Sunday 6 March 2016

Backlog Beatdown: Collecting EVERYTHING with Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga


If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might be forgiven for thinking “But Matt, haven’t you already beaten Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga?” And you would be correct, well done, especially if you’re not one of the (currently) 33 people who read that blog in the first place. And you’re right, I wouldn’t normally count a game as ‘beaten’ if I’d already done so. However, I allowed myself a free pass with Lego Star Wars. And here’s why:
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is the first full game on the Xbox 360 I have completed 100%. That is to say, I have completed all the campaigns, collected all the collectables (and this is a Lego game so there are a LOT,) and got all the achievement points.
Playing as Obi Wan in his full 'Cool
Old Guy' glory. What's not to love?
In fairness, this is probably the only game in my collection where I have a hope of achieving all the achievement points. It’s not because I’m bad at games, not just because of that anyway. It’s just that for the vast majority of games I’ve got on the 360, a lot of the achievement points are tied up in the online Multiplayer mode. And since I’m always going to struggle even to get a game in now that most people have moved onto the Xbox One, the chances that I’m going to get many achievements that depend on multiplayer games are slim indeed. There was one achievement, in this case, that required me to complete a level with another player online, but I managed that one a couple of years ago.
I got a long way to doing this when I was participating in No Game New Year back in 2014, but after collecting all the mini-kits and other various achievements, I realised I was essentially going to have to play through the game at least another two times in order to complete the game and it got filed under “can’t be arsed.” Nearly a year and a half later, I came back to it and found that I needed to get all the Blue Mini-kits in challenge mode. I used an online guide for this because I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down, and even then some of those kits were very tough to find in the 10-minute time limit. It took a while, but I got them all.
Then I needed to complete the bounty hunter missions for the final few gold bricks. These turned out to be quite easy and very enjoyable; the bounty hunters are always fun characters to play and it’s nice to play the familiar levels with different characters. Yes, I know Free Play allows you to do this, but the Bounty Hunter missions lock you with those 6 (I think) characters so you have to utilise what abilities you have – some have more than others – to get through the level.
The final thing I needed to do was to complete Super Story Mode – in this, you apparently have to get through each story in less than an hour and collect 100,000 studs along the way. Now, I’m not complaining, but I found in my play-through that I only actually had to do the latter, as some of the stories took me well over an hour and were marked off as complete anyway. Collecting 100,000 studs is really not that hard to do, so it was just a matter of getting through the story again, but I managed it for the final achievement of completing the game 100%.
Fitting that this was the scene at the end of the
Lego Star Wars - TCS journey...
And that should be it for Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I’ve done everything there is to do and there’s no reason for me to own the game anymore, so I should probably just get rid of it. Except… for some reason, I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know whether I’ve got an ill-proportioned amount of investment in this game now, or whether I’m thinking of playing it through again in the future, but I don’t want to delete it from my hard drive just yet.
Maybe it’s because whatever else it might be, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is actually a really good game.