Ah, LittleBigPlanet. Alas, we finally meet.

After spending what felt like an eternity in development, after being rolled out to oohs and ahhs at GDC, Leipzig, TGS and countless E3s, the once-humble little game that somehow, someway grew into a triple-A holiday season behemoth finally makes the scene.

I still remember the first time I saw LittleBigPlanet in action. It was like having candy shoved into my eyes. I was so overwhelmed that I could barely speak coherently about it.

"Hey everyone! Let's all go collect stickers! Yay!"

Maybe I've got a cold heart, but each successive time I saw the game over the last two years -- and I've seen it many, many times at this point -- it seemed increasingly less special to me. All of the smiling and waving that the Sackboys (and Sackgirls) did during demos began to seem like cheap mugging for the cameras, lame bids for more of those oohs and ahhs. And all the promises of so-easy-a-monkey-can-do-it level creation seemed fairly dubious to me.

So I kept digging. Beneath the burlap textures and Rube Goldberg-esque level designs, beneath the skateboards and stickers and hummable ditties, beneath the near-overwhelming preciousness -- has there ever been a more precious game than this one? -- I kept looking, kept searching, with one question in mind: Where, underneath all the precious graphics and dubious promises, is the game?

It's "Pixar Mario," according to fellow Game Truster and all-around clever bastard Scott Alexander. He's right. It is Pixar Mario. You'll hop and bop your way from left to right across levels that range thematically from earthy gardens to African Savannahs; from dynamite-filled canyons to Hindu temples; and even a descent into a volcano.

The overall production still impresses. LittleBigPlanet makes one of the great first impressions of all time. The entire game appears to be cobbled together from someone's junk drawer: bits of string, a button or two, an old coin, a pair of scissors, etc. It comes off as an intentionally lo-fi platformer. Think of it as the equivalent of a high school drama club production of Super Mario Bros.

BFFs.

At the game's start, you're introduced to your Sackboy (or Sackgirl), the big-headed, burlap-and-stuffing creature that's prominently displayed on the box cover. He is, if you think about it, Sony's antidote to its poster-boy Kratos: the company's first big-budget-but-still-casual bid to take a bite out of the Wii's fanbase.

But after you've been hustled through a series of well-crafted tutorials that teach you the basics of running and jumping and character customization, this warm, fuzzy, friendly game suddenly becomes surprisingly difficult.

I died. A lot. When you die, the game ports you back to a previous checkpoint. You get four lives per checkpoint, and once they're gone, poof, it's Game Over.* It's this cruel, Old Testament-caliber spirit that feels incongruous with LittleBigPlanet's fuzzy, friendly exterior.

At least some of the blame must be attributed to the game's loose controls. Sackboy seems to have a bit too much momentum, meaning that once he starts moving in a particular direction, it always takes him a few steps to stop. This becomes painfully apparent during moments when precise jumps are required. Countless pained cries of "Nooooo!" rang out through my apartment building over the last two weeks.

Look out! It's a giant skull-faced thing!

What I was looking at on-screen was still terribly cute -- jaded old soul that I am, even I uttered an "aw" or two on occasion -- but what I was feeling was white-knuckle, controller-hurling frustration.

Which brings me to my core complaint about LittleBigPlanet: If you're going to make a Mario clone, it better be a goddamn good Mario clone. And LittleBigPlanet is not a very good Mario clone.

During the game, I quite literally pinned a tail on a donkey. I was challenged to see how many times I could jump over a whirling necktie. I drove a hotrod, rode a skateboard, braved photorealistic flames and scenery-chewing Skulldozers. I scoured tea cups for stickers.

These things sound fun. But they're not.

The problem is, the whole enterprise -- whirling neckties, skateboard riding, tail-pinning, etc. -- never really comes together; it never really congeals into an experience. There's no motivation for any of this, no overriding goal ? la "save the Princess." Despite the game's precious graphics, it's merely a series of disparate ideas, themes and gameplay variations, all cobbled together for no clear reason. There's too much style and not enough substance, ultimately leaving you with a Franken-game aesthetic.

Not pictured: The six hours of work that went into creating this.

Of course, there's also the whole make-your-own-level aspect of the package. Does it work? The answer: It does. Open up the "My Moon" option from your "Pod" (the precious little house where your Sackboy resides), and you're free to build your own level either using either an existing level template (which you'll recognize from the campaign) or entirely from scratch. Your first attempt at level creation will set off a string of unskippable tutorials designed to help you figure out how to use your Popit menu (Hit the square button, and a cartoonish thought-balloon thing literally pops up). While the tutorials are useful, they're far from short. In fact, to get through them all -- the game basically strong-arms you into watching them -- you've already committed more than an hour of your time. All the narrator's warm, cutesy banter during the tutorials? It becomes decidedly less warm and cutesy very quickly, trust me.

Here's a quick and crude explanation for how the level creator works: Select an item from your Popit menu -- a big, fat mushroom will do -- adjust the size and angle of your mushroom (right analog stick), then place it on the blank canvas of your world with a press of the X button. It's easy enough to scatter a few objects here and there. But to build a cohesive level that even approximates a fraction of the quality shown in the levels created by Media Molecule? For the majority of us, that would take days, weeks, even months.

Not pictured: The 12 hours, four sandwiches, eight Frescas and two naps that went into creating this.

My guess is that 95 percent of the people who buy the game won't bother to put in the effort to figure out how this aspect of the game works. Part of the problem is that, as I've said, it's a relatively difficult and time-consuming process. The tools are powerful, but learning how to use them properly is a real commitment. As I recently said to fellow writer Evan Narcisse: "I don't have six hours to spend creating a giraffe neck that goes up and down."

Beyond that, the other issue I have with LittleBigPlanet's modding tools is this: The mods that I have played in the past -- for Doom, for example -- I did so out of a love for the source material. In other words, once I'd finished Doom, I wanted more game, and the mod community satisfied that need for me.

Once I had polished off LittleBigPlanet, I didn't find myself wanting more game. I wasn't motivated in any core way to download any of the user-created levels, or to really go to town and create my own. While including the D.I.Y. tools is a nice bonus, it does seem a bit presumptuous on the developer's part to assume that we're all going to be so absolutely ga-ga over LittleBigPlanet that we're going to desire more.

In the end, LittleBigPlanet turns out to be a little-big-letdown. It's very pretty, yes, and it certainly has its moments, but it never quite becomes the postmodern, genre-defining experience that Sony promised it would be.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.

* Editor's note: "per checkpoint" added as a correction on 10/30/08.