Among landscape full of nice pastel colors and cute designs, everything seems pleasant and well ordered. When little prince from space rolls his katamari around, you probably don’t even notice him at first. Then his sticky rolling ball starts to be nuance. Then, terror. Run for your life.
Katamari Damacy was one of that weird cultural artifacts that I knew since a long time, but I had to have good occasion to actually try it. It’s cult classic game from Japan that shines on its unique gameplay mechanic, equally cute and surrealist designs and subtle dark humor juxtaposed with overall whimsy around. We play as tiny (few centimeters height) prince from space, son of king of all cosmos. King, big douchebag and very, very awful father, went into big drunken party last night and accidentally destroyed all the stars from the sky. He orders us to go out to Earth with katamari and roll it, gluing as much stuff as possible to made new stars out of it. This weird premise sounds to me like mix of fairy tale cosmology (with their stars being small enough to be made of few stuff from Earth) and modern dark humor. Oh, and also, the king teleports us around by spewing rainbow from his mouth. Yes, we deal with that kind of stuff here.
It was a struggle to get a control over katamari. You steer using both sticks, so in order to move forward you need to move both up, to turn around in place you move them in opposite direction — sticks corresponding to left and right hands pushing katamari ball. It’s unusual control scheme for video game, but at first glance still quite intuitive. Despite that, I had hard time to get used to that and feel like I somehow handle it properly. Even past half of the game I still didn’t feel I mastered it. Additional difficulty arises out of big inertia that our katamari have and sometimes weird rolling movement when we glued items in less ball-like shape. In my case it seemed most common when I glued fences or other such long stuff. Original game is PS2 exclusive so I can imagine that game controls were designed around gamepad sticks and I played Reroll on Switch, so difficulty rather couldn’t come out of that. I wonder how PC version with keyboard feels. At some point I accepted difficulties and inertia as just one part of game quirks that build its charm and from hindsight controller is perfect for that.
There’s something weirdly satisfying when your katamari grows (semi-)exponentially and from level to level those differences between starting point and finish are bigger and bigger. Part of the fun is how our humble efforts at start soon enough allow us to bring small animals and then humans into our rolling ball. Then obstacles that at the beginning felt like sturdly and unmovable, like road signs, electric poles, cars and eventually whole buildings. It’s worth to note that nature of gameplay at first seem to make things easier further into session, because bigger we are, bigger things can be swallowed. But there are few problems that often occur and can make us stack and not realize our goal. Sometimes we can stuck in area where we have either too small things to quickly grow or big enough that provides obstacles. Sometimes we can literally stuck between two things and sheds too much of our stuff, because when we hit obstacles something always drop from katamari.
Another crucial aspect of the game that has to be mentioned is soundtrack. Shibuya-kei pop music fits perfectly to whimsical visuals and events during the game. Although I’m not exactly sure how and when I heard for the first time about this game, my best guess is that I heard first the soundtrack and I already fell in love. It’s very upbeat happy tune that accompany our reign of terror over terrified people running away from us. The biggest highlight for me was ending song that at first sounds like cliché song about peace, love and global unity, but if you pay attention it is in fact infused with dark humor, claiming that “we can be all together” if “we roll everything in”.
It is perfect game for anyone who wants to try something original and whimsical. Everything in this game works perfectly together — unique gameplay, subtle humor, quirky artstyle and amazing music.