LEGO The Legendary Flower Fruit Mountain (80024)

Building this one is a proper journey, appropriately enough. It is 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 is 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 turned 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.