File this one under “Perfect Sequels.”

In the late 2000’s, a magical game called LittleBigPlanet released for the PS3. On the surface, it was a cute 2.5D platformer with a simple Story Mode where you go through themed obstacle courses to make it from point A to point B. The visuals were beautiful and the sense of the world’s grand scale made your tiny hacky-sack person all the more endearing. Everything in the world looked like it was hand-crafted which made it apparent that they wanted you to tap into your imagination to fully enjoy the experience. You got to customize your little SackThing however you wanted and make them emote while you goofed around with your friends. You even got to customize the little ship that your character uses to select the levels you wanted to play.

While all of this was a great foundation, the Story Mode was simply means to an end: the developers wanted YOU to make your own levels like they did. Everything stated above is only a third of the game. Another significant part of the game is the Create Mode, which is the entire point of the hand-crafted theme that the game flaunts. In LBP, players could easily make their own levels using the powerful, yet easy-to-grasp level editor using all the goodies they collected in the Story Mode. The level editor seems overwhelming at first, but literally every aspect has a short tutorial. This might sound tedious, but each tutorial is optional, yet is narrated gently and delightfully by Stephen Fry who makes it fun to listen and learn. Afterward, you could go online and play all sorts of levels made by other users, whether it was a platformer, some sort of roleplaying map, a tech demo, a shark survival, monster truck rallies, fighting games with silly physics, PvP races, and the list goes on. Despite its primitive restrictions, people were capable of making truly magnificent things that wouldn’t seem possible at first glance, like working calculators or tic-tac-toe with an AI. Plus, the general concept of an online UGC video game was pretty novel at the time, especially on a console. Suffice to say, LBP was a fun, impressive game that really wanted you flex your creative muscles.

And then LittleBigPlanet 2 came along and obliterated LBP1 in every single aspect.

LBP2 takes everything that was great about LBP1 and cranks it up to11. Not only were there quality of life improvements across the board, but they did an exceptional job of filling in all the missing bits and pieces that you could possibly ask for. In the level editor, they added Logic Gates, which were little computer chips and other gadgets that gave you far more control over how anything and everything in your levels functioned. No longer did you have to rely on overly-complicated, yet primitive solutions to do something simple, you could just plop down a few Logic Gates and get it done in a minute. Plus, they gave you even more development tools at your disposal to make your levels more like a true video game. Enemies were easier to make, bosses were easier to make, multi-level narratives were easier to make and string together. There were lots of customizable power ups at your disposal that made creating your level around an interesting central mechanic easier. The new Story Mode was far more intricate and advanced than the old one, once again showcasing what was possible in the level editor. You could even make your own custom soundtrack with MIDI-like instruments if you wanted. You had SackBots which were NPCs you can change the behavior for, making them perform specific actions or just speak to the player. You could use a gadget called “the Controlinator” to make advanced vehicles, massive machines, or completely custom characters and bind it to your controller inputs. Players could now make things like Battleship, top-down racers, horror games, puzzles with serious depth, spectacular boss fights, collect-a-thons, survival gauntlets, and so much more. There were even people making feature length films with the new NPC system and cutscene tools, it was absolutely insane. To top it all off, if you had LBP1, you got to transfer EVERYTHING you obtained from LBP1 to LBP2. Music, clothes, building materials, objects, stickers, DLCs, your character’s outfits, everything. The amount of things you could do and how easy it was to build and play was truly mind-blowing. There's no doubt that this game has inspired people to pursue game development in their future.

Truly my only real complaint was the seemingly endless onslaught of DLC. It was cool that you could dress your character like Solid Snake or Ratchet or Jak or even Sonic with official costumes, but the prices would add up sort of quickly. Then there were level kits, where it was fairly common for them to lock an entirely new game mechanic like anti-gravity, wall-jumping, and gliding behind a paywall. By comparison, it was usually more worth it to get level kits, as they would have a small story mode, tons of new materials to work with, new music, a new central game mechanic, and even a few costumes thrown in for only a few bucks. Otherwise, they actually gave out quite a few free things from time to time.

Despite the years of experience between all the developers at Media Molecule, having LBP1 and 2 be their first games after forming a new company is astounding. When you play these games, it’s obvious that so much thought, love, and care went into them. For quite a few years, you could tell when Media Molecule made a game just based on the consistent quality, how detailed everything was and how there tends to be an emphasis on letting your creativity flow. Their mantra for their studio was to keep the amount of staff small so everyone could be tightly-knight and focused, which is a mentality that apparently inspired Hideo Kojima of all people when making his own studio. Their focus certainly shows in their games and LBP2 is easily my favorite game to come from their studio. Quite frankly, it’s also in my top 10 favorite games of the 2010’s.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with LittleBigPlanet 2.
Moreso than the first game, the campaign this time around is much more fantastical and imaginative, which, while fun, kind of robs the game of some of the quaint feeling its predecessor had - the original LittleBigPlanet is a globe-throtting adventure told through an arts and crafts project, this is just a full on sci-fi fantasy video game.
And that's like, fine.
All the characters are still demonstrably either dolls or made out of papercraft materials, we've just moved into a much more anthropomorphisized world.
It has its advantages and disadvantages, the game has a far greater focus on character writing with companions that follow you around the world and dedicated cutscenes between levels, your character is a part of a big ensemble cast which, while one-dimensional, is still suitably entertaining.
Do I kind of miss the tourist-y feel of the original game's campaign? Yeah, it lended itself better to the customization aspect of it all with your character being able to use the different outfits of the places they were visiting (a whole decade before Mario Odyssey did it too!), but this kind of goofy parody mixture between Star Wars and Ocean's 11 works well enough here and makes the game feel distinct from its predecessor.

As far as the actual levels are concerned they're often both very long and also have a tendency of feeling like tech demos more than anything, the game's more preoccupied with showing you all the cool ways in which you can use the new creator tools than it is in having a good coherent campaign, which results in more than a few dud levels across the campaign with gimmicks that maybe could have been left on the cutting room floor.

That said, it's hard to deny how much more fleshed out the customization and level creation in this game is, there's stuff here that's just outright coding language presented in a way to be easily understood and utilized by a kid and that's something to be commended - there were user-created levels in this game that would put some actual professional projects out there to shame.

Now did -I- use any of these amazing new tools that would let you take your creations to the next level? Well... no, I was a bit too dumb to wrap my head around it all and ultimately I just kinda wanted to make levels where you jump on stuff, which is where my bigger problem with the game arises: it's a bit TOO complex.
I realize that's kind of a nothing complaint, but I think there's some merit to it - LittleBigPlanet 2 increased the complexity of level creation to such a degree from the first game to the point where it stopped feeling like you could just pick the game up and make a fun level, anything you could make in a few hours with friends would just feel inadequate next to the gargantuant projects that smarter and more dedicated players could put together - is that a big of a skill issue on my part? Sure, but I think a game that's all about promoting creativity making it feel like your ideas aren't as good as other people's isn't exactly ideal.

Still, all of that said I had a grand time with this game as a kid and that's something I just can't brush aside, I can't think of a game since this one that allowed me to make so many friends and have fun all within the game itself with no outside input - it's likely that there'll never be anything quite like this again, and I'm glad that, despite the faults, I was there to experience it.

If you never played this game, sadly there's little to no point in doing so now, it was a 'you had to be there' type game. Of all the things I could wish for again in my life; I would wish to relive the era in which Little big planet 2 was popular. The community was absolutely amazing and the only video game community in which I could randomly join someone's pod and end up still chatting to them 9 years later! Inadvertently this game has shaped me and my personality therefore creating me as a person and I am none but thankful to media molecule for it. "Out pops a transcendental dream verse. A remarkable place where the real meets the fantastic and this vast expanse of imagination has a name, they call it Little Big Planet"

The first game is really good but this game completely obliterates it. It's probably the best example ever of a sequel that transcends its predecessor. Every aspect of the original is improved, and any complaints you could make were addressed.

I'm not ashamed to say that this was basically the only game I played for years when it came out. I wish it still existed in its entirety, but with the servers being down it's hardly the same thing anymore. Still very much worth returning to though, even if its just for the campaign or to fiddle around in the level editor.