Little Big Planet 2

So this post has been a long time coming. I finally finished Little Big Planet 2. I'd say 98% or so was done co-op with my wife. But the last level which is entirely fighting the last boss, is a pain in the ass. We tried probably 10 times and it was incredibly frustrating. You could tell what you were supposed to do but the crappy, imprecise, and floaty controls often prevented you from doing it. I finally decided to just finish this part on my own and not subject her to this bullshit.

So after another 10 or 15 attempts that involved a lot of yelling and smacking the table in front of me, I finally finished it. The ending briefly trotted out all the characters you'd met along the way and went right to some silly voice over and music while the credits rolled. The first song was one I actually recognized, Sleepyhead by Passion Pit and it fit in with the rest of the music for the series. Although after all the great music from 1, I was sort of disappointed with the comparatively bland stuff from 2 other than this song.

The big new addition in this game are the more varied creation tools, which I never used directly, but got to experience second-hand since they allow you to play mini-games that vary greatly from the normal platforming. The instances of this in the main campaign did a great job of being immediately understandable. Often your Sack Thing is piloting some sort of vehicle and the mechanics approximate an old school videogame like Space Invaders or Breakout. Also, note that they always refer to your character as Sack Thing instead of Sackboy like the previous. Sure it makes it open to be either a boy or a girl and the character is pretty androgynous anyway, but it's sort of jarring when you're used to one way from the old game.

The story in this one is even weirder and disjointed than the first. You meet several odd characters along the way, one for each group of levels. None of them were very memorable compared to the first game. In fact, it feels like they spent all their time making the new game creation tools (which I didn't bother to use), did a bunch of drugs to make a weird half-assed story, removed the cutesy stuff and called it a day. All of this together makes it sound like I hated the game, which isn't accurate. There were just some frustrating things and I guess I was just expecting more from a sequel to a game that my wife and I loved to play.