I have been at it again. I purchased another book that is already out of date just to get a new Minifigure. This time, I got a good deal on the new edition of the LEGO® Star Wars Character Encyclopedia from Dorling Kindersley (DK Publishing). The book came out on April 7, 2020. However, many Star Wars sets have hit store shelves in the meantime. All the same, the book is nice and represents a snapshot of LEGO® Star Wars history.
The official product description from DK reads:
Meet more than 200 minifigures from the LEGO® Star Wars™ Galaxy and get an exclusive Darth Maul minifigure!
Discover heroes, villains, aliens, and droids in this fully updated character encyclopedia-complete with an exclusive Darth Maul minifigure. Find out fascinating facts about all your favorite LEGO® Star Wars™ minifigures-including rare and exclusive releases.
A galaxy of Minifigures awaits you!
The Star Wars Character Encyclopedia comes with an exclusive Crimson Dawn Darth Maul Minifigure.
The Star Wars Character Encyclopedia organizes characters according to the movie or show they appeared in. As with other DK books, I find this tedious to use. This encyclopedia would be more user friends if it just organized characters alphabetically. For example, as it stands, Darth Maul appears in the book in two different places. All Darth Maul variants should be on one spread. Additionally, the multiple entry system is not consistent for all characters. For example, Ahsoka Tano only appears on one spread despite appearing in two different series.
Like other DK LEGO® books, this one also has a lot of extra packaging. I suppose that is the nature of a book offering an exclusive Minifigure. Consequently, the front cover is very thick to accommodate the character. However, the character occupies an incredibly small corner of that cover. To give you an idea, the actual interior of the book is 2.8 cm thick, and 0.8 cm of that is the carboard for the Minifigure. That is about 30% of the book’s thickness. As with past book reviews, I maintain that there must be a better way to offer an exclusive Minifigure.
Characters are not sorted alphabetically.
Otherwise, the book features great photos and spreads of Minifigures. DK always does a good job in their showcasing. I like that each character has a bio and a data file highlighting facts about production years and sets containing the character. The only bit of information that would make it better would be listing all the set numbers that contain a character. As it stands, the books will only give the number of sets containing the Minifigure, and no indication of what those sets are.
My reason for acquiring this book is the exclusive Darth Maul Minifigure. This is the Crimson Dawn Crime Lord version of the character seen briefly in Solo. Consequently, he features unique torso and leg printing. Incidentally, Maul is one of my two favorite Star Wars characters, so an exclusive variant was enough to tip the purchase scale for me. You can see how he compares to Darth Maul from Duel on Naboo below.
Overall, I enjoyed flipping through this book. There are a lot of characters. However, I did not read all their bios and facts. I find the organization of the book bothersome and the overpackaging for one Minifigure is always a sticking point with these DK books. With that said, it is an entertaining book. However, I will probably not reference it much in the future. I think this is a Minifigure purchase for most people, and you should probably wait for a sale. What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment below or reach out on social media.
Until next time,
-Tom
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