I collect old and new Polly Pocket and I really thought I would love this set, but I’m just really disappointed. To start, photos are deceiving. Mattel does something to their Polly Pocket pictures to make the plastic look sturdier than it is (in their photos, they have a very Playmobil look to them). The pink unicorn is particularly a massive disappointment. In photos, it looks like a solid plastic figure. In person, it’s cheap and has super bendy legs. I can tell they tried to make an indentation between the back legs for it to stand on pegs (because it doesn’t come with a hole in its foot for that), but the legs are too bendy for that to work. As far as “floor” pegs on the top portion of the compact go, there are only two. One inside the mushroom and one inside the mushroom door. This makes the top half of the playset almost useless for setting anything up. In fact, there’s not much room to do anything at all on the top of the compact. Speaking of the mushroom… The “cap” of the mushroom is hollow. This means anything you store inside the door can travel up into the cap. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing (extra storage space, right?), but there are plastic supports inside the cap of the mushroom, which means anything that slides up in there risks getting stuck. This makes me really nervous to put items like the Polly figures in there. And that’s really disappointing, because with so much pieces and so little space to store anything, every little bit of storage space counts. But who wants to risk pieces getting lodged up in a mushroom? The stalls for the unicorns also bother me. There’s one peg in each stall, I assume for the unicorns to stand on. But to fit the bigger, white unicorn onto the peg, it has to be standing with its face in the back corner. Why would they put the peg there? Why not situate it so that the unicorn would be facing out of the stall? Are the pegs not for the unicorns, but for the Polly figures instead? If so, then the unicorns have no peg to stand on and that doesn’t make sense. The swinging gates on the stalls are another bummer. They didn’t just make the gates click closed, which would be an obvious choice. Instead, they made a little bump for the gates to kind of squeeze against and hold closed. The only problem is, this method failed miserably. On one stall, the bump is too short, so there’s nothing for the gate to squeeze against. It just pushes right past and into the stall. On the other stall, the bump is too tall. Getting the gate at that exact sweet spot to hold it closed is impossible. The gate is either open or you force it and it pushes into the stall. The gates on these stalls isn’t a huge issue, of course. These aren’t real animals we’re trying to keep locked up. But if you’re going to do something, do it right. The designers of this set obviously wanted us to be able to actually close the gates and it just doesn’t work. I have no real complaints about the dolls or the accessories (though I really wish they would stop including SO many accessories), what I do take issue with is that the dolls can’t ride the unicorns. We have one mermaid who obviously doesn’t have legs to be able to ride a unicorn. Then the only doll with legs can’t bend them such that she can properly ride the unicorn. What is the point of a unicorn with a saddle when the doll can’t even ride it? Seriously, who is designing this? Other than these issues, there are also more minor issues I found. Pink stains on the rocky path, what looks like cardboard and other unidentifiable bits stuck in the clear blue plastic stream, and who on earth decided that the parts number (or whatever the string of numbers is) should be displayed proudly on the front of the yellow bench? I really wanted to like this set. I fully believed I would. The colors are lovely, the whimsical, mythical theme is a great choice. But the design is extremely flawed. There just wasn’t enough time put into how the set and the pieces actually interacted with each other.
