When LittleBigPlanet first hit the Playstation 3 in 2008, it genuinely seemed like it was destined for great things, but a series of decisions over the years has put the series in an tough place.
The most significant of these changes was seeing Media Molecule step away from development to make way for Sumo Digital, who would be in charge of development of a LittleBigPlanet game for the first time.
More recently, an unexpected external attack on the servers led to the decision to indefinitely bring them down for the first 3 main LittleBigPlanet games on all platforms.
This was a somewhat forced decision, but there have been some choices made that have raised questions. Other, less forgivable decisions include; LittleBigPlanet Karting servers being closed within just 6 years of the game's launch and LittleBigPlanet 2 DLC packs requiring you to purchase expensive peripherals to earn some of it's trophies, in an undoubtedly advantageous cash-in ploy on Sony's hardware. Even the DLC for this game, The Journey Home, was suddenly delisted and cannot be acquired unless you'd already purchased it.
When you think about it, it's been a tumultuous period that not many franchises would survive.
However, losing the servers was the real killing blow. It's always going to be a big problem when the premise of your game is based around user-generated content, and you suddenly lose half your product because that element becomes instantly inaccessible to everyone with no alternate solution to keep it alive. It wasn't just losing the ability to play through story levels with others co-operatively online. What use is still having offline access to this massive level creation tool full of possibilities without being able to actually share your creations with the masses? It effectively became redundant.
These were ultimately big issues with the game and I personally felt the series regressed with LittleBigPlanet 3.
The main showpiece is the Adventure Mode. The tutorial is interrupted by a character called Newton, who creates a black hole, sending Sackboy into a world called Bunkem. It's explained to Sackboy that Nana Pud is about to open a tin containing 3 Titans, that were locked away to protect Bunkem many years ago, and this needs to be prevented. Stopping Nana Pud allows Newton access to the tin, and upon opening it himself, he garners the power of the 3 Titans and this turns out to have been his ulterior motive all along. It's now Sackboys job to stop him and restore order to Bunkem.
The game retains it's warm charm, simple controls and pick up and play nature that has made it accessible to anyone and everyone over the years. The biggest new addition is the fact you can now play as different types of Sackboy. Throughout the Adventure Mode, you'll play as Swoop, who harnesses the ability of flight, Oddsock, who can sprint and bounce off surfaces, and Toggle, who can shapeshift into becoming a smaller or larger version of himself.
Sadly, it's a criminally underused element of the game. They each get their own introductory levels to showcase their uniqueness in comparison to the regular Sackboy, but are then only used in brief capacity thereafter. Their unique properties add some great variety to the way some levels play out and it would have been nice to see how far this creativity could be stretched. It's a genuine missed opportunity.
Other new gameplay mechanics include the Blink Ball, a gun that fires an orb that can instantly teleport you, and the Boost Boots, which can propel you to higher, previously unreachable, parts of the landscape. The Velociporters, also a new addition, can quickly send you through different layers of the level, and are used creatively in puzzles. Naturally, all of these new toys are available within the creation tool.
I've always taken an apathetic stance towards the creation elements of LBP. That's not the game, that's me. I've just never had the patience to learn how to be good at making levels, and without the ability to share them with anybody due to the lack of any online service, it almost feels like barely worth giving a mention to.
The creativity on display in the Adventure mode levels is still great and the mini-games are inventive and fun. It's a bit buggy at times though. I've been stuck on infinite loading screens, lost Prize Bubbles off the edge of a level and the framerate is still choppy when there's a lot going on at once on screen. These may seem like small niggles, but when you fall through the landscape for no reason half-way through an attempt to ace a level, they become much more viable complaints. I did also manage to play the game in online co-op before the servers were axed, and it was always laggy when another player was in the level with me, even when connected to different people.
In terms of the trophies, this is a medium sized list, containing 32 trophies, including the Platinum, all of which are evenly distributed amongst 3 main areas of the game, starting with the Adventure Mode.
Most of the trophies within the list are earned here. To be precise, 14 of the 32 trophies are achieved through Adventure Mode, which is almost half the list, and these are mainly progression-based.
The Adventure Mode feels shorter than it has in previous titles. There are 20 main levels to complete, and although there are a generous number of additional mini-game levels, the majority of these do not factor into the trophy list, with only a couple required to be beaten for separate trophies. If you want to spend time discovering all the secrets in a level, where you can often find Prize Bubbles and Multiplayer segments, you can easily squeeze around 7-8 hours from the story.
However, one of the main reasons the Adventure Mode seems shorter, is due to the absence of a trophy relating to the collection of all the Prize Bubbles, which had featured in both previous trophy lists in the series. Without this, there isn't a necessity to explore the entire level, where Prize Bubbles would usually be hidden in harder to reach places. These were also sometimes unavailable first time round, and you'd need a sticker or a tool that you only obtain later, and would therefore have to come back and replay the level. Prize Bubbles also used to be annoying for the fact they were often provided as rewards for beating the Multiplayer aspects of story levels, usually requiring 3 or 4 players locally using the same number of controllers or online with the required amount of people, both of which caused challenges for different reasons.
Not having to worry about collecting all the Prize Bubbles means you can just go through the main path of the level, and can also therefore complete it much faster. There is still a trophy awarded for Acing each level, and this also seemed much easier than before. I remember some tough levels in previous LBP games, yet there's nothing here that gave me a challenge when it came to beating it without dying.
The "Don't go alone..." trophy, awarded for Completing all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing is where the path became rocky. I'd originally attempted this trophy when the online element was still accessible, just using the "Dive in" feature to quickly matchmake with another player and beat the level with them. This seemed to be going fairly well, aside the horrendously laggy connection that was a constant throughout, but it seemed like the most viable way to Ace levels and beat them with another player simultaneously.
However, the trophy didn't pop. All 20 levels beaten with different online players, and no trophy. I'd read it was buggy and that the only real solution was to just replay it all over again. So that's exactly what I did, except this time, in local co-op with another controller. I'd beaten all 20 levels with another Sackboy idle throughout and still didn't get my trophy. That's 2 full playthroughs of the Adventure Mode with nothing to show for it.
My next step was to delete the save game data and go for a third run. Ironically, the shortest Adventure Mode in any LBP game was quickly becoming the longest and this summed up my thoughts on the buggy nature of the game. Thankfully though, I didn't need to resort to restarting a new save file. After playing through each level twice I'd noticed that a small handful of them had not recorded a leaderboard score, which was also something I'd read about. Before committing to deletion of my save file, I jumped back into a couple of these levels, and the trophy popped upon completion of one of them and we finally had it.
This was clearly just a little bit buggy, but just to further add to the frustrations, one of the most useful tools for trophy hunters within LBP, has always been the Pins. These would show you tracked progress for certain trophies, and where there were numeric requirements attached to them, you'd also see how much you'd need for a particular trophy. This trophy is tracked here, but for whatever reason, it won't show you how many levels you've beaten with another Sack Thing, so effectively may aswell not be here. Just about summed it all up.
The "A guy called Quest" trophy, awarded for Completing all the Quests in LittleBigPlanet 3 Adventure Mode, requires you to complete a listed set of individual tasks. These are simple requirements, often related to Story levels or Mini-Games, and do not require you to do anything too taxing. In fact, they're fairly easy and some of them are actually just awarded for progression-related milestones tied to reaching certain points in the story.
Unfortunately, the reason they're notable in this particular instance is because 3 of the 15 quests require multiple players to complete, with one of them requiring the maximum total of 4. Whilst it is a positive that you can still complete the quest solo, you will still need 4 separate controllers, and given the lack of online access restricts the route of grouping up with others, you'll need to have 4 controllers specifically for this part only. It's frustrating that it's literally only a single quest that requires this, and this classic LBP stunt has made me somewhat resentful towards the game. I really don't want to dislike you LBP, but you're putting me in a tough spot.
Just when you think you've gotten through the main parts of the game, and realised that any additional peripherals may have been excluded from thought upon realisation that the Prize Bubbles areas are excluded from trophy list requirements, they still somehow find a way to make sure you're forking out for some extra hardware to keep Sony happy. Keep hold of those controllers too if you intend to dive into the DLC - Spoiler, but you're going to need them.
To shake the sour taste that leaves behind, the Popit Puzzles are a refreshing addition - Effectively tutorials on how to use basic and advanced versions of the toolkit, but rather than just show you how to use them, they task you with beating levels by demonstrating that you have a reasonable understanding of them. Slightly more engaging than the typical tutorial, and you can earn trophies for beating and acing both term 1 and term 2 of the Academy, as well as another trophy for "graduating" - Which is effectively just earning the prior 4 trophies related to the Popit Puzzle mode.
The final mode you'll need to explore is the creation mode. This is where the heart and soul of any LBP game is meant to exist, and whilst I've already said it's just not the sort of thing that's ever really interested me, I have always appreciated the levels that other people have spent their time and effort into putting out for others to enjoy.
There are 8 trophies you can earn within the create tool here, and they're all incredibly effortless, to the point where you can achieve them all in less than 10 minutes. This is a far cry from LBP 1, where possibly the most infamous LBP trophy ever existed - To spend 24 active hours in create mode. The significant dilution of the create feature in the trophy list is very welcome, and it's the easiest step within this whole process. Place a few specific items down on the canvas, play around with a couple of level effects and then max out the thermometer with some mass copy and pasting. Job done.
Finally, there are 3 online trophies within the list too, which require access to community levels. They are also incredibly seamless tasks, but do now unfortunately make this Platinum unobtainable if you didn't grab them prior to the closure of the servers.
LittleBigPlanet 3 is undoubtedly the easiest Platinum in the series thus far. It actually almost drops below the baseline standard for difficulty of 3/10. If it wasn't for the buggy "Don't go it alone..." trophy causing me the frustration that it did, along with some of the general frustrations that make the game a bit of an unenjoyable slog at times then you could very well argue the case for it being one of the easiest in the collection. It can have an entire additional point on the rating for the forced peripherals.
No necessity to collect the Prize Bubbles, a create mode that only requires around 10 minutes of your time and in worst case scenario, you can navigate your way through the required Multiplayer elements, specifically the Adventure Mode, as a solo player controlling more than one Sackboy at once, unlike previous titles that have required 3 or 4 players due to the way these segments were built. It's annoying that the necessity for extra hardware has become a habit for an LBP title though, and realising you'll need 4 controllers is a real "urgh" feeling. A step backwards for the series in every way, including the difficulty of the trophy list.
Notable Trophies -
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| Don't go alone... - Complete all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing. A guy called Quest - Complete all the Quests in LittleBigPlanet 3 Adventure Mode. |
Hardest Trophy -
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