Non-Bot Reviews: Lego Ideas Sonic the Hedgehog Set

This is an unusual one for me, so let’s walk through what the deal is with this set, and why I’m invested in its contents.

As I mentioned the last time I did a Non-Bot Review (over here), I’m a Nintendo guy when it comes to video games. I didn’t have much experience with Sonic the Hedgehog as a kid (outside of vague memories of watching the more-serious of the two 90s cartoons). It wasn’t until the first few games for the Sega Genesis were re-released on the Wii, around 2007 or so, that I finally got some hands-on time with this franchise of pretty, fun, side-scrolling platformers. Since then, I’ve admittedly experienced most of the games through Let’s-Play videos online (including the less-great-on-average 3D stuff), but the both recent movies were way better than I was expecting, and that first movie got me playing the latest side scrolling title in the series, Sonic Mania, which is legitimately really good (seriously, if you have a game system that’ll run it, buy and play it, it’s a good retro platformer even if you’ve never touched a Sonic game.) So, while it’s not a franchise I’ve historically been super into, it’s one that I like what I’ve seen of.

Next, Lego. I think everyone played with Lego bricks as a kid, I certainly did, but it didn’t really follow me into adulthood, for whatever reason (and as a non-fan who knows it has a vibrant community, I apologize for butchered terminology, or general ignorance that’ll doubtless permeate this writeup. While I’m here, same for Sonic). The most I ever really got into Lego was Throwbots, Robo Riders, and the first couple years of their much-more-famous successor, Bionicle, a buildable-action-figure line that’s pretty removed from how Lego usually works. In the present day, there’s been a few one-off Lego sets that I’ve been interested in, but I’m usually deterred by the fact that, compared to Transformers, and most other action figure and merchandise lines, Lego is expensive, or at least it feels expensive. It’s hard to find anything impressive that doesn’t set you back triple digits, and even this one retails for $90 Canadian, so it’s been something I’ve avoided impulse-buying. But this one here wasn’t just an impulse-buy.

See, this is a Lego Ideas set, which is a really neat initiative. Being a Lego Ideas set means that it was initially designed and pitched by a fan, instead of the company. How each Ideas set works is that fan pitches get voted on, and undergo a Kickstarter-style campaign for those votes. If they pass a threshold of votes, the submissions get evaluated by the Lego company, and possibly turned into a real set (typically after a few adjustments). This set was initially pitched and designed by Viv Grannell (@toastergrl on Twitter), a Sonic, Lego, and Transformers fan that I happened to know, through sharing the same online spaces. Because of that, I followed her years-long project from design, to campaigning, to winning, to release. More than Sonic, more than Lego (and I do like both of those things), it was watching her whole project go from start to finish that made me invested in this set. So, as someone that hasn’t handled anything Lego-related in years, and mostly deals in pre-built Transformers, let’s see what this looks like in my neophyte hands.

The Building Journey

I call it a journey, because building a set like this is not something you do in one day. This isn’t a bad thing though. Instead, this became a fun activity with my partner, where we’d trade the instructions back and forth, while listening to music or YouTube videos, as we went. I took pics on my phone as we built it, so excuse the lower quality.

Speaking of the instructions, I need to mention the manual here, because it’s more than just a how-to-build guide. It has interviews with Viv herself, and the set’s other designers, as well as a bunch of information on the Sonic franchise. Basically it’s a little book unto itself.

When it comes to the building portion, the instructions are nice and detailed, and have a neat graphic at the bottom of Sonic running through a level as you progress.

As for building the set, it’s mostly nice and intuitive, with a few wrinkles here and there. When it comes to applying the tiniest, cube-shaped pieces, there’s some sharp corners, and I picked up dented, pinched fingers when it came time to straighten them out, and make them sit flush.

That being said, I learned some tricks halfway through to avoid it. There’s also some stickers to carefully apply while you’re making this, and they’re the type you really only get one shot at applying, so get ready. On the flipside, while I definitely made some mistakes as I went, and often had to go back a step or two, backtracking was easy, thanks to the set including a bright orange Brick Separator tool, designed to make deconstruction easier.

So, building is half the point for Lego fans, and to that end, something I noticed as I went was that the build sort of tells a story. First, there’s the sequence you do things in. You make Sonic first, then build the landscape in chunks, left to right, and build the boss battle at the end. The most novel bit is that there’s a Chaos Emerald in each bag of parts, (each bag is helpfully numbered to correspond with their section in the instructions), and each time you finish a bag, you add the emerald to the included stand, marking your progress.

Some other random notes about building this: One nice thing about Lego sets is that they always throw extra pieces in the box, mostly of all the small parts. That way, if you lose anything, you have spares.

Something else funky that I noted as I went: The set contains a number of pink bricks, which you can’t actually see in the finished build, because they’re totally covered by other colors.

I checked, and according to Viv, this is a small challenge some of the company’s designers do, as well as a way to make use of stock of lesser-seen colors, and done as a kind of tribute to other Sonic characters not in this set (in the case of pink, Amy). So, once it’s all done, let’s look at the results. I think I’ll cover the characters first, followed by the landscape. An important note as I go: Lego’s all about customization, so basically everything in this set can be taken apart and re-worked, and it’s encouraged, meaning this is basically just one possible way to do everything.

Sonic and the Chaos Emeralds

Sonic’s a modified version of your standard Lego minifigure, a design everyone has seen. He’s got the familiar blocky legs, and claw hands, with the novel thing being an alternate, big, Sonic-shaped head. It’s a great sculpt that invokes Sonic’s classic look well. He’s got big cartoonish eyes, a slick smile, the quills out back, the works. Both the head and the rest of him are slathered in deco to convey the rest of his design, and there’s a lot of colors here, including bright blue, flesh tones, white hands, red “shoes,” with small buckles, patterns on his back and chest.

The oversized head helps make him read as proportionate, and between that and his deco, he immediately looks correct, with the most sticky-out detail of his being those claw hands, but he needs to hold those rings somehow.

I suppose, being made out of a standard human-sized minifigure, Sonic’s out of scale with standard Lego sets. On the other hand, this set is a one-off, and the one human in the set is larger, so it looks alright by me. If you haven’t seen a Lego minifigure in awhile, he’s more or less the size of a Micromaster.

Sonic’s got the same articulation as your standard Lego minifigure, which, in Transformers terms, is not bad for the scale.

He’s got swivels on his neck, shoulders, wrists (at this size!) and hips, though his top-heavy and short-legged proportions means it’s hard to keep him standing while his legs are posed any way but straight. However, he’s got connection points on the bottom and backs of his legs to pop him into standard Lego pieces, so there’s a million places on the set’s landscape that work as a stand.

When you build him, Sonic comes with a singular Power Ring to hold, which serves as the game’s standard “get a lot of them for points and lives” collectible, and a means of teleportation travel in the films. It’s big, cast in yellow, and clips into his hands perfectly. I do wish it was an unbroken ring, like how it appears in basically all media, but the small circular gap on the bottom lets it mount on other places on the landscape.

Sonic also comes with a stand, made out of black bricks, with a small clear sticky-outtie bit in the back, designed to let you pose him mid-run, which I appreciate.

You can stick the spare ring there, if the figure’s off having adventures.

More importantly, this stand contains the Chaos Emeralds, Plot Devices from the games that everyone wants to collect (and can change him into Super Sonic). Like I mentioned above, you add these to the base as you build the set, “collecting” them as you finish portions of it. They’re intricately carved, multi-faceted gems, detailed for their small size, each cast in a different color, and look pretty flashy. Funny fact: Thanks to that “extra parts” rule, there’s a second copy of each of them included in the set’s bags. In a well-thought-out bit of interconnectivity, each emerald has a peg on the bottom that can fit it into either Sonic or Dr. Robotnik’s hands.

Overall, he’s really fun, even outside of the context of the set. But there’s a few more characters in the box.

Crabmeat

Crabmeat is the other character you build right at the start. This is a generic robotic enemy from the first Sonic game, which became a series regular. Generally, it’s not very threatening, though it can shoot projectiles from its claws.

Shorter than Sonic, but a lot wider, this crab’s made out of solid bricks, and is surprisingly sturdy in your hands. If I have one criticism, it’s that in this bricky Lego style, there’s nothing here that makes him look robotic, compared to the organic Sonic and Robotnik. It just looks like a standard crab filtered through this art style.

Not that I mind that, though. He’s really cute and endearing, with his little googly eyes. It’s hard to line those eyes up, but you can spin them in the socket.

Crabmeat’s mostly built out of a simple two-tone combination of red and gray bricks, and there’s some clever bits of construction. His four legs (which don’t actually touch the ground) are made out of pieces that I think are usually guns, reporposed into legs. Meanwhile, he’s got a little clear stand to help actually keep him stable.

His articulation is fairly limited but still, each of his legs rotates at his body. Meanwhile, his claws can move up and down at the shoulders. They can’t move forwards, but that’s accurate to how they looked in the game. Really, he’s just a charming, solid, funny little guy.

Moto Bug

The Moto Bug is another one of the first Sonic game’s early enemies, basically their answer to Mario’s Goombas. A robotic beetle-like enemy, he’s bulkier than Crabmeat, and just as solid.

He’s got a red shell, a black underbody, a blue head, and smaller parts in yellow and grey. He’s thicker and more solid than even Crabmeat was, thanks to being made up of an even bigger chunk of bricks, along with a few rubberized spikey bits. Aesthetically, he manages to actually scan as more explicitly robotic, too. I think the sculpted jets at the back of him helps.

Though, looking at the actual game design, he’s meant to roll on a tire, but that doesn’t really come through on this model. The positive trade off is he has a black base that plugs into the studs on the landscape really well, and can also freestand just fine. His buck toothed face in the front is provided by a sticker, and makes the whole thing come together nicely. He’s a cute little bugger.

For features, the Moto Bug can swivel his forelegs up and down, and do the same to his jets in the back. His other feature is a swappable faceplate, between two different stickered mugs.

He can either have an angry face, or a kind of blank, gormless expression I like the angry one, because it makes me feel less guilty about his fate at the hands of Sonic.

Honestly, I think this is the strongest of the minifigures here, it manages to capture the best combination of “looks right” and “has the right vibes.”

Dr. Robotnik, and the Eggmobile

Eggman? Robotnik? I know just enough to know that this villain’s name’s gone back and forth over the years. But the movie named him Robotnik, with Sonic nicknaming him Eggman, so I’m going with that first name.

In the style of the games, Robotnik’s a rotund, egg-shaped man (about the size of a Core Transformer) with big, bent arms, a big moustache, a big nose, and coke bottle glasses, on top of thin legs and pointed feet. He kind of has a mickey-mouse-ish red and black outfit, with those signature buttons on the front of his overalls, and white gloves on his fully-sculpted hands. I love how they made his brown mustache extra-large via judicious brick use, and I like his tampoed-on coke-bottle glasses.

The big issue I have is his pink “nose.” Something about the shape and location of it causes me to read it more as a weird mouth with a sticky-out tongue than anything else. Maybe if he had an actual mouth deco beneath it, or something. Some of his colorscheme is rendered with stickers, too, including those mickey-mouse buttons.

He’s a bit less durable-feeling than his two minions, thanks to how complicated his construction is, but still way more solid than I was expecting. This does come at the cost of articulation, though.

His shoulders can move up and down (but not forwards or backwards,) the wrists of his oversized hands can swivel, and his head can rotate, but that’s basically it for articulation, with his elbows permanently bent. This means he can flail his arms amusingly, or look like he’s going to grab you, but that’s about it.

I’d call him the weakest of the characters, but a) I’ve already seen alternate builds for him that add more articulation (including some by Viv herself), and b) he’s got a vehicle that significantly ups his appeal.

In the games, Robotnik would often meet Sonic at the end of a series of levels, in a vehicle or machine that forms a boss, and the hovering Eggmobile is his most frequent ride of choice (and this includes the finale of the first film).

A big, oval vehicle on a base, the Eggmobile is mostly grey, with bits of black and red, and includes stubby little wings, a clear yellow bit out front, and a clear windscreen, There’s a bunch of mechanical and industrial details painted and stickered on across its body, like vents and caution stripes, and it all looks very nice.

I particularly like the transparent red Batmobile-like jet of fire coming out of the back, and the little speedometers on the interior control panel.

In addition to the whole model feeling more solid than its pilot, it comes supported on a clear pillar, with a bit of black barely visible inside, and on a black base.

It’s, again, very stable (look the whole thing is made out of clicked-in bricks, I keep checking for stability), and can be popped out if you just want to swoosh the thing around.

It’s standing-room-only for the doctor inside the vehicle, thanks to a bar right in the middle of the seat that plugs him in securely between his legs, and keeps him there really strongly (you can always remove if you want other people sitting there). And I’ve got to say, he makes way more sense inside this vehicle than as a separate figure.

Sure, his hands and arms are waaaay too big for the controls. But there’s no buttons there anyway, and this works off of cartoon logic, and he looks good flailing his hands about at his enemy.

The Level

This is the big one, the thing that takes up most of the set’s real estate, a 2-d diorama for the characters to play in, recalling the sidescrolling nature of the classic games. The idea is that it’s a chunk of Green Hill Zone, a forested, hilled area that serves as the first level from the original Sonic game, as well as Sonic Mania, and others (and used as a representation of Sonic’s homeworld in the first of the new films).

It’s a sort of modular construction, with you building small chunks of the landscape, and then snapping them into each other at the end.

The idea seems to be that you can quickly swap around the landscape to “redesign” the level (and I’ve seen official stock photography with scrambled versions of the layout), but in practice, the final steps of building it involve creating a large black base that fuses all of the pieces together, so I can’t really get them out without doing a significant teardown, which makes me disinclined to re-arrange the landscape. Still, that base is a key part of making the whole thing solid and stable, so I can’t fault it for locking the chunks of turf up tight.

My biggest pro about the finished landscape right out of the gate is that they got the size of it just right. It’s big enough to feel substantial, but small enough that it doesn’t take a gigantic chunk out of my shelves. I wound up putting it next to my television, and it fits great there, and I’ve crammed it next to my computer to play around while writing it up. On the opposite axis, it keeps the two-dimensional look while being thick enough for figures to plausibly exist in its world.

The 16-bit style of classic Sonic translates well to this bricky art style, and a neat detail in the brown ground of the set is the way it imitates the checkerboard pattern of the game’s graphics. Outside of the brown ground, the sets mostly colored in different shades of green for the grass, partially through alternating bricks, and partially through painted deco along the sides. Since there’s so many studs on each surface, you can easily attach Sonic, or the Motobug, or even Robotnik’s vehicle to most parts of it. Robotnik himself’s a bit wobbly on his feet, since he can’t peg into these studs, but he never walks anywhere. There’s a lot going on, so let’s go left to right, like you would through the level.

On the left, you’ve got a sticker of Sonic’s face with three lives, like you’ve just started playing the game, and then above the ground and grass, a palm tree. They went all-out on coming up with this construction. It could have been a solid piece, but it has multiple palms on hinges that move either up or sideways, for real rustling action.

Continuing on, there’s a little brown drawbridge, over clear blue water, the bridge being one of the few parts of the landscape that isn’t studded with, well, studs. Behind it are three rings for Sonic to collect, identical to the one the minifigure came with, “hovering” in midair via transparent stalks clipped into the little hole behind each. You can pop them out, but another detail that I appreciate is that the stalks can click backwards on joints, to move them out of the way.

Past that, there’s a little yellow and gray fire hydrant-like checkpoint, with a blue or red circle uptop that you can spin around, though the top can twist off if you’re not careful.

The next bit is a big centerpiece, one of the loop-de-loops Sonic can run straight through if he builds up enough speed. I love that they can engineer a smooth curve out of these bricks via specialized pieces (and some stickers to simulate the checker pattern where the bricks can’t), though I do kind of wish there was a way to mount Sonic sideways or upside down on it, but no dice (I bet you can engineer one, though.)

On the terrain above the loop, there’s an additional hovering platform on clear stilts. And next to that, there’s two little gray item boxes, which sort of look like old-fashioned computers.

They have stickers on the front, and contain five swappable fronts, representing different items: Extra Rings, an Extra Life, Invincibility, Shield, and a Speed Boost.

Out of all the things in this set that you can pop out and move around, these two boxes are the ones I feel most inclined to do that to.

Next up, we’ve got a section with an Action Gimmick, in the form of a red springing platform. In the game Sonic would land on them and it would propel him upwards. In this version, you mount a figure there, and then slam a rod on the back to pop the platform up, sending them flying.

I’ve got to say, out of all the parts in this set, this was the most fascinating to build, as I made the whole mechanism come together piece by piece.

And it’s a fun little gimmick, though I do wish it was a bit stronger (admittedly I might just need to hit it harder with my hand). The funny thing about this gimmick is that it’s fictionally meant to propel Sonic, but I almost feel inclined to put enemies on it and have Sonic fling them away with it.

There’s another set of three rings, stacked vertically on a single stilt above the spring, and I appreciate that you can, again, tilt them out of the way, to not interfere with the springing action.

Last but not least, we have a nice sunflower to finish the whole thing out, once again made up of a lot of different parts. And if you look on the back, there’s an easter egg in the form of a tiny scoreboard, with the names of Viv, and the set’s other two designers.

Overall

This is a pricey set, but it’s really fun in a few way, which I think justifies the price tag. Firstly, there’s the build, which is almost as important as the result, I think. It’s time-consuming, but fun, and you’re paying for a whole experience there. Beyond that, what we have here is a nice little self-contained ecosystem of figures, representing a franchise that’s a good match to this blocky playset style, and despite being made of bricks, it feels durable enough to mess around with.

It’s a fun little diorama and figures, with enough going on to keep me interested. In fact, I get the sensation that I’ve missed a fair share of obvious features and quirks, as it feels like there’s some real depth in this design. You can tell a lot of love went into all the game-accurate details.

So, yes, at 90 Canada-bucks, it’s pricey, but there’s a lot under the hood . As a one-off, if you can budget it, it’s a fun experience with a fun result, even if you’re like me and are casual at best. Heck, more video game franchises could use a Lego set exactly like this, a slice of a game level with a few minifigures. Mario needs a set like this, instead of the weird electronic thing Lego’s doing with him, or that 200-dollar transforming question block they made, and Metroid could use one, too, instead of….nothing. As for Sonic, I don’t know how many big-ticket items I’d be up for, but I definitely wouldn’t mind populating this world with a few other characters from it, at least.

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