With the pandemic still keeping a lot of people at home along with kids, every little distraction is welcome. While the individual views and preferences on this may differ, the LEGO Friends magazine for March 2021 could be part of that complex puzzle.
Of course there’s the usual stuff ranging anywhere from ordinary to pretty terrible such as the comic and the posters. Can’t help it, but despite the visual overhaul last year this still looks quite awful on so many levels and the clichéed, locked character design with the ever same hair styles and all too similar clothes doesn’t help, either. It’s just forgettable stuff. I have a hunch that if I had a daughter, I’d get her different magazines.
On the bright side, there’s a bunch of sensible activities like crafting and coloring images. Nothing revolutionary and in fact getting some decent ribbons and double-sided sticky tape to wrap whatever vessels you have at hand might still be tricky, given current circumstances, but in my opinion it’s a good idea to remind today’s kids of the simple joys of crafting. We used to do this all the time way back then and it seems like we’re talking too much about LEGO Dots when perhaps indeed we should be promoting such stuff a bit more…
The large coloring image is unfortunately not printed on a single sheet and even though in my example the alignment of the separate pages was near perfect, you might want to make things easier for your kids by gluing them to a single sheet of paper or photo-copying/ scanning and printing. There’s also a second such image on a singular page featuring a portrait of Stephanie.
The buildable extra isn’t anything special, though admittedly it could have been worse. At least there’s a lipstick on this beauty table and they even included a wig as an extra! One thing that downright annoyed me is how hard they tried to pretend that the mirror would actually be metallic or genuinely reflective. Is it just me or is this just getting ridiculous? The work it took to Photoshop those images probably could have just as well been spent on designing that simple round foil sticker this would have needed.
Overall this is once again just your standard run-off-the-mill issue and its mediocrity is only mitigated by the fact that we have something to look forward to in the next issue. It will feature one of the new baby kittens and that should definitely prove much more interesting than this rather mixed bag…
Mylenium's Brick Corner 