Ninjago

Temple of the Endless Sea

Seven figures, a chained sea serpent, and more rare parts than you'd expect.

Brick Rated Score

4.2/5

Set 71755 · 2021

Pieces1,060

Minifigs7

Year2021

Set number71755

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The verdict

This is one of those Ninjago sets that quietly gives you a lot for your money.

You get seven really characterful minifigures, a modular temple you can rearrange however you like, a submarine, a manta ray, and Wojira the sea serpent wrapped in chains. It's aimed squarely at Ninjago-loving kids, but the parts haul makes it a soft spot for MOC builders too. If you want tight, clever architecture it's not that, and that's the only thing holding it back.

Best for: Ninjago fans and parts hunters who want a big playset with genuine minifigure value

The full review

The Temple of the Endless Sea was the big centerpiece of the 2021 Seabound wave, and honestly it earns that spot. This LEGO® set drops you into the underwater half of Ninjago, with a temple hideout, a laboratory, a little prison cell, a submarine, a swooping manta ray, and Wojira the ancient sea serpent bound up in chains. It's busy in the best way. There's always another nook to open up, another figure to slot in, another chain to rattle. For a kid who lives and breathes Ninjago, this is the kind of box that keeps a rainy afternoon going for hours.

What really tips it over the line for me is the minifigure lineup. Seven figures is generous at this size, and they're not filler. You get Scuba Kai with a properly dual-molded diving mask, NRG Nya with that lovely opal blue hair, Prince Kalmaar, Prince Benthomaar with printing unique to this box, two Maaray Guards to give the villains some muscle, and Glutinous, who stands on six brick-built legs like a little crab-person. That's a genuinely fun spread of characters, and it does a lot of the heavy lifting on the value side.

Now the caveats, because there are a couple. The temple itself is more about play function than clever engineering. The sections clip together at bar and clip points so you can rearrange them freely, which is great for a kid, but the backs stay open and the whole thing reads a bit more practical than it does beautiful. New Elementary's reviewer had reservations about the architecture, and I get it. This is a playset first and a display piece a distant second. It was also close to a hundred dollars new, which is real money, and since it retired in July 2022 the secondhand price has drifted up past what it cost on shelf, closer to $130 last I looked.

So who's this really for? If you've got a Ninjago fan in the house, or you are one, this is an easy yes. The play value is high, the figures are excellent, and there's enough going on to keep it interesting long after the build is done. Parts collectors should perk up too, because the rare recolors alone make it worth hunting down. The only people I'd steer elsewhere are the pure display builders who want crisp, show-off architecture. For everyone else, this one holds up beautifully.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build runs about two to three hours and it never feels like a slog. You work through the temple in modular chunks, each one finished with a bar at one end and a clip at the other, so the sections snap together in whatever order you fancy. Then you move on to the smaller side builds: the submarine, the manta ray, and Wojira the serpent, who gets a lovely flowing tail. It's a friendly, forgiving build, ideal for a confident kid, with just enough variety in the sub-assemblies to keep an adult builder happily ticking along.

The pieces are where this quietly overdelivers. There are two brand new molds, both for Prince Kalmaar: a five-tentacle lower body in medium lilac and a spiked head with dark turquoise webbing. Around those you get eight tail and tentacle elements in dark turquoise, four large wings in the same color, eight dark turquoise friction cylinders, and three tan curved slopes that were a unique recolor here. That is a serious pile of useful, hard-to-find parts. At roughly 9.4 cents per piece it lands on the good side of fair, and once you factor in seven minifigures and that stack of recolors, the value math tilts firmly in your favor.

Fun facts

01The set was designed by Theo Bonner and served as the flagship of the 2021 Seabound subtheme, which took Ninjago underwater for the first time.
02Prince Kalmaar came with two pieces molded specifically for him, a five-tentacle medium lilac lower body and a spiked head, neither of which had appeared in LEGO before.
03It had a short retail life, released in June 2021 and gone by July 2022, and now trades secondhand for more than its original $99.99 price.
04Glutinous is one of the more unusual figures LEGO has built, standing on six separate brick-built legs rather than a standard minifigure body.