Little Big Planet: Late Reactions

Little Big Planet: Early Reactions

Recently I sold a stack of Xbox360 games (somehow I ended up with the collector's edition of Skyrim that came with the giant dragon... I didn't even like Oblivion, so I'm a bit confused by my own reasoning) at my local Exchange, and with the funds I purchased a used PS3 and a Playstation Network card. It was, honestly, something of a whim, but I'd been pretty dissatified with the virtual console library on the 360, and if the past has been any indicator, there is no end to the amount of times I'm willing to buy Mega Man 2 & 3 and Final Fantasy 6 & 7. There was however, one exclusive PS3 title I was really looking forward to playing: Little Big Planet.

Now, I know I'm coming into this extremely late in the game, there's already a sequel available (which is currently very likely to be the SECOND PS3 title I purchase), but that's kind of the point: I'm entering a world and community that is already very well-established and densely populated... a very different experience than I would have gotten had I started on the ground floor.

The story mode of LBP is just about perfect... the physics, the platforming, the adorableness... all of it narrated by Stephen Fry in the warmest, most welcoming voice possible... if the game was just that, I could easily rate it as the best new property I've played in years... but that's not really what LBP is all about. Right from the beginning, the game is all about customization, giving you costumes and stickers and new materials to make Sackboy (our adorable protagonist) out of, and once you clear the first set of levels, they open the level-making tools so that you can build your own levels and share them online, and clearly this is where the game expects you to spend most of your time (when I went back to the story mode, Stephen Fry seemed more than a little surprised, and seemed to think I had done it by accident). Now, this is somewhat understandable: the story setting is rather small and insubstantial given the vast array of worlds I could build or the exploration of worlds made by other users I could explore... I could (and currently intend to) subsist solely on LBP for my gaming fix basically indefinitely with all the user-made content out there to play (there's even a job out there for someone to just review user-made levels full-time... a repeative job that would be eventually degenerate to evaluated the quality of the stickers any given level gives you, but still..)

There is a problem where, whenever I'm about to praise a level for an ingeneous bit of platforming of physicsplay I realize they're actually just taking advantage of tools and abilities already provided and showcased to them, and it is disappointing the number of levels I've seen that felt the need to employ the paintenator (the only "gun' option I'm aware, which is from the DLC) given the ability to build anything. The trends I've noticed with the user-made content so far tend to be towards turning Sackboy into other, more-established video game characters and this is somewhat upsetting, because even when I'm enjoying a particularly well-structured Castlevania-themed level (and it was great, EmiliatheSage, hats off to you), I'm still struck by the fact that it's taking a fresh (to me at least) IP and replacing it with something a little more tried-and-true. The DLC seems to promote this as well, with material built mostly around other games (tellingly mostly T or M rated games) and comic book characters (who might as well be video game characters at this point). It's a bit disappointing that given all this freedom to create, the drive is still towards the tired and familiar.

Still, the ability to create levels is brilliant, prolongs playability basically indefinitely, and is deeply rewarding. Somewhere there are boxes full of banner printer paper full of the masochistic platform levels I designed at Daycare after school when my age was in the single digits... I'm currently planning a gauntlet of hundreds upon thousands of fatal deathtraps and swinging rope timing jumps, with the solely reward being a sticker of myself with the words "Good on You," but I must admit, I've not yet experimented much with building my own levels... with all the best toys safely locked away in the story mode (or downloadable content), my options are somewhat limited for the time being... in a way, it's just as well. For as much as I enjoyed turning Sackboy into Shakespear or giving him the ears of a rabbit, zebra-stripes, and cat eyes, he seemed less endearing and (ironically enough) he lost a lot of character. Which I guess is part and parcel with putting him in old Mega Man games, but..

I've been trying to express exactly what my reaction to Little Big Planet has been and it continually eluded me until I finally realized to my shock and bewilderment that more than anything else it made me happy, which is a reaction to a video game I find puzzeling and basically unprecedented. I've been playing video games for literally longer than I can remember and while I have always enjoyed them, often gotten a sense of achievement from them or been absorbed in a world or the characters that lived there or found myself basically addicted, I could not honestly think of another game that made me genuinely happy by itself, without being part of a large experience of memory. It might actually be my favorite new game in the last decade.

Now I have to go copy a 20 year old Mega Man level.