Katamari Damacy

Katamari Damacy is notorious for a few things: a brilliant soundtrack popular even with those who haven't played the game, an easily recognizable, surrealist art direction, and (most importantly) a bizarre core concept that is executed at ridiculously high levels. The game, taken as a whole, is a tornado of jazzy bubblegum electronica, pastel colors, and unfettered, wanton destruction - a complete sensory overload that understands the unique aspects of the gaming medium.

Your job as the Prince of the Cosmos is to rebuild the starry sky after your father, the vain, sarcastic and somewhat abusive King, destroys every star in the universe on a whim. Deciding he misses them, actually, he sends you to Earth to roll up objects, people and creatures to collect material to rebuild the stars. However, the King is a busy guy, and he only gives you a handful of minutes for each mission, making where to go and what to pick up nonstop mental decisions for the entirety of the stage. You control your ball of stuff with the two analog sticks and barrel through the environment, grabbing everything you can.

The sense of scale and perspective was the first thing that really grabbed me. The tutorial level takes place on a kotatsu that feels gigantic, rolling up candies and matchsticks and dominoes as the size of one yourself. As the levels go by, you'll eventually tackle the rest of the house, the yard, the neighborhood, the nearby cities and finally entire islands in the sea. This size hierarchy is emphasized in gameplay by immediately attaching any object small enough to your katamari, and bouncing you off of everything else. Out of the hundreds of thousands of objects in this game, they either are yours to take now or later. This gives way to some creative level structures, where areas can be "zoned off" simply by containing too many of an item you can't pick up yet, giving a semi-intended route though these otherwise unbounded playgrounds.

In the later levels, the sense of destruction you're causing becomes intoxicating. You might spend a level in a small market, picking up fruit and boxes while humans charge into you and erase your progress, only to end that level large enough to start picking up the people that caused you so much trouble before. Overcoming your obstacles through sheer heft gives a weird, primal sense of accomplishment, as you stage a literal conquest of the environment before you. In no time, you'll pluck cars from the street like you're waxing hair off of your body. Katamari Damacy discards stuffy completionism favor of a million shiny objects for you to roll up, with each weird item and creature vying for your destructive attention. It's impossible to roll up everything in the tight time limits, so you're gunning for sheer quantity at all times.

Series creator Keita Takahashi has spoken about this game being a critique of consumerist culture, and I think that lens is the best way to understand the game's vision. The sheer number of different objects that can be rolled up is completely staggering, and even through hours of gameplay there will certainly be some that you haven't seen yet. The King lambasts and praises you based on your collection efforts per stage, but will always end his monologue with the same line: "My, Earth really is full of things." It is up to interpretation if this is meant to represent some divine condescension of mankind's hoarding, or a critique of the actual utility of these things in their current state outside of kindling for a boulder of stuff, or a more abstract desire of the creator to do away with the manufacturing of useless trinkets that comprise a majority of our landfills, to literally shoot all of this garbage into space, where it may actually be of use for something. The fact that the people who helped create all of these things are commonly caught in the mayhem serves only to amplify the stance, whether you see those acts of kidnapping to be punishment for mankind or an act no different than picking up anything else. Perhaps it's justifiable as an alleviation of a burden on the Earth itself.

On a smaller narrative scale, you learn of a human perspective on the events taking place through small cutscenes of the Hoshino family, who witness some of the Katamari nonsense as they travel across the country to see the father's rocket ship launch. The kids see news stories about stars appearing and reappearing and even glimpses of the King himself, but their mother always just misses the events and refuses to believe such ridiculous stories. Inevitably, the adults are forced to accept the strange reality when the father's launch is canceled after the moon can no longer be found in the night sky - a reconstruction project that you as the Prince just hadn't gotten to yet. This second story gives an interesting perspective of childlike wonder on your anti-consumerist crusade, re-contextualizing it as what it appears to be at first glance - a fantastical mythos of childish imagination. Damacy is both the work of a discontent adult, disgusted with the planet around him, and the boy he once was, wide-eyed for stories of the otherworldly.

The identity of humorous surrealism is built on with rather strange side missions to rebuild constellations, with goals other than to consume indiscriminately. To rebuild Cancer, you are told to collect as many crabs as possible, with all other things discarded from your score. To rebuild Taurus, you need only touch a single cow-related object, but may start too small to pick up any large bulls, requiring careful navigation through the environment so that you can build your katamari while avoiding smaller cows. Finally, in the reconstruction of the North Star, you are tasked with eyeballing a katamari of 10m in diameter without any numeric data for your ball that is usually given, forcing you to pay attention to the relative size of objects in the environment and making an educated geometric guess as to when to stop. All three variants are fun, simple twists on the usual formula that add tension, constraints and challenge where the open-faced levels may not.

The only real issue I had playing at any time was occasionally combating the control scheme. You can hold both sticks forward against an object to slowly climb it, but how long you can do this before you fail and fall to the ground seems inconsistent. building momentum is difficult in areas without much free space, and the "boost" mechanic is caused by turning left and right very quickly which makes it unreliable to aim. This isn't a major issue, as a ball that large of weirdly shaped stuff is of course going to prove difficult to control, but it posed a challenge in a handful of levels where visibility was poor or there were many obstacles to avoid. In tense situations, even minor dissonance between my inputs and the katamari started to drive me up the wall. If this control scheme was intentionally hard to reign in I'd consider it a design flaw.

Control weirdness aside I cannot think of a single area where this game fell flat outside of level variety, which feels like a silly complaint considering how much Namco gets out of just the normal grab-everything stage layout. It's a really well-thought out piece of art and one of the most complete experiences I've ever enjoyed. Highly recommended to everyone, especially those who don't venture outside of their comfort zones often.

Still an awesome little puzzle?... action?... you know what I don't know how to describe Katamari Damacy's genre other than it is a game that is well regarded for various reasons and is still fun to come back to and replay.

The only true flaw is that it is a little short, but it sets out to do and deliver exactly what it wants to and it does a good job of doing just that. Easy recommend if you wanna play a little sociopathic space prince rolling up crabs and people into a sticky ball to turn into Polaris or whatever.