LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 75395 Review
LEGO likes to celebrate the festive period around this time of year, releasing several different Advent calendars to help give children something more permanent than a simple bit of chocolate. They’re based around their popular themes, and of course one of the biggest is LEGO Star Wars. This year’s advent calendar, set 75395, is an amazing set full of festive fun that delivers not only some iconic figures, and great miniature builds. LEGO provided the set for review.
The set as a whole has 368 pieces and six minifigures, and costs £29.99, €34.99 or $44.99. Trying to assess a time to build for the whole set would be missing the point as it’s opened throughout December, but the individual builds can take anywhere from a few seconds for the minifigures to a few minutes for the more complex builds. There are 18 builds in total, and they make up the meat of the set. This is the right balance, as the sets help with the value proposition of the set overall, and gives a better experience.
Diving into the 18 builds, there’s the classic X-Wing and TIE Fighter, Millennium Falcon, Palpatine’s Theta-class Shuttle, a Venator, Darth Vader’s Castle, a U-Wing, Yoda’s Jedi Starfighter, Y-Wing, Mandalorian Fang Fighter, an AT-AT, Jabba’s Sail Barge, a T6 Jedi Shuttle, Crimson Firehawk, Luke’s Landspeeder, the Ghost, a Minikit, and the Razorcrest. This is a brilliant selection, as it spans the multiple eras ‘Star Wars’ now represents. Fans of the High Republic as well as the prequel era are served well. Video game fans can also be represented, with the Minikit build – a surprising but welcome inclusion, being pulled from the LEGO games.
For accuracy, while one or two struggle to match their ‘Star Wars’ counterparts – the U-Wing and Fang Fighter suffer from this the most, lacking the signature articulation. Without this they look similar in shape, and if it weren’t for the colour it would be easy to get them mixed up. The vast majority are charming and brilliant mini-versions of the iconic vehicles. By far the best vehicle is the Ghost from ‘Star Wars: Rebels’, with the shape, colours, and even the notch for the Phantom all being perfect and representative of the ship.
Some builds do rticulation, such as Palpatine’s Shuttle, the X-Wing and more, achieve this is such simple but clever ways, demonstrating the masterwork and imagination that the folks of LEGO have. It captures the ability to have some play with these sets, even at the tiny scale. The articulation is only one way this imagination presents itself, as there are tiny details bought to the fore, like characters being represented as studs – such as Luke and C3-P0 in Luke’s Landspeeder R2-D2 in the X-Wing or Yoda’s Jedi Starfighter. The latter also has a bright green piece inside to represent Yoda.
The audience get to experience this imagination for themselves, as the instructions for these builds have to be communicated in one picture. The audience have to imagine and experiment with getting the ships right. It’s communicated in an easy-to-understand fashion, though builds such as the Millennium Falcon do feel a bit too complex for the ease the builds have to capture. The balance between representativeness and complexity is hard, but LEGO have struck it well.
Of course, there aren’t just miniature builds. The six minifigures are a strong selection, with a Christmas-themed Luke and Leia, an older Ahsoka, a Phase 2 501st Clone Trooper, a Super Battle Droid and Praetorian Guard. They’re all desireable figures from across ‘Star Wars’, again spanning multiple eras. The Ahsoka especially is brilliant, with a double-sided faceprint and arm printing. It’s the same one as the one that appears in the Ahsoka Tano’s T-6 Jedi Shuttle set. Luke and Leia have Christmassy atire inspired by ‘Star Wars’ moments like the Battle of Hoth and Luke’s Tatooine home. This is about as festive as the set gets though, however ‘Star Wars’ itself isn’t awash with Christmas bits to pull from, so this is perhaps unsurprising.
The LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar is a perfect buy for the fan that wants something more permanent than chocolate, with several builds that show off the imagination the people that work at LEGO have. The miniatures come together to form a diverse and recognizable collection of ships, vehicles and buildings across all the different eras of ‘Star Wars’, across the films, animation and games. It’s another worthwhile addition in the LEGO stable, and the LEGO calendar range. As Yoda would say, “size matters not.”
