Celestial Pagoda

The first thing that got me about the Celestial Pagoda was the color. Monkie Kid sets usually come at you with neon and machinery, but this LEGO® set goes the other way completely. It's lavender and tan and dark blue with pearl gold trim, and when you stack the six floors up into the finished 61cm tower it reads as calm and elegant, which is not a word I ever expected to use for this theme. It's tall, it's genuinely pretty, and it's the kind of thing that makes people stop and look when it's sitting on a shelf.

The build itself follows a lovely logic. Each floor sits a little smaller than the one below it, so you slowly work your way up into that classic tapering pagoda silhouette, and every level is its own little decorated room. There's a dungeon, a study, a throne room, cabinets with rotating murals of the Monkey King's past, and a color stone holder up top. Modular floors mean you can lift the tower apart to move it or to look inside, which is a genuinely thoughtful touch for something this height.

There are trade-offs though, and I'd rather be straight with you. The back is open, dollhouse style, which is fine while you're playing but does mean the tower looks unfinished from behind, and one reviewer liked it enough that they bought a second set purely to close the rear. There's real repetition too. Several floors lean on the same wall panels and curved slopes, so a few sections build almost identically, and the play value is lower than the piece count suggests because the rooms are small and getting minifigures posed inside them is fiddlier than it should be.

The minifigure lineup is a strong reason to want this one. You get seven figures, all new to this set. The core crew is here in matching tracksuits, MK, Mei, Mr. Tang, Pigsy and Sandy, plus Sandy's cat Baby Mo, and then the two headliners. Li Jing arrives in golden armor printed front and back with a crown, and Nüwa has a spring green body and a soft teal rubber tail, both making their very first appearance as minifigures. There's even a tiny golden Nüwa nanofigure tucked in as a nod to the legend where she sculpts humanity out of clay.

Here's where I land. If you love tall, architectural, Asian-inspired builds and you care more about how a thing looks finished than how it plays, this is an easy yes, and the community rating of 4.3 out of 5 backs that up. If you're chasing clever engineering or hands-on playability, the repetition and the cramped rooms will nag at you, and you might feel the price. For a display-first tower with a gorgeous palette and a genuinely nice set of figures, though, I think it earns its spot.