Developed by Amaze Entertainment
Published by LucasArts/TT Games
By Danielle Zacarias
While LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy is a great game on the PS2, the Xbox or the 360, if you play it on the DS you will realize that whatever magic LucasArts managed to capture on the big consoles is utterly and completely lost once it is transferred to the portable screen. What was a great game becomes a nearly unbearable voyage into a land of bad graphics and nauseatingly bad controls.
For those not familiar with LEGO Star Wars, the game won a bunch of awards for being incredibly awesome. In it, you assume the guise of everyone from Princess Leia to various bounty hunters and Sith lords while you play out the story lines from the original three Star Wars movies. Throw in the fact that the characters and much of the scenery is made of Lego and you have one of the most inventive and amusing games ever created. The characters don’t speak, they mumble, and the cinematic sequences are goofy takes on scenes from the movies. It’s bound to appeal to both adults and kids, since the violence is actually cute — it amounts to Lego blocks falling apart and spewing pretty gold and silver bolts — and the missions are fun but not devoid of intellectual challenge.
It’s a shame then that when LEGO Star Wars II switches platforms and jumps down to Nintendo DS size the list of bad things goes on longer than the title screens in Lucas’ films. Everything the game does well on the other platforms just gets worse on the DS. For example, my one complaint about LEGO Star Wars on the bigger consoles was the title screen. I mean really, does “A long, long time ago…” really have to stay on the screen for five minutes without being skippable? Well, on the DS the title screen is even worse because it looks somehow cheaper on top of everything. But I could live with that. I could probably live with the game, too, if I thought for one second that LucasArts had given adapting the game for the DS more than three seconds of thought.
The music, the scenery and even the little gold, silver, and blue screws that fall out of things when you blast them seem to have lost their shine on the DS. There aren’t as many bolts, and with less bolts comes less amusement. But that’s not the worst of it.
My biggest problem with the game on the DS is that LEGO Star Wars II is 3D and the directional pad on the DS is not really meant for 3D adventuring. I first noticed it when I had to move diagonally across the screen and I was reduced to doing so in short bursts. First a little left. Then a little up. Then more left. You can imagine how this killed the game play. It became monumentally frustrating to have to navigate even the shortest distance in this fashion, especially when the distance traversed was over a beam suspended in space and falling off it meant having to do it multiple times. In and of itself this is fine, since falling off and dying amounts to nothing in the game: you have endless lives and there is never any time limit on anything. So you can go and fall off things as many times as you like, the only problem being it isn’t any fun and that was what made this game great on the other platforms. This is the main problem with the DS version of the game. The fun is gone and is replaced by frustration. And take away the fun and you’re not really playing LEGO Star Wars anymore. You’re just playing a bad game.
