"Wow, I wonder what this Katamari game will bring to the series?"
>is a katamari game
>idontknowwhatiexpected.jpg

I think this game's big shtick is that the power of the Xbox 360 enables at least a thousand items to be onscreen at any given time. It's impressive on a technical level, but I feel like having this much shit going on at any given moment makes the game feel really busy, and detracts from the level design pretty hard. We're still working with Me and my Katamari's new scoring system, judging you based on size and a specific "type" of items rolled up. When there's so much to roll up, it really makes trying to focus on a specific type feel like a fool's errand.

It's not hard to feel Keita Takahashi's departure from the series in this one, the King's dialogue is very cookie-cutter, and the game is generally just going through the motions. I remember this game catching flack for being one of the earlier offenders for on-disc DLC, which really hurts it in the long run. All of the unique "gimmick" stages are locked behind paywalls, $1 for each. The game really needed this content to be free from the start. I beat this in an hour and a half, a single sitting.

That all said, I'm still shocked that this game has a decent leg up on the PS3's Katamari Forever. Beautiful Katamari runs at 60 FPS, has online multiplayer, and even an iDOLM@STER song. That sure is something.

what a beautiful game

ngl i like it better than we love katamari. i know, i know, but before you get your pitchforks ready, the vibes in this one are immaculate. completely replicates the vibe of katamari damacy, from the zany ost to the comedy to even the great credits sequence. my biggest complaints with we love katamari were how it just didnt have the same vibes, and whilst ive learned to love it in spite of that during my october replay, it still holds it back from being a 10 in my eyes. the story is meta commentary and its just not as memorable as damacy's. accessing levels through talking to random people never sat right with me either. and the credits, something i adore damacy for, for having one of the best credit sequences in gaming, are complete ass compared to wlk's. dont get me wrong i love wlk, but theres tons of micro criticisms i have.

so before my wlk replay i went through me and my katamari and touch my katamari. while those ranged from alright to pretty good, they still didnt touch the first two in my eyes. the katamari itch came back over the past month as i was finishing cs2(which is done, btw) so decided id get through beautiful after i finish. this shit blew me away. like i stated in the first paragraph, the vibes from damacy are here in full force. the story feels a bit redundant and like a retread of damacy, but its still better than the meta commentary of wlk. in fact, id say the epilogue level which sees The King yap about shit from his youth is a better way of telling the story that WLK ended up telling anyway. the silent cutscenes were alright, but it's another thing to just hear The King talk about his childhood in his hilariously narcissistic tone. also fantastic use of the song the royal academy of katamari for the level. this was initially the credits theme for wlk and it just didnt do anything for me, but here it works perfectly and fits the tone.

i havent mentioned it in any of my prior reviews, but i think the biggest boon this series ever had after takahashi left was keeping the same composer. no katamari ost has ever been bad from what ive played, but this definitely has some of his finest work for the series. it's also not entirely shibuya kei, which was an interesting but welcome choice. granted katamari osts have never been entirely in the shibuya kei genre, but at least for damacy a lot of songs were. some of my favs include bless my stars, katamari dancing, sayonara rolling star(the goat) and ofc, colorful heart the credits song.

we need to talk about that credits sequence. oh ye gods, its so good. katamari of love in damacy is one of my favorites for a reason, the rock ballad + the minigame of rolling everyone up was such a breath of fresh air, so imagine my surprise(when most of the other credit sequences afterwards have been ass or unmemorable) when there's a) a fun minigame and b) an insanely good credits song. just left me so fucking satisfied and glad i played this game.

i also checked out the dlc, and for taking me a total of just under 1 hour, its definitely a scam to not include it in the base game. being that i played this through means of dubious legality, i didnt have to pay, but it's also a scam that each level costs 1 dollar. 5 bucks for every dlc, including all the extra cousins and shit (which are apparently 2.5 dollars??? more than the levels what the actual fuck who bought this) i could get behind, but in it's current state, since each dlc level took me 5 mins or less, its totally a scam lol. being i dont interact with the xbox ecosystem at all idk if theyd ever go on sale but if theyre like half off definitely check em out. all of em are fun jaunts that feel right at home with the rest of the game. i hope if this one ever gets rerolled theyre bundled into the base game.

it feels weird saying this, but i think beautiful katamari feels like the true sequel, like for me im praising it as much as people praise wlk, so it feels like im in an alt timeline where wlk is the one that takahashi was not involved in. BK was an extremely well rounded experience, and if damacy didnt have the "did it first" bonus, im struggling to say if id choose damacy over this one as #1 in the series. it just feels right sitting at a 10. very underrated game in the katamari series, definitely check it out if you love katamari(and i mean, who doesn't)

#breakfreebeautifulkatamari

Beautiful Katamari has all the characters, cousins and katamari chaos you would expect from a game in the series but you can tell that it's missing a certain something.

The levels you're given are great and expand in entertaining ways but there isn't much variety on offer - you have two different smaller starting locations which eventually grow out into the same larger overworld which is a nice idea but growing out into the same wider world for every level does tend to get old a bit quickly. There's a bunch of levels stuck behind DLC which may address this, but I haven't been able to try these out yet.

The objectives too are pretty stale. The base request you'll receive is to reach - or ideally beat - a certain size while also rolling up as many objects of a particular type which is fine in theory. However, it's almost impossible to fail in collecting enough of those object types (and quite easy to get more than you need to get even the highest scores) which makes it pretty redundant, leaving you stuck with the base 'as big as possible' objective. You do get a couple of requests that are a bit different (like having to keep your katamari warm by rolling up warm things and avoiding anything cold as you try to reach 10,000 Celsius) but these are few and far between and don't match the creativity on display in the two previous PS2 games.

But the main thing that I think is lacking is purpose. I don't want to romanticise the first two games too much, but among the silliness there were interesting ideas. The first entry showed us the concept and executed it to a tee, the second developed it alongside a smart meta story about fanservice and having to do the same things again. In Beautiful Katamari, the only progress is in how nice the game looks. The story has nothing to say and is even more of a non-entity than before while its corporate nature shines through with a level about collecting 'cool' things being filled with Xbox 360s - this title of course being an Xbox 360 exclusive despite the history of the series elsewhere - along with the aforementioned locking of 7 of the game's 20 levels behind DLC

With all that said it's still a Katamari game where the simple act of rolling something up is incredibly satisfying, so much so that you're able to block out some of the weaker elements in this entry and just enjoy the ride. It's not perfect by any means but I'm super glad that this made it into the Xbox backwards compatibility program and that I've now been able to play a game I missed 14 years ago

Finally, the peak of Katamari.

I wasn't expecting much out of this game since Me & My Katamari was a huge disappointment and I pretty much thought the franchise would never be as good as it once was, but oh so wrong I was.
This game could be just considered "more Katamari" but you can call any Katamari sequel "more Katamari", Me & My Katamari was just "more Katamari" and it sucked! This game pretty much perfected the Katamari formula we all loved by making good levels where you just grow big and gimmicky levels that don't feel shoehorned in or unfun like how some of We Love Katamari's stages were.
And if anyone cared about the multiplayer aspects of Me & My Katamari it's all back with leaderboards and coop/vs modes or at least it used to have it I have no idea if the servers are still on for this game.

The reason why I'm not giving this game a 5/5 is that it's the shortest game of the franchise which is unfortunate since the stages were oh so good. They also added a few gimmicky stage reusing stage layouts which is fine on its own but as DLC it kinda sucks for a really short game.

一歩前進！前進！たまに中断！そんな時もあるさ
無理せずに完走！完走！次は楽勝！できるといいのだけど
それがうちらのやり方だから
一致団結！団結！時に衝突！後腐れないように
とりあえず円満！円満！すべて相談！つまらないことでも
みんなまとめてみんなまとめてみんなまとめてアイドルマスタ

I love Katamari and had a great time with this, but of the three I've played so far this is easily the weakest. The original and We Love are both super imaginative and have very well designed progression: you don't have to slowly search an overly large map to find levels and they actually build up in difficulty and concepts over time. Beautiful is fun, and it's Katamari so it's a unique and enjoyable experience that I'm still thrilled to play, but it's not as concise or well designed a game. Most levels feel just about the same difficulty, the gimmicks generally don't meaningfully change how you play, and it feels like the time limit is almost always 5 minutes, making each level very short. Previous games weren't exactly long but this was over in no time.

It's great to have more Katamari to play, Katamari doesn't get boring! I'm still glad that Beautiful finally got made backwards compatible, but it's a shame that it's so inessential after how incredibly good it's predecessors are.

It’s a lot of fun and most levels are great. The graphics are beautiful and hold up as good as the Reroll games. It also has a larger sense of scope than the previous games, with a lot more objects and explorable areas on the maps.

It is almost my favorite in the series, but there are 7 stages locked behind (granted, cheap) DLC. These DLC levels are also the ones that switch up the formula.. without them, the game has little variety and is probably more like 3 stars. A couple of levels are also stinkers (Uranus and Sun, I’m looking at you). If everything was on disc I’d probably score it a bit higher.. if it ever got a Reroll, I would probably give it 5 stars. This is also probably a hot take, but I think it has the best music in the series. The Lonely Rolling Star remix here is a banger. At the very least, look up the OST.

A must-play for Katamari fans, and a good buy for platformer fans.

Note: The game has a bit of slowdown, but I played it on an Xbox One X. It is probably a safe bet that it’s not there on the Series X.

(8-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

I love rolling up people's stuff, and if it was real life, it would be stealing. But this thing is very realistic and everything it has is definitely in real life, like the King of All Cosmos is definitely real! (giggles) And the final part where you have to roll up the world, I think they spelled a typo in one of the countries. I think it was meant to be Tajikistan, but they spelled it like Tadzhikistan?

[We google that for a minute]

Oh wait it's like another name. One last thing, play as Foomin. Bye!

One thing I doubt anyone knows about me is that I love the Katamari Damacy Series. I've been only able to play half of it sadly (not counting that mediocre mobile game), and the series seems to be dead, but I adore the games of this series that I have played.

Beautiful Katamari also happens to be one of the first Xbox 360 games I played at the young age of 4. The console would go on to give me many great experiences in my really early life and this weird-ass game was at the forefront of that.

Clear nostalgia aside, I think this game is amazing, having only a few flaws I'll touch on in a bit. I've returned to play bits and pieces of it here and there on completed save files over the years and have played the game start to finish a handful of times. Something must be enjoyable about it to keep me coming back, and that's what this review will cover.

There is a story to this game. The King of All Cosmos is playing tennis with his family while on a vacation when he makes a serve so powerful that it rips the fabric of the universe, creating a black hole. Everything except Earth gets sucked in, leading to you, the prince, getting called upon to roll a katamari around to pick up objects and recreate stars, planets, constellations and the like.

The story of this game is simple enough to get you rolling, and that's what it needs to be. However, I felt that it was a bit lacking. The game doesn't need a sweeping narrative or anything, but Beautiful Katamari doesn't really do much with its story.

Compare this to We Love Katamari (the best game in the series), which has a minimal story too, but uses these overly dramatic cutscenes to show snippets of the king's backstory. There may be a story there, but they're presented in such an over-the-top and bizarre way that you can't take them seriously. That's the joke. Beautiful Katamari has a plot, but no fun with it.

The gameplay is more of the same twinstick rolling that Katamari Damacy is famous for. Push both sticks forward to roll forward. Backward to roll backward. Left or right to strafe. So on and so forth. Pick up items with your katamari to make it grow. Pick up larger things as your katamari grows and meet a certain requirement within a time limit. There's not really anything new to make this game shine, and that's okay. The Katamari formula was great as is, and I personally think it didn't need changed.

The music in this game is amazing. It's all very peppy, with lots of catchy J-pop songs. My favorite is easily Sayonara Rolling Star, for taking a more calm and somber tone while still feeling right at home in the game's soundtrack. Katamari Damacy was originally created to make people happy, and Beatiful Katamari's soundtrack embodies that mantra of being happy perfectly.

The game's levels are designed masterfully, being areas with many nooks and crannies, all chock-full with items that will help you meet your goal. You also run across some very weird stuff. The tutorial level, Egg School, sees you rolling up little plastic toy pieces, angels, and even the puzzle pieces that make up the floor and wall of the map, the removal of which show that you're rolling in a building the king is holding up.

However, the most glaring flaw of this game is in its levels as well. The levels lack variety. Aside from one or two levels, all objectives are "roll around and pick up stuff to reach this certain size." This isn't bad, but previous games, like We Love Katamari, had more varied objectives. That makes the lack of objective variety here disappointing.

On a side note, I think this game is a great first game for any kid. The simplistic controls and imaginative environments can appeal to almost everyone and spur a young mind's imagination. I remember my little sister loving Egg School's odd locales as a toddler, and my mind was blown at a young age when I saw you could roll up the whole world in Schloss Kosmos, the game's final level. The game is also pretty easy, but not patronizing.

Beautiful Katamari is amazing. The gameplay is tight. The scenery is weird. The music is amazing. The nostalgia runs strong. However, the game has a story but fails to do anything interesting with it like previous games and level variety is lacking. Also, the game has some minor frame skips, but they're far from common. However, nostalgia aside, I feel these flaws are relatively very minor, and the game was one I'm proud to have been introduced to at such a young age.

9/10 - It's an amazing game that captivated me when I was very young, but is marred by some minor issues.

This review will probably be shorter than my past few, mostly because it's Katamari! If you don't know what it is, then it's really easy to describe, and if you do know what it is, then you probably already have an opinion on it, so it's not really that worth dribbling on about here. I'd already loved the first two games, especially the second one, and this game reaffirmed that well-deserved love. The only part that made me sad was to learn that this was really the last real Katamari game on a console, with the PS3 one just being a compilation and not so much a new game of its own ;A;

It's Katamari Damacy: You use both joysticks as tank controls to roll around a big ball that sticks to anything smaller than it that you roll into. It's wacky, it's Japanese, and it's very very fun. The King of the Cosmos is his usual campy, cocky self, spitting tons of weird lines of both praise (of himself) and of demeaning (you, his son). The art style is more or less the same as the PS2 games, which I'm inclined to forgive not only because this was a fairly early 360 title, but also because it means the game has a really good frame-rate that rarely dips, and was immediately noticeable for me. Only in the very final levels when you get SO big that you can see most of the map at once does the game start to chug at all, and even then it certainly doesn't harm gameplay.

In comparison to the first game, it blows it out of the water. The first game had a bit more personality in the writing and had more, better music, but this game just has SO much better levels. There are fewer of them, yes, but gone are the totally wank "collect the biggest X in this area," or "collect only X as much as you can" stages that plagued that game. Now in addition to the missions where you gotta roll a Katamari to X-size, you also need to focus somewhat on the theme of that level (be it toys, cold things, powerful things, energy things, etc.) but that usually isn't too hard.

In comparison to the second game, though it has been a while since I played it, I do recall that game having more levels. I could be remembering it wrong though. Beautiful Katamari I would say is at least on the level of that game, though perhaps not quite as good because that game's writing was very self-referential and sillier, and it had more stages. This game keeps that game's local co-op mode though, so that's nice. The 360 version does have a level full of 360 controllers and consoles though, which made me giggle quite a bit X3. This game is also HARD like the past couple games. Especially the last 3 or 4 stages, you really gotta work to get the Katamari big enough for the goal-size.

Verdict: Highly recommended. It's Katamari! It's silly, it's wacky, and it's above all: fun. Even if you suck at it (like I kinda do, though I like to think not too badly), you'll have fun with the cool environments, neat art style, and fantastic music. I can also speak from experience to the fact that the co-op mode is a fantasticly fun thing to do with someone who doesn't play video games too often, or even with one who does. I will admit, this is really just a slightly lesser version of We Love Katamari but on a 360. However, if you can get past that, then it's a fantastic game that's still a boat-load of fun.