We're hyping ourselves up by building another of the LEGO One Piece sets. We already built the Going Merry Pirate Ship and the Baratie Floating Restaurant this past August. Today, we're building and discussing Battle at Arlong Park, which depicts the climactic battle that capped Season 1.

At 926 pieces, this is not a LEGO set for adults display piece; it is a large playset with mechanical functions that reinforce those play elements. But it's large enough and detailed enough to be displayable, and it's not entirely dependent on its play functions (in the way that, say, the Super Mario playsets rely on their play elements) to make itself interesting.

Before we get started on the build, we should discuss a LEGO packaging change, which began over the summer. The majority of new sets – rather than using clear plastic bags to organize their pieces – use eco-friendly paper bags, with smaller eco-friendly paper bags inside of those. This is a welcome change. With the old plastic bags, pieces had an annoying tendency to get trapped in the bags' creases when you dumped them on the table.

Every LEGO builder knows the frustration of searching for a missing piece, worrying that you might have accidentally tossed it out with the rest of the garbage. Anything that mitigates that risk is a win. With the paper bags, the pieces simply slide out, no shaking required. Plus, the paper is sturdy enough and thick enough that the pieces don't puncture through it.

You begin building Battle at Arlong Park with four smaller builds. There's the log that Usopp hides behind when he's trying to escape the clutches of Chu.

There's a beach lounge area with an umbrella and a snail phone. And finally, there are two gallery style amusement park games. In the live-action One Piece, Arlong's lair is a theme park. The manga and anime give better context and explain that Arlong Park is modeled after Sabaody Park, an amusement park which discriminated against fish-men and merfolk.

One booth is a Shooting Gallery, complete with two hinged targets and a gun/launcher that shoots studs.

The second booth is called Shark Attack, which has been reappropriated as a throne room for Arlong.

Then you build the main pagoda building, which contains Arlong's map room. There's a chain on the floor – which Nami spent her childhood shackled to while she drew maps – and East Blue maps on the walls.

I appreciate the detailing on the pagoda. There's lined bricks mixed in with smooth bricks, which give the appearance of weathering and erosion. Jagged holes in the walls add to this perception, as do the uneven and jagged pagoda roofs.

Playwise, the pagoda is destructible. The second and third levels are each composed of two halves that are independently separable from the whole, and the fourth level is halved and hinged in its middle. When you push down on the top of the building, the different levels are gimmicked to slide outwards, which triggers the walls on the ground floor to collapse. It results in an immediate, splashy destruction of the whole structure.

Because the building is intended to come apart, the LEGO designers did a great job of individually reinforcing each piece of the building, and the cleanup to put the building back together is minimal. The very top of the build is a lock of sorts, which holds the building together when you're not actively using its play feature.

Battle at Arlong Park comes with five minifigures: Luffy, Nami, Usopp, Arlong, and Chu. The minifigures are extremely well-detailed: Luffy comes with stretched out, bendable arms, Nami has a bandage over her left arm (where she cut off her slave tattoo), Usopp has his slingshot, Arlong has a fin on his back, and Chu is carrying the whiskey bottle that leads to his demise. All of this adds up to some great roleplay scenarios.

Thus, this set overdelivers on its play elements, even though it slightly underdelivers on its display elements. If the designers intended to straddle the line between both, they largely succeeded.

Your kid will definitely love this set. You might love it; it's pretty cool in its own right, but its scale is dwarfed by both the LEGO Baratie Floating Restaurant and the LEGO Going Merry Pirate Ship. But at $80, Battle at Arlong Park is underpriced for what it is, and it's the best bargain out of the three major One Piece sets.

LEGO One Piece: Battle at Arlong Park, Set #75638, retails for $79.99, and it is composed of 926 pieces. It is available now at Amazon and LEGO Store.

Kevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He's also been published in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.