / $59.99 I Could Have Just Put This Link at the Beginning You’re probably asking yourself - gee, what picture will he start with first? The final product? A albatross? Nope, just the nice little (big) box here. Once you remove the pieces, the box itself is actually pretty weightless, the perfect thing to throw at someone if you want to make a point and get their attention, but don’t want to permanently cripple their head/brain. As you can see, the box features some nice Lego placement, something that I could never replicate in my opening picture. But...something does bug me about this art. Do you see ol’ Kylo Ren up there, looking out at us with his nice red laser beam? Okay, great. A light beam would cast shadows outwards, right? You don’t need to tell me, I already know. So why is the little slope piece right next to his lightsaber casting a shadow...on his lightsaber? Yet look down there by Finn - his shadow is repelled towards us, like it’s the lightsaber that’s casting the shadow, which makes nice sense. But then on the fallen tree, the leaves’ shadows are right under them, with little to none angle...where is that light coming from?! You probably think this is nitpicking, but I guarantee, given enough time to think of a nice lie, I could find a connection between this and the rapidly increasing price-per-piece ratio. Look at this graph. Some poor fool over at Wired did this. I have no idea what any of it means, but it seems relatively relevant. Moving on, we now have our minifigures. In my last review, I wondered why the minifigures had a glow about them - disgusting new Chewie had blue, the rest had an orange glow. Some guy on Eurobricks (the site is literally down right now, so I can’t look up his name, and we both know I won’t go back later and change this, but if you’re reading this, you know exactly who you are) told me that it was because the orange figures were new, and only poop-colored Chewie was old - hence the blue. Got it? Great. Take that knowledge and toss it out your window. Or throw it away, if you’re like me, and for some reason your windows are bolted shut somehow that you can’t figure out, no matter how badly you’d love to feel that nice cool winter wind on your face as you type away at your computer like an insane fool about glows behind minifigures on a cardboard Lego box. Excuse me, have to...uh...I had a thing in my throat. Like I was saying, that knowledge is irrelevant now. The blue colors mean new, so for Maz and Sir Ren, they are glowing blue, but for the rest, ol’ Boyega and his ex-coworkers, they don’t get as much as a little ambient glow. What’s next is the side of the box. It’s...it’s the side of the box. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. Moving….on! This is where the real potatoes come on out to play here - the mufflefracking back of the box, kiddies! A nice different shot of the set with cool lightsaber graphics! Useless top view hologram-type picture with weird sideways lantern-pillar shot! What? I don’t get it! Do you? Why are there soundwaves coming out of some random point in the top left? Why does one part of the pillar-lantern have a rectangle over it? Weapons! Guns, sabers, large white and black stick! Kylo Ren is from heaven! I think...I don’t remember the scene in the movie where he stands in front of a glowing doorway. If you look over to the right, you can seen Maz using the Force to do something to a Stormtrooper. Is that just me? Why else would the Stormtrooper being in the pose, dropping his gun? That scene wasn’t in the movie. Lego needs to work on their representation of these Star Wars characters - just because Maz is short, wise, and old, doesn’t make her Yoda. Come on, Lego! Here we have some shots of the “play features” of the set. Don’t look too close, boy and girls, because I will be going into depth with these later! Don’t look! Stop it! STOP! Okay, one of you looked too closely. Get out. This is my review, I make the rules here. Get out, seriously, man. I ain’t playing with you. Bye-bye. Go buy this set if you want, see if I care. I don’t care. Now for all of you who actually followed the rules, let’s keep going. Instruction Manual! I don’t know how much this weighs, so don’t ask. We’ve got Kaelow Rhin at the top again, with his fluttering lightsaber and enough particles to satiate even the most ambitious of visual effectists. Same art as on the front of the box, standard stuff here. Flip it over, and we get...a robot? I don’t remember this guy. Everyone remembers the happy Win kid (Gwin something? I can’t remember). At some point they moved on to just a normal, happy minifig - which makes sense, don’t want to show any favoritism to that one kid - who knows what happened to him. But now it seems like they killed the minifig and replaced him with a cold, hard, steel robot. To each their own, I guess. But, like, what happened to the happiness of the old guys? Right now, I have the instruction manual with ol’ real happy kid here...and I want to win. With this robot, it feels like I have to win. But not by my choice. He is just my new Robotic overlord. So, once we stopped complaining about menial details, pop open that booklet, and we see Hannibal and his bags. I made a joke about this in the last review, so I’ll just copy it over here: "There's a fun little graphic of Mr. Fig here opening a box full of what he's made of. Don't think about that too much, or it'll be a human opening numbered bags of livers and digestive tracts. I'm pretty sure there was an episode of Hannibal about that." Pretty funny guy here. I wish I had his creativity. What I do have is a nice picture of the instruction manual here - page 41, not that that’s relevant, but I figured I’d just choose my favorite page for you guys. See, here, you get to put some pretty irrelevant bricks onto a structure...for support, maybe? Not super sure about what the purpose is. There’s really nothing about any instruction manual that someone, somewhere, hasn’t said. So let’s pop this baby open and see who’s lurking inside! Bags 3 in the box do lie. Cardboard, standard deal here. I really wish there was more here than there is. The price really comes down to the minifigs you get in this set - not so much the set itself. More on that later, I promise. Once you spill out Bag 1, you get this picture. I try and replicate the feeling of Legos that you’d actually get - no one really lays out each and every brick unless they’re going to take a picture for a review. I want to reinstate that classic feeling of ripping a bag open and searching for each piece for a good minute until you find it and start the next minute-long search for another piece. Color-wise, we have gray, tan, and lighter gray. Some other orange color, and I have no idea what that color’s called. I think of cake when I see it, so from now one the name of that color is cake. Slap a few pieces, flip a few instruction pages, and you get this really promising structure. This really is just securing the structure - a totally different feeling than you’d get with a starfighter ship - while those usually build from the inside out, these always build from the ground up. As such, the more playset playsets, versus the ships, have more room to pop in totally useless 2x4 red bricks. I know no one can see them once the structure is complete, but something about it just...ah. I don’t get it. It ruins the integrity of the canonical structure. But hot damn if these Stormtroopers aren’t sexy! I remember seeing the trailer for Episode 7, in late November of 2014, and seeing that short clip of the Stormtroopers and instantly falling in love - it’s a bit of a combination of the late-Clone Wars Clone Trooper and the OT stormtroopers. And it’s absolutely wonderful and translates very very well into Lego form. One of these guys comes with the lightsaber electric heavy stick that he fights Finn with. Interesting not here - this guy actually has a name - FN-2199, old comrade of Finn here. nicknamed “Nines”. Man, I love Star Wars. there’s a name for everything and everyone. Back in build town, we cover up those nasty red bricks with some good ol’ tan plates, basically building up the structure more. Believe me, as legitimate as that last sentence sounded, I’m internally screaming in anger at the blandness of this build. If you throw 2199 and his buddy around, you see the fantastic backprinting. In terms of design, it works, both in this form and in the actual costume. I don’t know, man, I just really like Stormtroopers. Sue me. Now now nowwe get some cool building - a weird triangle building doorway shape plus a sticker, going from solidifying the base to building up the...well, building. Is good stuff here. Beneath the helmets, we get Standard Angry Lego Face #8, two of them, in fact. I kinda miss the old days of just a black head, something about it fit much better than these weird generic angry faces. Bag 2 everybody. What surprises lie beneath/in these bricks? Well, Bag 2 holds two of the three reasons anyone would buy this set at all - and those first two are: Finn and Kylo Ren, two pretty big main characters in the movie. Unfortunately, this is the cheapest set that you can get these guys in. I’ll talk more about each figure individually, but since this is the only picture I actually took with Ren’s helmet on, it would be wrong to not discuss it for a little bit. Here we go: I like it. Okay, moving on. So on the build, we throw two sides of a door behind the doorway, as would make since, and later they’ll slide open magically in that special way that only Star Wars doors can do. We also bulk up the side more, but not much is added overall. Like he does in about 90% of the movie, here we’ve got Finn wearing Poe’s jacket. Bonus Lego creativity - if you switch out the hands and put Poe’s head and hair on the torso instead of Finn’s, you get early-movie Poe. I’m throwing out tips here, guys, you better accept them. Finn’s face doesn’t really look like...John Boyega at all. I guess as far as Lego translations go, this is the best they could do, but it feels more like a generic double sided face than one of the main characters of the whole movie. Finn carries Luke’s old lightsaber that somehow appeared in Takodana, which is one of the murkier parts of the movie, and a standard blaster. I was kinda hoping that Lego would at least make the blaster two colored, like in the movie, but my hopes have been dashed once again! Blast! But here we go, we add the flag, just about double the whole size of the structure. By the way, you see that single, solitary flag up there? Of course you do, you can see the picture. It’s supposed to replicate this - Yea. I have the same exact feeling. Now, let us take a moment to celebrate this hairpiece of Finn’s. Throughout the however many years that Lego has existed, we’ve been severely without a solid black guy hairpiece. And here we go, finally. Of course, we both now know what this means - expect every single licensed black guy from now on to have this hairpiece on. It’s already happened with Winston from Ghostbusters and the Falcon from the Avengers. Kind of a double-edged sword, but I suppose it more of a two steps up, one step back, versus not moving at all. Who knows, I’m sure some college student out there can write an entire paper on this. If I find that, I’ll let you know. Oh but they totally (read - don’t totally) redeem their lack of flags themselves with these two lantern things. Not sure what these are, but here they are, whether you wanted them or not. And let me tell you, these guys are really (read - not really) secure - attaching with a whopping two studs with no bottom support. I think I actually lose one after I took the pictures for this review. Let me check. Yea, yea I immediately lost it. It fell off and now it’s gone. Maybe my cat ate it. Our other figure is Kylo Ren, who, in this version, I’ve named “Kinda Adam Driver but not really”. It fits this figure well, considering that this figure looks barely anything like the character. My working theory is that both Boyega and Driver have rather prominent noses, versus Ridley, who has a pretty normal nose, so the absence of the noses loses the resemblance to the characters, while Rey’s figure looks pretty good. I could be wrong, but I honestly have no idea what else it could be, but I just can’t see either of the actors in the faces of the minifigs. Anyway, back to the actual minifig - the hair is...expected, but yet again it falls short, since Driver’s hair is way more billowy than this hair. Ah, and the lightsaber too, really, they could have done much better than the weird cross-piece. Am I complaining too much? Most likely, but I have really high standards for Lego minifigs here. Okay this review just hit a bloody seven pages on the Google Doc I’m writing it on, so you know what time it is - commercial break! ...time. Commercial break time. I realized on the Imterial Suttle review that I can’t actually deeplink a video in here, so I’ll just copy a transcript and take a screenshot of the commercial of my choosing. So I’ll just...type commercial into Google, and let’s see what we get… I can’t find a single transcript, and I’m not going to type up what I hear, so I’ll just post the chords to “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, since that was the background music in one of the commercials I found. Just the chords. Em Am Em Am C G C G C G Am B Em Am Em Am Em Am F#m B That’s an insanely short song. Moving on. Rip open Bag 3 and get ready to finish up this build. There’s basically two parts of this build, and Bag 3 solely contains the second half. Okay, let’s wrap up the building process. Bag 3 contains about 80% of the total play features of the set, and many of them are absolutely useless, but I’ll get to that later. For now, you can see the work on two features - you can always tell when a play feature is about to be implemented, because there’s always technic pieces integrated. Here we get reason #3 that anyone would buy this set - for Maz Kanata. As she, well, owns that cantina that this set is based on, it’s not a stretch to assume that this will be the only set she’ll likely appear in, at least from Episode 7. Her figure is thoroughly mediocre. In the movie, Maz is pretty skinny and short, but the way that minifigs are, she looks rather plump. The head mold, however, is very strong, and it resembles her way better than Ben or Finn’s heads do. We add more to the wall, add a hole, cover up the technic pieces, and hope that we’re almost done. Spoiler - we are. We get some nice torso printing, and it displays this magpie-y characteristics that Maz has. Good job, Lego. Separate piece of building - the tree. I think it’s a tree, or just a very tall log. It’s not the best representation of a tree, considering that it is literally a tall cylinder with one constant width. You know, a lot of people have compared Yoda to Maz, and I feel like the resemblance really shows in this figure, at least comparing Maz to the pre-Clone Wars Yoda head. They both have pretty similar noses and mouths. I have no idea if this was on purpose, but it fits pretty well, accident or not. Anyway, you connect the “tree” and the wall together, to get a tree and a wall. Thoroughly unexciting, I know. Add more crap to the build, add tiles to the top, I want to rush through this part, really, I do. It’s literally a multi colored wall and a stick. It’s really not impressive. Give me 40 pieces and about 5 minutes and I can do something similar. Okay, thank God, we’re finished. Leaves and wall pieces and I can finally close my eyes and take a long-ass nap. I’ll connect the two parts together once I wake up. Hey-o! Look at that baby, folks! Beautiful, connected, and full of play features to touch all over and use! As far as basing it off Maz’s cantina, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I suppose it works. It definitely approaches the battle from an underwhelming perspective - the battle was much more Resistance v. First Order than Kylo ‘n’ Pals v. Finn. It was mainly Finn trying to escape with Han and Chewie. For what it’s worth as a playset, though, it definitely delivers, although many of these features, like the area it’s based on, are underwhelming. But let’s take some interesting looks at the set, first. The front view of the door is probably the most recognizable from the movie and trailers, and, like I said, despite the lack of flags, it still manages to give off that “used” Star Wars feel that Episode 7 captured pretty well. It probably has something to do with the color choice, too, blending in cake bricks, dark bley, tan. It’s all quite nice, really. It’s a decent structure, here. Nothing modular building-y, but it manages to fit. This side shot is primarily useful to show the God-awful way that the lantern-pillar-dildos are attached to the rest of the set. No support, I tell you. They fall off! There were, are, and will be so many better ways to connect the thingys to the rest of the set. And Lego didn’t try a bloody single one of them. Shame on you, Lego! Shame! Shame! Shame! The back view. Never the part of a Lego set you’re supposed to show off, as it seems like on the backs of playsets or the bottom of starfighters the building just becomes lazy. Compared to the slope-y, curvy front, the back just falls...flat. Flat. Get it? Here see ye the other part of the set - or as I’ve named it: the Wall. Not the one from Game of Thrones, just the wall. I didn’t mean to capitalize it back there; it’s not an important wall of any kind. It has designs, the faux-random brick placement, and the ugliest tree on God’s green Earth. Or green Takodana. I mean, seriously, this tree. Let us talk about this tree, shall we? It’s...it’s a stick. A straight cylinder, pointing right up towards God. “Oh, but JJP, it has leaves on it! Isn’t that redeeming?” Redeeming?! No! I...it’s...why...just don’t include the tree!! Who would have been torn up about the absence of a tree?! I don’t even remember seeing a tree nearthe cantina! Reallywhatweretheythinkinghereit’sjustpissingmeoffman!!! The back of the Wall (again, not an important wall). Don’t look at that poop stick to the right, but notice the gear that was hidden. You didn’t notice it, did you? Clever Lego hiding play features. At least this back is somewhat okay in terms of design. Of course, it’s nothing fantastic, but then again you don’t see the designer of the set winning any MOC contests, do you? A top view. That is all. No comment here. Oh, but did you think there wouldn’t be stickers in this? Nah, buddy, of course there are. Only two stickers are here, this one control panel thing on the side of the door, and this other fake design-design up here. It’s partially hidden by the flag. Which, by the way, I quite like. It’s a very nice flag. I would have just preferred about 100 more to make this cantina entrance come to life. Hey, Star Wars Lego builders - get on this! Play features! I’m not totally sure how to approach this, so I have the part I’m affecting, and I show what you touch or turn or pull or push to manipulate it. The Door - Action: Pulling/Pushing - It’s almost odd to see something so simple in a set. All you do it apply a lil’ pressure to the stud there, then pull it to open it or push it to close it, and you have a nice door. I would have opened both sides of the door in a nice dramatic Star Wars-y way, but how was I supposed to take a picture, then? These, my friends, are the questions you must ask yourself when you write a review. The...Pebbles? Rocks? Stones? - Action: Slamming and Hoping it Works - So this set has rocks or something right here, just kinda stuffed in, not attached to anything. You just put your finger/thumb/toe on this little slide thing here and slam it forward, and about 60% of the time the pebbles will fly away. I’m not sure if these are Maz’s attack, since on the box art she’s right next to them, or if it’s an explosion, or even how this is a remotely fun play feature, but what I do know is that something funky is going on with my thumbnail there. The skin around it is frayed slightly, and it’s a weird yellow color....anyone know what’s up with that? Is anything up with that? Help? The Chunks of Wall - Action: Rotating and Then Picking Up - Another fun feature in this set to clean up after you make a mess are two identical pieces of this wall here. See, you kinda rotate the gear around and it pushes those L-things up and push the pieces of the wall off the wall, since they’re very loosely connected, and then you...just put them back. That’s it, folks, that’s the best they could come up with. The Tree - Action: Heavy Analysis of Lazy Tree-Building - And then there’s this little box - almost meaningless, really. For some reason it’s stuffed away in this little corner behind both pieces of the set. Is this the box where Luke’s ‘saber was/is supposed to be? I’m not totally sure, but it’s the only thing that I can make sense of it. You just turn that pin and the box falls out like my hope fell after seeing that tree - i.e., pitifully and quickly. The Box I Forgot About - Action: Turning - And then there’s this little box - almost meaningless, really. For some reason it’s stuffed away in this little corner behind both pieces of the set. Is this the box where Luke’s ‘saber was/is supposed to be? I’m not totally sure, but it’s the only thing that I can make sense of it. You just turn that pin and the box falls out like my hope fell after seeing that tree - i.e., pitifully and quickly. The Fold - Action: Confusion, Since I’m not Sure if this is a Play Feature or Not- ] The two pieces, once connected, do this nice little rotating fold thingy. So you can have it be a nice 180o flat angle, or crush it in as tightly as possible and then throw that damn tree across the room and smash it with the hammer you keep safely in the box for emergencies just like this, and watch as the once-hard-seeming plastic immediately bends under the sheer force of your anger, for is it not anger that fuels all desire and all passion of any negativity, is it not anger which caused Man himself to act? I don’t know the answer, and I’m not really sure what the hell I just wrote, but you can bend it in any way that you’d like - that’s what Lego’s all about, guys - creativity! You get some extra pieces here. I think a few of those were supposed to go in the model, especially that 1x3 plate, but I’m not going to destruct it and then rebuild it just to place that piece in - I’ll probably forget a few more, anyways. Whoa, wait did I finish? Okay, I ran out of pictures, so that means we’re done. I didn’t even register it, I just thought that I would be an endless loop of review-writing. I’m kinda excited, honestly, to see what awaits me next. But, of course, we have to wrap this whole review up. Cue the queue for the Q&A! (See what I did there? Ah, never mind.) What would you rate this set on a scale out of 100? I would actually rate this question a Piss-Off/100. Let me do my own thing, conformists. What did you like about it? Nice pieces here, good minifigs for the collectionneur, and, I guess, it at least resembles the cantina. What did you not like? And why would anyone actually ask this? Well, damn. You didn’t have to add that last part. But for the first part, it just seems like a lot of fumbling pieces, a bit of shoddy design, and mediocre play features. And don’t forget the tree. Don’t you dare. Sum this set up with one word. Not a question, actually, but okay. Underwhelming. Think about it - the biggest draws about this set are the rare ‘figs, not the actually set. Therefore, the design can afford to be a bit sloppier in exchange. This generally seems to happen with the minifigs > everything sets, unless both categories are hopeless (lookin’ at you, “Ultimate Lightsaber Duel”. Get outta here with your BS). Have you been gelling your hair recently? It looks good. Hey, thanks, man, yea I got a shorter cut and now I’m gelling it up to get rid of the fringe. I think it looks okay. Your compliments mean a lot, seriously, they do. So, final score? Hm, I think I’ll go with the classic 37/100. Hasn’t failed me yet. It’s not the cheapest set, it’s not the most romantic set, and it’s probably just cheaper to buy the minifigs online. Huh, maybe that 37/100 is actually a correct rating. Nah...