Are New Lego Castle Sets Too Complicated? (ft. The Good Time Group)

Hey guys, it's BB202, and today we're going to be discussing whether or not there's too much detail in LEGO castle sets. This wouldn't have even been a conversation a decade ago, but the last few castle sets have changed the game. We'll talk about the history of castle building techniques, what the new sets bring to the table, and the pros and cons of details. This video is in collaboration with The Good Time Group, which has become one of my favorite new channels. They make videos about all kinds of castle-related topics. I particularly recommend their Defensibility Check videos. It's a great series that you might find yourself getting lost binge-watching. I'll start off with my thoughts, and then we'll let them take over for a bit. Don't forget to subscribe to The Good Time Group, I will leave a link to their channel in the description. We've already got a collaboration up over there if you want to check that out. Also, subscribe to my channel. Castle videos are all I make, and your support keeps me going. Now let's get into the video. You can make the argument that the Yellow Castle is too simplistic. After all, the horses look like they're wooden props from a renaissance fair. Sometimes, LEGO has no choice but to make a big, specialized part like the current horse vault. The Yellow Castle, nostalgia aside, still looks surprisingly okay for being over 40 years old. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it gets the job done. There's a slightly more nuanced argument when it comes to castle compared to other themes. When you think of a real-life castle, you probably think of a gray, stone slab that prioritized its defenses over flair. Castles are unique because they can still look okay even without any details to speak of, compared to a pirate ship or spaceship. They were, after all, utilitarian for the most part. Those who were in castles were more concerned with keeping people they didn't like out of castles. We reached a happy medium between detail and overdoing it sometime between the mid-90s and late 2000s. LEGO took some risks with castle design, experimenting with raised base plates and then moving to a more modular system. Castles weren't just gray anymore either. 90s castles had black, red, and light blue, while fantasy era and kingdoms introduced royal blue, red, and gold accents. There were also more play features. The Royal Knights Castle from 1995 paved the way for later castles with the first castle-mounted catapult, a dungeon, and a throne room. LEGO would stick with this formula for another two decades. I can't help but feel like LEGO sacrificed a bit of its charm with the blacksmith shop At the same time, would sets that big even work if they didn't have that much detail? They're the two most expensive LEGO castle sets of all time, so we really don't have any older sets to instantly compare them to. Let's go down a few price rungs and take a look at what were formerly the two most expensive castle sets, the Medieval Market Village, released in 2008, and the Kingdom's Joust, released in 2012. They're more involved builds than regular sets, but not so much that they'd look out of place next to them. The Joust actually has an open back so you can easily access the interior, making it more like a normal set. The interior is a bit sparse, but it leaves more pieces available to be used on other builds, like the tents and the grandstands. Now I don't want to erase history when it comes to the Medieval Market Village, because it was the most detailed castle set when it came out. It had one of LEGO's first attempts at making a complicated tree, as well as a brick-built Tudor-style construction that LEGO used to make prefabricated walls for. That said, it still looks quaint compared to the modern sets. There are no snot techniques or chairs made out of axes. It doesn't go far beyond having hinges to close the buildings. Let's go back to the prefabricated walls, since they were a staple in Castle until recently. In fact, I can't think of a single castle other than the first one that didn't have some kind of prefabricated wall. This is yet another point that you can make arguments for and against. The negatives are obvious, since they take away from the uniqueness of the set, but there's no easier way to quickly build a castle. Imagine being a kid, you'd want a ton of these in your collection, so you could put together a huge fort in just a few minutes. And it's not like there hasn't been a lot of variety in the castle wall pieces over the years either. We've had various kinds of turrets, the regular 1x4 walls, the walls that jut out a little bit on the sides. There have been a lot of options to build a castle wall. And that has to appeal to kids, who, like it or not, are far and away LEGO's biggest market and always will be. The current sets are too big and too complicated for any kid to build them. Should LEGO be depriving kids of castle walls just to satisfy us? Also, you're telling me that there are no adults who are nostalgic for the chunky castle walls they had when they were kids? Because I find that hard to believe. Now before I twist myself into a pretzel trying to cover every angle of this topic, I'll hand it off to the Good Time Group, which I promised at the beginning of this video. Take it away, guys. Greetings! But of course, dear Good Timers et al., our new friends, viewers of none other than the BB202, we're here to talk a bit about the impact of excessive detail in LEGO, particularly castles. If there be such a case of excessive details, we've been invited to this, by the way. We didn't just pop in. That's true. No, no. Yeah, it's kinda cool. Yeah. Very cool. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. BB202. You're in my top ten. Easy top ten. So here's some things that we think could potentially be at risk should the detail of be placed above the simplicity, the charm, the resolution, the toy-ness of LEGO. Without further ado, let's dive in. Accessibility! Woo! Charm is magnetic. When you look at the yellow castle, you're drawn in. Even though it's yellow, and you have never seen a yellow castle before, when you look at King's Castle, you are drawn in, even though it's very boxy, very repetitive, very juniorized. Even though it was really top of the line at the time, that was like your teenage building. Right. Right, right, right. I think something to be said about charm is being unashamed of inadequacy. Not necessarily proud of your inadequacy, but not afraid to be yourself. I'll throw out, for example, the designs of the Transformers from the 1980s. The toys were not the most attractive. Where we see Megatron, who has a shelf protruding from his gut. Some other figures have ape-like proportions when they really ought not, but perhaps no head looking at Ironhide. Fair point, fair point. And so even when you look today at the Masterpiece figures, what are they trying to evoke? Those same inadequacies. So the only charm that's left in Masterpiece figures is the fact that they're trying to harken back to something that was inadequate. Because the mechanics these days are absolutely next level. Think for example, back to the fireplace in Magisto's fire-breathing fortress. It was but a simple arch. Was it even an arch? It was not an arch. It wasn't even an arch. It was just an overhang with a transparent stud. Do you recall the excitement that we experienced when we were looking through the instructions and we saw that? It had a fireplace. It had an eccentricity. It had an idiosyncrasy achieved through maybe three pieces. I think many times the best things are achieved through three pieces. Unless it's Bionicle. Good guy is kind of weird. So the simplicity of these pieces says something about the resolution of LEGO. LEGO exists in a pixelated universe, up one over one, and you can go up by thirds as well, with a limited number of angles, of textures, of directions, of build. When you have an overcomplicated product, and by product I mean set, vehicle, building, whatever it may be, it ought to agree with the scale and the aesthetic of the figure itself. And so with the advent of considerably more complex vehicles, buildings, we've also seen a quantum leap in terms of printing on the minifigures to try and keep up with that. And we've even seen some very odd experimentation with minifigures, like for Toy Story, elongated limbs. Very uncanny. A tremendous number of molded heads, of slip-on pieces, of mid-length legs, shorter than normal, but longer than shorter. It's weird. Stop it. When folks were very happy with the smiling heads of the 80s for everybody. Having many, many heads is very cool, but is having 30,000 more kinds of faces making you 30,000 times happier than the face of the 80s? Think about that. 30,000 with its cheeky little smile. And looking at its smile, they're happy, not necessarily because of what they are doing, but that they are doing. Even villains with the classic smiley face take, for example, the Falcon Knights. Not necessarily because of what they are doing, but that they are doing. In conclusion, in order to justify the detail, we would have to be as many times happier with the detailed set than we would have been with the charm and simplicity of old LEGO. Thanks again to The Good Time Group for pitching in for this video. I will leave the link to their channel in the description. Don't forget to go there and subscribe. I'm sure it'll be worth your while. Now, I want to hear from you guys in the comments below. Do you think LEGO should continue making castle sets with this much detail, or they should go back to the way they were making them before? Love to hear your thoughts. Please put them in the comments. I will be sure to reply to everyone, and hopefully we have a good conversation down there. Again, thank you guys so much for watching this video. Don't forget to subscribe for more LEGO Castle videos, which are coming soon. Thanks for watching.