Set Review ➟ LEGO® 77093 The Legend of Zelda® The Final Battle Ocarina of Time
I suppose that this set will appeal to someone, someone who grew up playing the Zelda video games and who has some nostalgic affinity for them. A chaqun son goût. If you are not in that camp, probably best to move on. This set is aimed at adults with the 18+ age rating, bereft of sex but loaded with violence. Some of the violence is to be perpetrated upon someone’s pocketbook at $130/€119 for a 1000 piece display model.
Perhaps had I experience with Zeldaworld the novelty would justify the price. But from the position of someone indifferent to the brand, meh. The set provides three minifigures, one of which gets hidden inside a box, and a mech that looks like the combination of a bull and a pig. They are placed in a setting that appears to be parts of a crumbling castle or something…and it’s on fire!
The instruction manual gives hints of the Zelda story, but I found it insufficient and went to Wikipedia to get some clarity. (Shout out to Wikipedia, send them the money you were going to spend on coffee today.) After consuming me some Wikipedia goodness I came to the conclusion the only way to understand and appreciate whatever is going on would be to play the game. But me being blind in one eye and barely able to see out the other along with various other old age related infirmaries and being deficit one time machine, yep, that ain’t gonna happen.
Anyway.
What I can tell you is that the setting seems to be a battle, and a building has experienced some disrepair, and there is some fire. And the setting has some clever assembly strategies to make things look crooked and askew. What I can’t tell you is why there is a minifigure hidden in a box or if that minifigure is supposed to be the same character as the big bad bull-pig. Do I care? Not really.
The bull-pig character, it’s a good thing that LEGO has decided to mount his feet to the base because the feet are absent any sort of heels and the figure really struggles to stand by itself. The decision on the designers’ part to make the figure “poseable” in what is a build-it-and-put-it-on-the-shelf-to-collect-dust set I suppose on some level is admirable, but having had it sit for a week, gravity has won and the bull-pig is on its knees.
Bull-pig has ratchet joints at the shoulders, which should be good, but the brick build-out around the bicep bumps into the chest assembly and, while 360 degrees of rotation is possible, the arm has to be clicked in and out of various pivot positions to achieve it. Mostly bull-pig is looking at a case of can’t-raise-arms-above-the-shoulders.
Pin-and-hole joints at the elbows allow the forearms to rotate but not bend. The wrists are fixed and the fingers are moveable. Hips and ankles are ball-and-socket joints, and for some reason…probably just aesthetics as I can’t really perceive there being any structural benefit…there are loose tires slipped over the ankle joints. Maybe they are there to disguise the fact that the ankle joints are ball-and-sockets and as usual are not up to carrying the weight put upon them.
Bull-pig’s head pivots and the tail is positionable and there are a few other thises and thats, but I think I would have preferred that the model be completely fixed in design, with bull-pig in an exciting pose that conveyed the appropriate drama as opposed to what we get. And what we get is, yeah, it can be placed in some limited poses but many of them end up in the same pose: bull-pig face planted. Such is the fate of trying to translate a two-dimensional character into three dimensions. And that’s kind of a shame because bull-pig is really quite nicely sculpted.
There is a sliding gimmick on the back side of a section of fallen building there in the center of the base. This slide pops up the top section of the wall to reveal the third minifigure. To make this magic actually work, though, you need to position bull-pig’s arm out of the way. Unfortunately bull-pig is constructed such that it can’t simply move the arm. And bull-pig’s pose is actually designed, you guessed it, with its arm in the way. Bull-pig basically has to be set into a position with the left knee moved down towards the ground and towards the right knee. Think of a bow-legged Chubby Checker doing the twist or your favorite athlete suddenly having a hamstring problem and you get the idea.
Elf-boy there on the end of a transparent bar is kind of difficult to get into any position that looks good, and the connection of the bar at the top of the window is not my favorite.
My last points of contention are the row of fire and the warhammer in the turret. I managed to inadvertently knock off various flames while inspecting the model. There is a warhammer thing on the back side of the turret that has fallen off so many times that it is now lost. I did manage to get it in the early photos but who knows where it is now.
LEGO went all out on these minifigures. All three figures’ heads have double sided printing, dual-molded arms, and torsos are printed two sides. Legs are dual molded and side and front printed, the villain’s armor is printed all around, and the villain’s cape is printed both sides different. Princess headwear is double molded, villain headwear is double molded and printed, and elf boy’s headgear is triple molded. The wow factor on these minifigures cannot be denied.
The Randolph T. Fielding Absolutely Administrivia Section
In an uncommon move for a set aimed at ages above 6 there are no stickers. Maybe that is a cost driver. This is also the first instance that I have seen of a triple-molded part. Elf boy’s hat, ears, and hair are a single piece with each part molded in a different color. The princess headgear is double molded and the villain headgear is double molded and printed.
The sword and shield are picked up from the earlier 77092 Zelda set.
Villain armor is printed all around, and cape is printed both sides.
This 2x2 tile has repeated usage on the bull-pig figure.
These printed pieces are used on the bull-pig’s face.
Finally, this butterfly dish. I guess it’s a butterfly.
Summary
The target market for this set is obviously adults, and that’s a good thing because play value is zero. Solid points to the design team for the castle in ruins setting. The bull-pig suffers from more than the usual number of gripes I have about mechs in general, and if you are a regular reader you know I gripe about the mechs. Citing the Jill Bearup scale for armor, the bull-pig figure rates a “Just Stab Me Now.” I found the minifigures to be outstanding. I kind of think the set ought to be a hard pass for anyone other than a die-hard Zelda fan, though. C’est trop cher pour ce que c’est translates into easy money for Nintendo.
Disclaimer
Thanks to LEGO for kindly providing the set for review.
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