LEGO just gave us our first look at their first-ever Pokémon sets, a dream collaboration for many fans of both. Check out this fun announcement (Jan. 12) video coinciding with the launch.

In this first wave we have three, honestly fantastic looking, sets. 

There's the loveable Eevee, which retails for $59.99.
 

The fan-favorite Pikachu, which retails for $199.99.

Then there's the show-stopping mega set consisting of Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur, which retails  for $649.99.

In addition to these retail sets, LEGO is also offering an exclusive Kanto Region Badge collection set which is only available if you order the huge Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur set off of LEGO's website.  

Since LEGO acquired the Pokémon license last year, there's been a lot of speculation as to how their sets would look. Fans debated whether the Pokémon would be made into minifigures, those cute, yet highly collectible, figures that come in many LEGO sets, or be brick-built, meaning the monsters would built out of dozens of individual LEGO bricks.

LEGO has clearly landed on the latter, but this seems to be for the best as they were able to include so much detail in each build. Each Pokémon looks like an accurate representation of these chracters we've come to love over the past 30 years. 

The marketing for these sets is kind of interesting though, as it seems to be missing one key component that you'd probably expect from a LEGO x Pokémon collaboration: children! The teaser starts with a voiceover over an adult laying bills on a table. "In a world of taxes..." is not the first thing you'd expect to hear in an advertisement for what are essentially toys. The voiceover continues over the main character and claims "one trainer is about to remember who he really is." It's pretty obvious LEGO is trying to appeal to adults with these sets, more specifically millenials who grew up with Pokémon but maybe stepped away from it. It's pretty obvious they're aiming for adult collectors when you see those price tags too! 

This marketing isn't surprising as adult collectors continue to be the main driver behind sales in the toy industry, and boy have adult collectors latched onto Pokémon. In 2020, Lego capitalized on this trend with the launch of what became known as their black box sets, expensive sets geared towards adult builders, which serve more as display pieces than toys you play with. That's the category these Pokémon sets fall under. As impressive as they look, it feels odd that children are being excluded from the marketing and are being priced out of sets for a property that, at its core, was geared towards children in the first place. 

Photo Credit: LEGO