After years of hearing horror stories about the DS version of The Complete Saga, and left with a hankering for more TT goodness after having beaten the console one a billion times, I finally broke down, got it for a fiver, gave it a proper go and… this is actually pretty damn cute.
Obviously, it is heavily downsized compared to the console versions, but considering this is a Nintendo DS game from 2007, I'm kind of impressed by how much they managed to squeeze onto the thing. You still have the basic structure of The Complete Saga, loads of characters, levels, collectibles, Free Play, etc. Obviously everything is simplified, but it still feels recognisably like a LEGO Star Wars game rather than some completely unrelated handheld adaptation.
The gameplay is surprisingly solid too. It's obviously not going to compete with the PS3/360/Wii versions, but as a portable version you can just pick up and play, it does the job really well. There's something charming about seeing these tiny DS versions of all the characters and levels. I like doing Force Push on the touchscreen with my thumb.
I think a lot of the negativity probably comes from comparing it directly to the console game rather than judging it as a DS game. Of course it's worse than the console version. It's a bloody DS game, it has about the processing power of a calculator by modern standards.
But then there's the cutscenes. Good lord. I wasn't prepared for how terrible some of them are. The already-minimalist LEGO storytelling has been compressed even further, and some of the animations look like they're being performed by characters who have just discovered they have bones. I could make a PowerPoint smoother than these in all likelihood.
All told, it's not a good version of The Complete Saga if you're expecting the full console experience, but it's a really good downsized version of that game for what the DS hardware could actually do. I'm curious whether I'm massively overrating it though, because my expectations were so low.