Monkie Kid

The Legendary Flower Fruit Mountain

The Monkey King's whole origin story built into one gorgeous mountain.

Set 80024 · 2021

Pieces1,949

Minifigs8

Year2021

Set number80024

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The verdict

If you like your LEGO sets to look like proper display pieces rather than another spaceship, this one's a winner.

It ditches the usual Monkie Kid mecha-and-vehicles style for a mythic mountain vista pulled straight from Journey to the West, and reviewers landed everywhere from 95% to a full 10 out of 10. The one real gripe is the minifig count, but if you're buying it for the model itself you'll be very happy. Grab it while you still can, because it's retired now and prices are climbing.

Best for: Fans who want a display-worthy landscape build with real folklore behind it

The full review

What it is

So here's the pitch for The Legendary Flower Fruit Mountain, and it's a good one. Most Monkie Kid sets lean hard into the flashy mecha-and-neon look, but this LEGO® set goes the other way completely. It's a mountain top sitting up among the clouds, and it retells the origin of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, across six connected scenes. If you know your Journey to the West, this is the theme finally paying proper respect to the 500-year-old story it's built on. And if you don't know the tale, honestly, the set kind of teaches it to you as you build. That's a rare and lovely thing.

The catch

Now the honest bits, because that's what mates are for. The big one everybody points at is the minifig count. Eight figures in a nearly 2,000-piece set works out to roughly one figure per 244 bricks, and for a set this size that feels light. You do get four versions of the Monkey King which is fun for collectors, but a couple more supporting characters wouldn't have hurt. The other thing is that this is very much a display model with play features baked in, not a vehicle you swoosh around, so if your kid wants action toys this might sit prettier than it plays. And since it retired at the end of 2022, the old 169.99 sticker is history. Expect to pay a premium now, around the 229 mark for a sealed one, so it's become a collector purchase as much as a build.

Who it's for

Who should grab this? Anyone who likes their finished sets to actually look like something on a shelf, folklore fans, and Monkie Kid collectors who want the crown jewel of the theme's early years. It's also a great pick if you're after a build that surprises you section to section rather than repeating the same technique for hours. Who should skip it? Bargain hunters chasing parts value, and anyone whose main measure of a set is how many minifigs fall out of the box. For everyone else, this is one of the best-looking things Monkie Kid ever put out, and the reviews back that up. Easy set to recommend.

The parts story

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

Building this one is a proper journey, appropriately enough. It's organized into three main sections holding six scenes, and you read them right to left the way many East Asian languages run, which is a thoughtful touch. Early on you build a neat little abstraction of Sun Wukong being born from a stone: two halves of a hollow rock crack open when you pull a tab riding on a pair of Technic axles. From there you work through a swivel throne, secret staircases, a mysterious opening rock, and a rotating platform for martial-arts practice. The centerpiece middle mountain hides the big waterfall function, with a cave you can open up behind it. There's even a gear tucked in the base that pokes out just enough to spin the turrets up top. Each section builds differently, so the pace stays fresh rather than turning into a slog of repeated rockwork.

For parts nerds, the story is a bit mixed. The showpiece is the waterfall, made from those iridescent blue curved panels that first showed up in LEGO Friends, and they look terrific used as cascading water. The catch is that this set includes basically one brand-new mold, a curved internal 1x3x3 piece in black, and only a single copy of it at that. So while you get a mountain of useful earthy slopes, rockwork wedges, and plenty of nature elements, the new-and-exciting parts haul is smaller than the box size suggests. The value here really lives in the finished model and the play features, not in cracking it open for rare elements.

Fun facts

01The set retells the Monkey King's origin across six scenes arranged right to left, mirroring the reading order of many East Asian languages.
02Four of the eight minifigures are Sun Wukong himself in different guises, from Baby Monkey King to Battle Monkey King.
03Despite nearly 1,949 pieces, it introduced just one new non-minifigure mold, a black curved internal 1x3x3 brick, and only one of it.
04The waterfall uses iridescent blue curved panels that debuted in LEGO Friends, repurposed here as cascading water.