8 Metroidvania Games We’d Love to See Adapted into LEGO Sets

2 weeks ago 9

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

As more video game IPs like Mario, Sonic, Legend of Zelda, and Fortnite get LEGO representation, I start to wonder just how far we could potentially push this little merchandising opportunity. For example, perhaps we could reach more into specific genres and subgenres of game for inspiration, such as Metroidvania games? It may sound a little overly-specific, but it kind of works if you think about it.

Metroidvania games, thanks to their large maps, are generally jam-packed with memorable characters, locales, and most importantly, setpieces, all of which would be perfect fodder for a LEGO kit. Admittedly, the odds of some of these games actually having enough star power to get their own LEGO kits isn’t exactly stellar, but hey, if a game can get official merch like a T-shirt or keychains, would a bunch of colorful, stackable bricks really be beyond the pale? I say no, and if LEGO wants my money, it’ll say no as well.

8 Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

Welcome to Scuttle Town

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse Ammo Baron boss

Throughout most of the Shantae series, the central location is her hometown of Scuttle Town, a cute little village that’s regularly attacked by pirates and thugs for some reason. Technically, any of the games could have a representative LEGO set for Scuttle Town, though I think drawing inspiration from Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse specifically might make things more interesting.

In that game, due to Ammo Baron assuming ownership over the town, Scuttle Town gradually becomes more and more militarized, with armor plating over all the buildings. Here’s the concept: we start with a regular LEGO Scuttle Town set, with the major buildings like Shantae’s lighthouse, Mimic’s Workshop, the Bathhouse, and so on, and include minifigs of Shantae, her friends, and a couple of the recurring NPCs.

In addition to the regular buildings, though, we also include some LEGO armor panels that you can quickly snap onto the sides of the buildings without having to disassemble and reassemble everything. Just like that, the whole set transforms from Scuttle Town to Ammo Town and back. Don’t act like transforming LEGO playsets aren’t the coolest ones.

7 SteamWorld Dig 2

Open it Up Like a Diorama

Did you ever have a dollhouse or playset when you were little, the kind that opened up on the side to let you see and interact with everything on the inside? There have been plenty of LEGO sets that either open up or just show you the inside of something without the hinges. That’s the kind of framework that would work best with a SteamWorld Dig 2 set.

Since the entire point of SteamWorld Dig 2 is to discover the map through mining and digging, it makes sense that the set should depict Dorothy, as a minifig, mid-dig. The concept is that you’d have a big cube of dirt with a little mockup of El Machino on top, which you then open up to reveal tunnels and caverns within. Said caverns could include some traps, waterfalls, machinery, and maybe some scattered resources like cash and cogs, all to help set the scene.

Maybe for added authenticity, there could be a little nook in the bottom of the set for you to stash a Rusty minifig. You’d definitely want to have Rusty included in the set, since he’s the first game’s protagonist, and you could pose him alongside Dorothy if you’re not looking to make a game-authentic scene.

6 Animal Well

It’s Already Blocky Enough

I have to assume that it takes a bit of workshopping for LEGO designers to decide on the best ways to LEGO-ify certain characters and backgrounds. You have to decide what can be conceivable rendered in relatively simple, cubical shapes, and what needs to be more elaborate. An Animal Well set might save the designers some work, because it’s plenty blocky already.

One of Animal Well’s most distinctive elements is its deliberately minimalistic aesthetic, with simple tilesets, backgrounds, and characters made more elaborate through careful animation. Take the animation out of the equation, and the whole thing should be nice and simple to present in LEGO blocks. Heck, the little blob thing you play as could probably be nothing more than a simple peg or stud.

As for a set, a simple scene would be the ideal choice rather than anything specific. Just place the little blob in a big staging area with some platforms, maybe add a telephone and a couple of little animals here and there, and add a big, elaborate image of a larger critter in the background just to seal the deal.

Full of Big Setpieces to Rebuild

Speaking of small critters in big worlds, that’s one of the dominating design elements of Ori and the Blind Forest. Little Ori scampers about in a lush world full of monsters and mysteries, and the occasional giant beast pops up out of nowhere to chase him down. It’d make a great LEGO setpiece set.

Start with an Ori minifig, maybe add a little Sein thingy either sticking up out of the ground like a lamppost or attached directly to Ori, and add some cool foliage and landscapes for them to stand and pose on. Most importantly, the most elaborate part of the build would be a large beast like Kuro, off to the side in a vaguely menacing position.

Alternatively, we could opt for a setpiece from Ori and the Will of the Wisps instead, with an Ori minifig in a similar situation, but alongside Ku instead of Sein. If Ku is an entire dedicated construct, maybe there could be a little spot on top for Ori to ride around on.

4 Dead Cells

Modular Dungeon Builds

When my sister and I got bored with our standard LEGO kits as kids, we’d do as any proper LEGO builders would and begin mashing kits together to create bizarre Frankensteins. Modularity is a keystone of LEGO’s entire brand identity, after all. You know what else is really modular? Roguelike games like Dead Cells.

In a similar vein to the game-centric Mario LEGO sets, my vision for a Dead Cells set revolves around gamifying and modifying what you have. Asking for a Beheaded minifig with the same kind of tech as the LEGO Mario toy is probably not reasonable, though, so instead of anything fancy, just give us a whole bunch of assorted dungeon components and let us build our own little vignettes.

Dead Cells: All Bosses Ranked

Dead Cells has some fantastic boss fights, and we've ranked them all.

You could make a couple of platforms, maybe add some cells in the background, a few assorted monster minifigs, and of course, a variety of different weapons for a Beheaded minifig to hold like a sword or a frying pan. Just think of all the different configurations you could post to social media! They could even release kit expansions with new pieces, just like the game’s many DLC expansions.

3 Hollow Knight

With Optional Silksong Expansion

As arguably the modern face of the Metroidvania scene, it’s only right that Hollow Knight have a horse in this race. Or a horsefly, I guess. Hey, since all the characters and enemies are bugs, it’d probably be pretty easy to depict them as either minifigs or very simple brick constructs, so that’s some development time saved, at least.

For specific sets, we’d want a good intersection of cool settings and major boss encounters. Some examples would be the large room in the Teacher’s Archives in which you fight Uumuu with Quirrel, the big, ornate balcony in the Soul Sanctum where you fight the Soul Master, and the fight against Hornet in the Cast-Off Shell in Kingdom’s Edge.

Speaking of Hornet, if LEGO really wanted to make some mad bank with this idea, we’d definitely want to get some Silksong bosses and setpieces in the mix as well. I think the more overtly mechanical bosses would work best with this framework, such as the Clockwork Dancers and the Fourth Chorus. Imagine if the Fourth Chorus had fully articulated arms; that’s the kind of LEGO kit I would’ve loved to get for my birthday as a kid.

2 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Vampires and LEGO Go Great Together

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Brief aside, one of my favorite LEGO kits of all time is the Night Lord’s Castle from the Fright Knights series, which also included one of my favorite minifigs, Basil the Bat Lord. I bring this up to emphasize that vampires and their gothic castles, conceptually, go pretty great with LEGO aesthetics. Ergo, rendering Dracula’s infamous castle from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in LEGO should be a no-brainer.

Thanks to its legendarily varied map and denizens, Symphony of the Night would be perfect for a LEGO set. We’ve got plenty of characters and monsters to make minifigs of like Alucard, Richter Belmont, Death, and Dracula, and the many distinctive locales could honestly be entire sets in their own rights. Honestly, the hardest part would probably be narrowing the scope into something reasonably sized.

The simplest course of action would probably be to have one big castle set, and have a few mini-sections dedicated to representing some of the coolest areas. You know, the Long Library on the right, Olrox’s Quarters on the left, the Abandoned Mine in the bottom, etcetera. Hey, if you buy two, you could hang the other one upside-down and call it the Inverted Castle!

1 Metroid

You Knew it was Coming

We can’t have any kind of conversation about Metroidvania games without paying proper respects to the OG, Metroid. Samus Aran’s little cave-jumping adventure set the standard for all these other games, and given that Metroid is a Nintendo property, it probably has the highest likelihood of actually getting a LEGO set someday.

As for what that set would entail, I can see a couple of possibilities, depending largely upon which subset of LEGO builders it’s meant to appeal to. For the more casual builders, a more traditional scene set would be the choice. Give us a Samus minifig, maybe build a little set depicting the depths of Brinstar or the battle against Mother Brain. The latter would look especially cool if Mother Brain’s little circle shots had moving action.

For the more advanced builders out there, I think either a detailed kit of Samus’s gunship or her Power Suit helmet would be the most interesting. The point of the advanced kits, at least to me, is to make something that looks good on a shelf rather than something to play with. Imagine how cool it would be to not just have Samus’s helmet on your mantle, but one you assembled yourself.