My personal Minas Tirith Minifig upgrades
I'm a minifig enthusiast and was dissatisfied with some of the choices in the official. So I wanted to share my purist modifications. These are personal preferences so I won't be calling them objectively better, but please let me know what you think.
I was mostly happy with the Gondor soldiers except for the faces which I all thought were a little too boy-faced, so I switched them out to have more facial hair. I also gave them some proper spears. The black hands looked off to me so I swapped the whole torso to the one from Dragonborn paladin which also has some sweet arm print. This left me with 4 leftover torsos.
2 of them are archers and the other 2 some sort of cadet I suppose. I haven't really decided exactly what to do with these.
My least favorite fig was unfortunately Gandalf. Aside from the loss of his old beard/hair combo I wasn't a fan of the tan printing at all. Since I already have (what I believe) the better version from 2013 I decided to give him some grey cloaks that he wears at Edoras which also covers most of the tan details. I wouldn't really call this an improvement to the overall fig, it's just what I did.
Pippin is great, just a bit cheap that they wouldn't give him a Gondor helmet.
Faramir was my most anticipated and he looks fantastic apart from the horrendous hair they gave him. He's not supposed to look like Isaac Newton is he? As you can see his hair is about the same as Boromir, a little wavier perhaps, but mostly the same. Also, why do Lego insists on making the brothers gingers? Also gave him a ranger sword from Rivendell.
Denethor is good, just thought he should have some sort of a cape.
Arwen is interesting. I understand she doesn't really have any remarkable detail to her dress, but to give her arm printing and then leave the dress unprinted looked odd to me. They could have at least given her some thin lines. The dress I used is from Princess Tiana which I think looks better than nothing at all. I was also bothered by the one size fits all hairpiece, so I used old Elrond's hair, which also has the crown going all the way.
Aragorn is obviously really good, but I was sad that they didn't care to give him a full beard. This head from Sirius Black has grown on me, and I think it matches his slightly tired and older appearance in that scene too.