The day after Nintendo and Lego revealed their collaboration on Mario, there were two series people wanted, The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing. Now after a lot of waiting and hoping, the latter of the two has been given its first wave of sets and Lego were kind enough to send the Isabelle’s House Visit my way, so lets take a look at it.

Looking at the box you can see what you are getting with this set, a house, a few Animal Crossing themed elements and two new minifigs. Isabelle is of course one of them, with the other being Fauna, with Isabelle having a flower in her hair and Fauna having a party hat on her head. While the vast majority of the pieces contained within the set are your standard Lego brick, there are a few custom pieces, which are the highlights. Yes the minifigs are among those, but there is also a Nook Phone, a DIY recipe card, a picture of KK Slider and a host of smaller parts. In addition to there being new Animal Crossing themed pieces, there are a host of new colours for existing pieces, mostly within the Orange and Dark Orange colour sets. Out of the roughly 180 different parts, which do total 389 pieces, there are around 20 new ones, making this a very unique set.

Now while the pieces on their own are fun, it’s the building with Lego that is more fun and here things are a little odd. They are odd in the sense that almost everything is small and standalone, which is quite the opposite for how most sets are, at least in the countless Star Wars sets I have built over the years. One example is that the first bag you open has Isabelle, which is normal, then you build the workbench and then you move onto bag two, the house. But the final few bags are also smaller items, most of which are for decoration purposes. The middle bags are for the house itself, though for some reason the door and windows were not in those bags, but later ones. As the house has no rear wall, it makes you can access it without the need to pull anything down, which is nice, but it also feels a little weird. The reason why its weird is that displaying it has the front showing, but to access anything you need to turn it around, and I am not sure if that is the best option.

As the set is Animal Crossing themed, outside of the house itself, nothing else has a set position, if you follow the instructions. That means the tree, flowers, work bench and plants outside to the bed, oven and clock inside, you place them where you want. This feels a lot like the Super Mario sets, where you have a few base plates and you connect them in a way you want. The box itself does promote the set as customisable, but the only real elements that are, are the windows, you can have square or rounded. The other elements are just free to place wherever, but there is limited space to place everything on the included pads, so an extra flat piece would not have gone astray.

Much like the Super Mario series, the Animal Crossing series is more about creating interesting playsets, rather than display pieces. While it is possible to display Isabelle’s House Visit, you would miss out on seeing the bulk of the content, unless you keep rotating the house around, which is kind of against the point of a display piece. As a set for actually playing with there are a lot of small things that make it interesting and while nothing in here is super unique, the addition of the New Horizon’s themed items do help it stand out from being just a generic house set.

You can order your own Lego Animal Crossing: Isabelle’s House Visit here, though at the time of writing most locations are out of stock. You can see all the sets in the first wave here, along with their prices.