DLC #199 - LittleBigPlanet 3 - The Journey Home

It's fitting that the premise of The Journey Home revolves around somebody dropping the ball.

I was willing to go into this final foray with an open mind, despite some reservations about the workmanship of LittleBigPlanet 3 that were well documented in my Platinum Difficulty Review. Underneath this brief, post-game exterior remains an unpolished game plagued by technical issues. Blue screen crashes, corrupted save files and loss of progress. It's clear that there was an abandonment of this game that has hurt the reputation of the series.

The Journey Home begins where the main story ends. After saving Bunkem, Sackboy and friends are teleported back into Craftworld, ready to be welcomed home by a surprise party. However, the teleporter beam malfunctions and the force of the beam whips the unsent invitations to the remaining party guests out into the world, and it's now your job to find and retrieve them.

This will require progression through a series of new levels where the reward of an invitation sits at the end of each one, and once all 6 have been gathered, the party will finally be able to go ahead.

The pack contains 6 new trophies, all of which are obtained via the new selection of Story levels on offer. This is broken down into 3 main Adventure levels and 3 Multiplayer side missions. There are trophies awarded for both completing and Acing each of the 3 Adventure levels, which are both fairly easy tasks and should take no longer than an hour or so. There is a level dedicated to each of the new heroes - OddSock, Toggle and Swoop. Their lack of usage within the main game was something I was slightly critical of within the Platinum Difficulty review, so it's good to see at least a little bit more advocacy for these characters.

Toggle gains access to the Springinator within his level, which also comes attached with it's own trophy after using it 100 times. The Springinator is a new device that allows him to bounce up to harder to reach places. It's nice to see a neat little gameplay addition, but the variety in content with a game like LBP has always stemmed from it's unique level designs, which are all refreshingly charming in their own way in The Journey Home. It's just a shame that there are only 3 main Adventure levels.

However, the package does heavily lean towards a Multiplayer emphasis that may cause a few struggles along the way;

Two's Company, Four's a Party - Complete any Adventure level with 4 players.

The original intention of this trophy was to encourage community play, and this would have been easy enough to achieve at the height of the game. However, the only way to unlock this trophy now is to have 4 different controllers and finish a level in local co-operative play instead, so if you want this trophy and don't have the required amount of peripherals, you'll need to find a way to acquire them. 

Under normal circumstances, I would usually cut a bit slack for this. After all, the server closure wasn't the fault of the development team, and the action was necessarily drastic to prevent further harm to the LBP community. However, when you've got previous form for this, I feel like you relinquish the benefit of doubt. Two of the LittleBigPlanet 2 DLC packs have become permanently unobtainable to 100% for me purely because they required me to invest in peripherals and that was something I'd refused to do until it was too late. The only reason I grabbed this trophy was because I have 4 controllers anyway, but it's a tough cost to justify for anyone who doesn't and would only be purchasing them for the sake of this trophy.

Loosely linking into this, the 3 Multiplayer side missions also require at least 2 players to complete, and they're both directly linked to a further 2 trophies requiring all Prize Bubbles and obtaining all 6 Invitations to the party. They're all used as rewards for reaching a certain points threshold (30,000 points) within each mini-game. The first one can easily be beaten solo using 2 controllers, but the other 2 will need an actual second player to support well enough to obtain the threshold score. Not only are there multiple pieces of hardware standing in your way of full completion, but you'll also need the services of another person sitting next to you to help out anyway. If you're solo player, these are big barriers to completion.

On a final note, I began to have issues towards the end of this package when attempting to complete the side levels with a second person using another controller. The game would begin to blue screen error at the post-level loading page and upon rebooting the game, the Prize Bubbles would remain uncollected. There were also a couple of notifications that the save had been corrupted and we had to restore via a prompt. 

I had to remedy this by just making sure I collected the Prize Bubbles only and didn't trigger the end of the level via the finishing screen. If you've collected the Prize Bubbles, you can just exit the level without actually officially finishing it. It took a handful of attempts to work this out as a viable workaround, but it's a real shame some awful technical issues reared their head once again.

When it's working, The Journey Home is at least a serviceable offering. It doesn't break any new ground, but it's still good, hearty fun and the levels of creativity maintain a high standard. It's a little bit on the shallow side with just 3 main Adventure levels and 3 mini-game side missions, and the complications of requiring multiple controllers, another person to combat the mini-games with and eventually having to juggle some unexpected technical errors near the end had me questioning whether the balance had actually tipped towards the downside of the scale.