Someone asked for a Mega Bloks Gyarados review awhile ago. I finally got around to building mine... and wow did it make me appreciate the little things in Lego
Pros
- It's Gyarados, one of the coolest Pokemon of all time, and the build really looks nice once it's done
- It's articulated well, each segment can move around on a ball joint, and the tail can flap up and down. The mouth also moves slightly.
- There are no stickers, although, even if this was Lego, the only place I could see them using stickers would be the eyes, but I think Lego would likely print these pieces as well. There were also random printed pieces that Lego wouldn't put effort in, like printing lips on the lower mouth segments.
- Mighty has some wacky pieces, like studs on the top and bottom, that are kind of cool and I wouldn't mind seeing adapted into Lego.
- The quality of the pieces are a lot better than I remember old school 90s Mega Bloks being. I had a dinosaur kit from them as a kid, and I remember the pieces being kind of mediocre feeling. A few even shattered as time when on (which is bad for a kids' toy!)
- There are marbled transparent plastic bricks that have a nice visual effect on them that Lego could do more with. They already apparently have a way to do it, since their force lighting piece does this.
Cons
- The quality of the pieces is better than the 90s, but still not great. The edges are super sharp on some pieces. I didn't have any loose pieces, but nearly every piece I placed was very tight, to the point where it was really annoying to make simple mistakes. Their knockoff Technic pins are the worst, it's basically impossible to remove them once they're placed, and they seem to love using them.
- The instructions are bad. They'll be really detailed in some places, and then randomly skip over a few bricks in other spots. The directions are also kind of scatterbrained, and there were a few times where I read over the directions and did it in my own order and everything snapped in a lot easier than their method had me do. The book is also a vertically centered, and that's harder to use than a traditional horizontal booklet. It opens like a calendar...
- Despite being a kids toy meant to be played with, it's very fragile. Gyarados' head is very poorly put together. His crest on his nose falls off with a gentle breeze, I've had his eyes fall off, his fins are fragile, and there never feels like there's any structure to the pieces. Often pieces are hinged on a single stud, and they fall off way too easily
- There's no order to the bags at all, they're just random pieces, vaguely sorted by color and size (very vaguely), and thrown into the box. A build that would have taken a little over an hour, probably, with proper Lego instructions and bags, took almost three hours. It was more of a scavenger hunt for the right piece than an actual construction toy. There's also a zillion light blue pieces, many of which are very similar, and finding them in a bag with another zillion light blue tiny pieces is challenging and annoying.
- Some of the pieces get too wacky, like the random T brick I got that changes the studs so they go "off grid" from the usual spacing of studs.
- There's a few places where the pieces are meant to be placed, but cannot lay flat due to the slightly raised portion of the ball joints getting in the way. It's a weird design, that I'm not sure if they didn't catch, or didn't really care since it looks okay once it's done being built.
- My Ultra Ball was completely mangled. The printing was scrapped up on one side, and the top wouldn't fit properly. I had to apply a lot of force to get it to snap, and now it's never coming off. The holes attaching to the studs below seem to have been slightly warped.
- It came with extra pieces that I didn't know what to do with, so I put them with my extra Lego pieces. Oh no!
Overall, it's a nice kit if you really like Pokemon (like I do) and want a sort of Legoish build of a popular Pokemon. But man did I wish it was Lego basically through the entire build, mostly because the bags were so poorly organized, it was a disaster. It's soooo fragile too.
Lego needs to get with Nintendo. I don't know why Nintendo tolerates second class knockoffs like Mega and K'Nex, when they could easily get in with the king.
