Sometime following the release of LittleBigPlanet 2 in 2011, it was announced that Media Molecule was teaming up with Toyota, of all companies, to do a promotion for the Prius. Assets made to look like a Prius were given away, and a contest was held. If there's any indication of how that probably went, the entry my older brother submitted is as far away from palatable marketing as one can get. The description of LittleBigPrius Goes On a Killing Spree simply reads, "Go green with your road rage". You are trapped in a small cardboard box with an infinite number of rodents that never stop spawning, and your only goal is to kill as many of them as possible. There is no win state, and you cannot lose; it goes on like this until you get bored and decide to quit. In hindsight, the reading on what LBPrius Goes On a Killing Spree is is something you can spot from outer space: a counter-cultural shitpost used to disengage from a deplorable marketing scheme and throw discussion elsewhere. I was probably around nine or ten years old at the time, and he was eleven.

Almost by design, LittleBigPlanet 2 was a game that not only encouraged all shades of creativity but was particularly interested in seeing things through a more punk-oriented lens; we just didn't realize it at the time. You see that old man? He looks at the things you want to see and scoffs at them every time. And sure, he might be right, but fuck him! If you want to make a game where you have to survive in a Taco Bell as burrito-shaped bombs fall from the sky, you go, girl! If you want to have a game where the shark from Jaws is replaced with several miniature buttocks that shit an unrelenting stream of plasma at you until you die, he can't tell you no. If you want to create what you think a baller-ass house would look like, that can be considered a game now, as are all of the wildly inventive ideas you can think of. There is a reason why the emo community thrived on this game for as long as it did. I wasn't personally a part of it, and as a child, I found it to be quite off-putting. But on a platform where the limits of your creativity are stretched to "don't cuss and don't draw dicks," it only makes sense that the emotional at heart would have found a home, and I find that sentiment to be indicative of this package as a whole.

It's a shame that all of this is a footnote now. In a figurative and literal sense, the creations of old don't really exist anymore. Although everything is backed up in LittleBigPlanet 3, there are enough glitches in that game to shave a creator's vision off a mile from where it was etched. The additional layers added to the play space are brought over to old levels almost by accident. Unless the level you're playing on is Wiggler World 2, it's super easy to bypass levels entirely. The best example of this is raced-oriented levels. With this newfound ability, you don't even have to start races to jump to the exit of a level immediately. But I suppose that's all a byproduct of it being the only archive nowadays. I guess it was always an inevitability that the servers wouldn't stay online for long, but never in a million years did I think they would be used to spread hate before vanishing. As the eulogy this is, I'm almost bound by a clandestine oath to say that this is one of the greatest games of all-time, and it kind of is? But it's not. I don't know how we ever let it slide as children, but LittleBigPlanet 2 has to be one of the most egregiously over-monetized games I owned back then. The download code we received with the Special Edition when we got our copy was chock full of DLC to be sold at later dates—and we never even redeemed the thing. It expired before we even knew we had it in our house. Some of the DLC was great; the PlayStation Move pack that wound up being bundled with the Special Edition, for example, was an endless source of joy for us. But most of it was costumes, and they were just... whatever. The creativity of dressing up and finding new ways to look fancy was almost stripped by the corporate need to boost sales, and in retrospect, that's a damn shame. It's easy to remember the good times, but in doing so, I believe it's also necessary to be entirely honest.

With the online component stripped and left with only its campaign, LittleBigPlanet 2 is hardly worth visiting nowadays outside of a cursory glance done out of curiosity. But for the memories it's given me, I will always respect it.

Reviewed on Apr 29, 2023


2 Comments


10 months ago

Loved this review

2 months ago

@whu This response is eight months late, but thanks! I'm glad to see you liked my work.