Katamari Damacy

Year: 2004
Genre: Puzzle, Action
Website: http://katamaridamacy.jp/

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Lee:

• Platform: PS3
• Hours logged: 5.5
• Playthroughs: 1
• Rating: 9/10

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Notes and Discussions:

• Lee (3/31/2014): I seem to remember about a decade ago Shane insisted that, as a fellow Japanophile, I must play a game called Katamari Damacy. Shane’s recommendations rarely lead me astray (except perhaps for sour beers and Led Zeppelin III), so I bought a copy of the game for my PS2 on Amazon. It turns out that it was a fantastic recommendation! Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, when it hit me that I absolutely had to play it again. But unfortunately, I had given the game away when I got rid of my PS2 several years ago. After a bit of research, I discovered that there was a $10 PS3 digital download for the game from Amazon. Sold. I think within the first five minutes after downloading and launching the game, I likely proclaimed “What the fuck?!” two or three dozen times. The intro scene includes dancing pandas, rainbows, butterflies, mushrooms, and a gigantic dude with a funny hat and a monster bulging package in his purple tights. WTF?? I had almost forgotten how deliciously fucked up some of the things you find in Japanese culture can be.
  
  It turns out that the gigantic, flamboyant dude is the King of the Cosmos, and he did a few too many acid-laced shrooms one night (OK, that’s not part of the story) and broke all of the stars in the sky. Your task, as a tiny little prince picking up objects by rolling around a ball (called a “katamari”), is to make new stars for the sky...and to put up with the ridicule, harassment, and impatience of the rambling and ultra-strange king. After finishing the tutorial, the first level starts you off at about the size of a mouse, and you are only able to pick up tiny objects like dice, thumbtacks, and marbles. Once you reach a certain size, the screen zooms out, you and your katamari increase in size, and you are then able to pick up even bigger objects like Mahjong tiles, Lego blocks, and snails. This process of rolling up increasingly larger items to grow your katamari repeats until you are at least the size that the king tells you to be at the beginning of the level. When the time limit for the level is up, the king appears and scoops you up and brings you back into outer space using a Royal Rainbow, which he shoots out of his gaping mouth. WTFFF?!  If you achieved the required katamari size within the allotted time, the King of the Cosmos makes it into a star and tosses it up into space (after telling you that you could have done better); if not, he gets SUPER pissed and things get a little dark and scary.
  
  
  Bottom line? I loved it. I loved it when I played it on my PS2 years ago, and I loved logging this recent playthrough. There are points during the gameplay when it is hard to see where you are going because your huge katamari and large surrounding world objects obscure your field of view, but if you just keep rolling, your katamari will usually quickly get big enough for the screen to zoom out another step. I enjoy the fact that the controls are very simple, as you only use the two analog sticks on the PS2/3 controller, but mastering the controls still requires a degree of coordination and dexterity. Completing some of the levels with the allotted time can be challenging, but the level goals are all reasonably achievable. For a few of the maps, if you do really well on them, then your katamari will get so big that you can just roll up everything in the map. When that happens, it is pretty gloriously satisfying.
  
  I would highly recommend this game to anyone who is in the mood for a dose of humor and whimsy in your gameplay. The game is over-the-top in a lot of ways, and over-the-top fun is definitely one of them!