To me, Katamari Damacy is the margherita pizza of video games. It's one of the simplest yet most innately fulfilling concepts in the medium: roll up things with your ball to become big to roll up more things. While this description is accurate however, it doesn't do justice towards the game's underlying complexity. Committal tank controls combined with the seemingly strewn about yet carefully placed objects of varying sizes means that Katamari forces players to consider both the micro and macro design which the game effortlessly excels at. The player must weave in and out of clusters of increasingly large objects, building up their sphere while also mapping out the optimal paths (snagging relevant objects while factoring in how their shapes, once collected, will alter the roll) and keeping in mind how larger objects must be avoided at first and later consumed in the growing mass as the world appears to shrinks around you. For this reason, I think it's not just a simple power fantasy, and instead more closely resembles pure obstacle escalation. Katamari Damacy really drills in the sense of player progression from how the world unfolds from sense of scale (which is why it gets away with only three distinct stages) and even seemingly inverts its own concepts with side stages that force you to avoid smaller themed objects just to get your katamari to the perfect size for the ultimate outcome: the reward is made that much more gratifying with just a bit of restraint.

This all works seamlessly because Katamari is the king of player feedback. It can certainly feel frustrating at first, getting tossed around like fireworks by these moving objects that dwarf you, but the game knows exactly how to communicate your inherent progress. As your ball exponentially swells, these moving objects go from sending you flying, to lacking any significant impact upon contact, to eventually spotting the player and running away from the growing catastrophe. There's nothing more viscerally satisfying than coming back to mobile obstacles that were pushing you around and flattening them, hearing their cry as they too become stuck in the jumbled mess of rolling flotsam while the King of the Cosmos quips in the background. Simply put, the concept never outstays its welcome.

Going back to the opening metaphor, it requires much finesse to make all these different concepts sing together with little friction in a video game, this fusion of audio-visual presentation and player input. That said, to successfully disguise its intricate design and depth beneath its far-reaching artistic vision and simple yet realized gameplay mechanics takes a master's touch. Katamari Damacy does not try to explain why it works or how it succeeds, because it simply is, and it just does. Perhaps I've moved onto greater and grander things since that have built off of this, but I have to admit that sometimes, you just can't beat the basics in life. It's always worth going back for a slice or two every now and then, just to remind yourself that this is why video games exist in the first place: because underneath all this talk of focus and cohesion, video games are just goddamn fun.

Also, it's fantastic hangover food for you and your buddies after a long night, when they come calling you for content and suddenly it's 3 AM in a packed Discord call where everyone is wailing "YOU'REEEEE LONNEEELLLY ROLLING STARRRR" as this growing, screaming ball of flailing limbs bounces helplessly about for yet another awry creation. Let the good times roll.

Allow me to present you with a question you might groan at the mere sight of witnessing it, fellow reader, that being: are videogames art?





To that I say a resound:... they are even better than that

I really don’t know where to even start with Katamari Damacy, much like with the weird kind-of-not-spherical bringers of chaos and destruction that give the game’s name, there isn’t really a beginning or end, it just keeps on rollin’...

I wouldn’t be the first to gush about its uniqueness, both in its completely bonkers yet adorably silly presentation and its rather peculiar control scheme, one that definitively takes some time to adjust to, but one you do it’s like riding on a bike. Managing both joysticks, knowing when to turn and when to stop, where to go and what to evade, it’s a waltz performed by a mystical otter that plays the accordion, and you may be thinking ‘’Deemon, that doesn’t make sense at all’’ and to that I say EXACTLY! It’s a hectic loop, there were times I was sweating wondering if I’d even come close to the required size to beat the game, only to steam roll while some of the most varied and oddly beautiful bangers play in the background, some even compliment you! And that’s when the stress starts to mix with an zen sensation, a melding process that culminates once you do it, you manage to reach the required size, and from your mind an profound and sound ‘’WOOOOOOOOO!’’ sensation appears as you begin to try to go even higher, reaching uncontemplated horizons by your small prince mind and achieve a perfect star shine... only for the King of the Universe to go ‘’You call this a star? Oh me oh my.’’ ...

It feels too chaotic, and yet, it’s perfectly calculated. There are so many maps that it feels like new surprises are neverending, yet there are so little that learning their routing becomes essential as well as pretty rewarding; there’s so much stuff that it may be hard to know where to start or on what you can even roll over, yet it’s placement is so finely tuned, so perfectly put together that it begins to be like a puzzle that gets easier as you go along, and even throws some extra challenges like finding the scattered gifts across the globe or trying out the constellation stages. Even when the King of the Universe throws you to repair his ‘’naughtiness’’ or time seems of the essence, there's always a moment of respite, a small victory whether it’s in pure calmness or pure ectasis, or something as simple as triying to find out a new crazy set up or what do they ask of you next. Going from having to just achieve 1 meter to the three-digit numbers was a feeling of progression that seems simple, but I wasn’t expecting to see so well-crafted in so little time, to make me keep coming back time and time again may to grab a scarf or shirt on the way, or get the biggest cow possible and make one hell of a Taurus.

The little intermissions, the songs, the movement... it’s such a silly experience, and I use that word with the best intent imaginable. Katamari Damacy is comfy and hilarious, stressful and maddening, a cocktail of emotions I don’t think a game has made me feel in such a way. There’s not a ton of games that say goodbye when closing them, and even among them, Katamari does it with an irreplicable sweetness, the same with which i does everything else.

You gotta defeat mouses if you want to go up against a Kraken, you need to see small worlds before going through the globe, and of course, if you want to make the sky shine, you gotta keep rollin’

And before I wrap this up, huge thanks to @Drax for recommending me this one, it was the reason I came back to it after giving it a go in 2022 and dropping it near the beggning and I’m so glad I returned, it was beyond worth it...

imagine someone just waking up some day and thinking "what if i made a game about a small guy with a ball than can go big with the many things it collects? all of the objects having it's own kind of collision, causing that crispy sensation? and, logically, the ball itself getting slower with the amount of things you collect? oh, and of course, the art style being so colorful and caricatured in a humurous - but never offensive - way? having one of the best soundtracks of the medium? man, it's gonna be awesome"

well, someone actually thinked. thanks to keita takahashi, now we have katamari damacy, the greatest videogame production since super mario bros. (1985).

at least for me!

BORN TO ROLL
WORLD IS A STAR
星星 Roll em all 2004
I am prince man
410,757,864,530 DEAD PEOPLE

I see people use words like "childlike joy" a lot, but I don't remember the last time I've seen a game so suited to it before playing the remake of 2004's Katamari Damacy. Katamari Damacy asks that you maneuver an increasingly large ball around a level where smaller objects adhere to the ball - the katamari - until you have enough volume to roll up new objects. It is perfectly tactile: in primarily using the analog sticks, you are not the ball - you are the diminutive prince, forced to settle for merely corralling the momentum of a katamari that is often twice your size before you've picked up even a single object.

It's not a frictionless experience, but Katamari Damacy's developers are judicious in how, when, and how much they attempt to toy with the player. For the most part, they're rooting for you: objects are generally placed with those of a comparable size, allowing you to build up some steam before hitting a conspicuous, illogical wall of bicycles or traffic cones or what-have-you that blocks the path ahead - a gentle, guiding, parent-like hand that asks you to spend a little longer working with what you've already got before picking up some new toys. And boy howdy will you pick up some new toys.

Start with thumbtacks, then move to erasers, then pick up a toothbrush that nearly prevents your katamari from rolling in certain directions. In the span of minutes, cars become as useless as thumbtacks as you pluck buildings from the ground, islands from the ocean, and clean the sky of its clouds. You have completed your goal of making something as big as you possibly can during your time at recess, and how do you feel as you roll around the empty ocean? Satisfied? Bored? Hungry for more? Do you feel a tinge of regret at having undone it all? That last one is me speaking from my own experience, but Katamari Damacy itself does not judge you - it'll make a magnificent star, after all.

I don't think I've encountered a game before where I've loved how it feels to move and control as much as this one. There's this perfect amount of friction and imprecision to it all, whether it's from rolling down a hill and not being strong enough to push the katamari back up, collecting a bunch of stuff and becoming too large to be able to manoeuvre your way back in the same smooth way, or even just the way that you become progressively more unwieldy the larger you get, there's a lot of fantastic nuance to how it feels to play the game. This especially serves to make each level feel engaging in how you approach it from start to finish, with your growing size frequently recontextualising pieces of the scenery, especially since the game just, isn't afraid to have those moments where it absolutely sucks to move through somewhere. I love this for the way it gives the environment a somewhat more natural feel to it despite the scattershot madness that it can embody, as if it's this whole little world that you're trespassing into and messing with as opposed to a world that feels created with the purpose and expectation of guiding this giant clump of assorted objects to destroy everything.

What makes all of this even more impressive however, is that despite this, there's almost not a single moment where this game isn't an absolute joy to play. A lot of this comes from the presentation I think, both the visuals and audio. I appreciate the absurdity of how the environment is constructed having so many strange, entirely disparate elements being slapped together and then playing it off as if it's just another regular day, as people go about their business watching polar bears sing and walking their elephants down the street. Love the character designs too, there are few things that are as cute as the prince or as playfully cursed looking as the king of the cosmos, and the random civilians on Earth are pretty funny as well with their square heads and exaggerated features.

The audio is great as well, especially with how weighty it sounds in the right scenarios, with each collision feeling like an absolutely catastrophic setback because of this, even when you're losing about 3 seconds of progress at most. The absolute chaos that the game embodies when you've got a lot of sound effects playing at once as you're rolling over a large group of objects is another highlight in this regard, since there's something that just doesn't get old about hearing a bunch of people and animals screaming at once while the cheerful background music blares. The soundtrack is one of the best ever as well and I will hear no arguments on this (not that there seem to be many anyway since it seems like a common enough take), basically every game would be improved with the inclusion of Lonely Rolling Star.

On the whole this is just one of the most delightful games I've played, with the one drawback being that I did find some of the later stages to be a biiiiit repetitive since it starts using the same big environments over and over, so I feel that even just one more place that was introduced near the end would've helped keep up a sense of variety, but even so, I see myself playing this game a lot when I'm just looking for something cozy to put on for a bit.

Katamari has always been on my "want to play this someday" radar, but I never actually delved further into it - all I've known for many years is that it was supposedly about rolling up stuff to roll up even more stuff. But when I saw it for 4€ on sale the other day, I decided to just give it a try.

Surprisingly, Damacy Reroll already managed to set a record within the first 5 minutes in gameplay, where I was ready for nominating the game for the "worst controls of all time" award without even having finished the tutorial levels. Thankfully the award didn't go to Damacy and it didn't take me long to get used to the controls and enjoy the game properly. The twin-stick controls are really unique and simply describable as "easy to learn, hard to master", there's an additional layer of precision when you get the hang of them and it's quite satisfying to see.

The core gameplay is as straightforward as it gets - in the main missions, the Katamari (the ball you're rolling) has to reach a certain size within a certain time limit. Everything you roll over gets glued to the Katamari, so you'll have to start with coins and fruit first and when things get rolling (I'm sorry), you can roll over increasingly bigger things to a point where it's comical. It's so ridiculous, but Damacy Reroll does a great job at creating a sense of scale in each individual level. The side missions are also fun little challenges in the way that their main goal isn't having the biggest Katamari possible, but rather collecting a certain amount of something or having to guess your Katamari's size.

In terms of soundtrack, the dreamy songs fit the fever-dreamish vibe of the game's direction really well and are easy on the ears. Do yourself a favor and listen to Lonely Rolling Star. I think it's rather silly that the music is so cheerful and pleasant when there's a weapon of mass destruction mowing down everything in sight, but that's definitely part of the charm for me.

There's... not much else I have to say, except that I'm looking forward to playing We Love Katamari! Currently pretty engaged with Tekken 8, so my progress in Persona 3 Reload has been paused for the moment, but I'll get back to it soon. As always, thanks for reading my reviews!

I am so mad at myself for not playing this sooner holy shit. I legit could not put this game down.

Ya get in a kinda zen state with it where ya bounce from level to level just wanting to continue on the fun joyous ass ride that you're deep in on. Getting a handle on the controls and what the game demands of you feels so good once ya got it down. Rolling shit up just FEELS good in this game. The use of vibration, the visuals, the sounds all gives it this perfect tactile feel to it that just works so perfectly.

While I do wish there was a bit of a better visual indicator of when you could roll something (there were multiple times where I was sure I could roll like a person or a pole or something only for the game to stop me from doing so multiple times which kinda annoyed me) I never felt inconvenienced or fucked over at any time by it and as I got better with rolling I got better at collecting and getting bigger much quicker. Snowballing a real good roll is fuckin godlike in this game it's so satisfying.

It offers pretty fun and clever little mix-ups in how you approach collecting shit thrown in here and there and it all just feels fuckin great. The moon level is just an absolutely perfect stage like godDAMN.

This is also now just straight the fuck out one of my new favorite OST's too which I guess shouldn’t be too surprising given the reputation this series’ music tends to garner I’d just never listened to it really! I've listened to like the main theme and I dug it but I didn't know this shit went THIS fuckin hard with it so lemme geek out about this shit for a second!

LONELY ROLLING STAR makes me smile every time it comes on, it feels warm and adds a kind of vibe to the game that I can't really describe all that well. It makes me feel at home?

Cherry Tree Times also just fills me with a happy kinda calm whenever it would come on. It just makes me smile at the cozy fun vibe this game wants to carry on. It's like the singers are cheering me on as I roll up all this shit to turn into a big beautiful star or series of stars and it just hits.

Gin & Tonic & Red Red Roses in ways reminded me of like a Judy and Mary song or something from a Mariko Goto solo project for some reason with a bit more swing type flavor and that just made me really happy whenever it came on during the game!

This game absolutely rocks the amount of pure VARIETY this game tackles in like every aspect on all cylinders at all times no matter what. Whether that be visual, musical, gameplay, just all fuckin over feels perfect.

For whatever reason, I’d been hesitant to really give this game a shot. I wasn’t sure if I would vibe with it or dig what it was doing but that was clearly the thoughts of a complete dumbass. I’m never doubting myself on shit like this ever again my g o d. I see the vision, I truly get it now.

what this game really nails is fulfilling this chaotic destructive urge in the player while also refusing to give into any sort of alienating or cynical aesthetic to justify it. in many ways it's a flippant creation mythos, rendering the earth asunder to create the sky anew. keita takahashi's sculpture student background can instantly be seen through these stellar structures that form from societal detritus, expanding and growing and taking on unique forms of every permutation of the level. each run is a celebration, with joyous rhythms from a range of latin, jazz, and electronic influences intertwined with screams, cries, and gunshots as the existing structures crumble and make way for astral creation. and it's so bittersweet when it finishes too.

gameplay is also masterful of course, not really shocking anyone by saying that. control this giant haphazard clump as you ricochet off of obstacles and absorb everything in your path. they could have easily left the game with no opposing force and instead intricately laid out a full playfield of different sized objects in each level, constantly forcing the player to make snap judgments about what can be picked up, where they should proceed next, and how they should weave through these patterns. the perfect push-pull of precise object management sections with the catharsis of finally breaking through to the right size where nothing can stand in your way.

Sometimes the simplest things can be the best. You take a ball and can rollover things to make the ball bigger but they must me smaller than the ball. This grows the ball so you can pick up bigger things. I know that probably doesn’t sound great but it’s addicting and super fun. The story is the one of the strangest things in gaming. I would explain it but I don’t know how. There is star god”? I think, and some people and giant octupus and Godzilla and a lot of other random things. You roll around and collect stuff so the star god can bring the stars back.

I realize this review makes no sense and makes the game sound dumb as hell. But you also need to realize it’s really funny and worth a few hours of your time.

i'm going to be incredibly harsh here and say that this is a remaster that does not need to exist. the graphics look more washed out and lose that sharp style that original had. more damningly, the game somehow runs worse on the PS4 than it does on PS2 and will regularly get very bad slowdown around the baseball field near shopping street. it adds no qol features that the original could've used (i.e. the ability to restart a level either from pausing mid-level or retrying at the results screen), no extra content that the original didn't already have, and it only offers the japanese voice acting with no option for the iconic english voice acting (ik this part is contentious but there really is no reason it couldn't have at least been something you could toggle). i hate to be the fun police because a lot of people got introduced to this game from this remaster, but there really is no actual reason to play this over the original, especially considering how most microwaves can emulate PS2 games nowadays. i don't recommend this remaster for anyone uninitiated to the game and i don't recommend this remaster for any fans of the original looking for either new content or to revisit a classic, so it's a game for an audience of no one in my mind.

i want to be clear that this rating isn't necessarily reflective of the whole package; even with hiccups, this is katamari damacy. it takes more than slowdown to negate the joy of saying "C'MERE BITCH" and rolling up a terrified person into your katamari to then be rewarded with their screams of fear and agony. this rating is more an assessment of what reroll does (or does not do, in this case) to differentiate itself meaningfully from just playing the original. why pay money for this game when you can emulate the original and get the better and (imo) more essential experience? there's nothing inherently wrong with playing this over the original, but i would be completely unable to make a pitch for it. that's what makes it such a failure to me.

I've never really played a game this artistically unique and beautiful in a long time, and there probably isn't much that compares to this game. There's just such a great feeling of love and satisfaction and meaning in this game that doesn't exist in other games, even other katamari games don't really seem to GET it. No games have really even tried, probably for the best. I mean there's, like, Donut County but, no not really.

Even just putting aside this guys ideas and creativity the game is just FUN. Getting big enough to roll up everything you can find is one of the best feelings I've had playing a game and replaying the levels for bigger stars is actually fun but finding presents and cousins can be kind of annoying, if you're good enough at the levels you're almost bound to find them but sometimes you miss them. But the levels are so fun to go through anyways so I never cared anyways. The controls are weird but you get used to them, they feel kind of sensitive at times though? Like when you're small you sometimes move REALLY fast, and going against walls to roll up them almost always makes you lose stuff which was annoying at times.

And the music is some of the best music I've ever heard in a game??? Katamari on the Rocks??? I've yet to hear any of the music from other Katamari games but how could it get better than this? Even if it's the same composers I can't see it, but maybe that's why I've never even heard them played off hand.

I can't imagine any other Katamari games even being as good as this without Takahashi involved (besides We Love Katamari which is why this game isn't 5 stars). Play this game please. Don't be like me who went 23 years of my life without touching it once, and then play We Love Katamari in June.

A brilliant, insanely charming, instantly enjoyable gem of a game. A relic of a sadly bygone era, where Playstation (for which Katamari Damacy was originally an exclusive) were willing to publish weird, mid-budget games with eccentric presentation and weird ideas. There's nothing like Katamari out there anymore.

Its controls are really wonky in that up and down on the directional stick don't move you forward and back, but they move you around the circumference of the ball - and then you use the other stick to move once you've oriented yourself. It's a bit hard to get used to - but I think it's to the game's benefit and adds a lot of personality. If it were as cut-and-dry as "move forward to go forward" and "move back to go back" the game would be too easy, this gives it a unique feeling and makes it satisfying to get to grips with, and I think also adds a bit of depth to what would otherwise be a pretty shallow experience.

Katamari has this brilliant, off-kilter sense of humour. The King is such a fucking weido, frequently making weird remarks during levels in which he's asked you to roll up as many women or bears or crabs or whatever-the-fuck-else as you can possibly find. He lambasts you in-between levels and makes fun of your height and the size of your head, he roasts you for your failures but also gets really excited if you manage to roll up a big enough cow. I love him. He's my absolute GOAT. We will never see another video game character like The King Of All Cosmos. The game's levels also just frequently throw shit at the wall with no care for logic. Here's a couple of giant 100-foot-tall wrestlers swinging eachother around in the middle of the beach, here's a panda bear floating down from the sky on balloons, here's a random-ass unnamed kaiju that looks like Gigan from Godzilla rampaging through the middle of the ocean. Sure. Fuck it. Why not?

I'm particularly impressed by levels like the bear level and the cow level in which you're tasked with rolling up one of a single thing in the world and can finish the level no matter how big or small that thing (bear or cow) is, but are encouraged to get a bigger one to get a better score. In these levels it's not just about what you can roll up, it's about what you can't roll up (or, shouldn't, which is small bears or cows). You go around the whole level trying to pick stuff up and get bigger so you can get a bigger bear/cow for a better score, but the whole time you're having to dodge smaller bears and cows like your fucking life depends on it so the level doesn't just end and your hard work isn't wasted for nothing. It gets increasingly harder to dodge these things the bigger you get and the more ambitious you become in your bear/cow size hunt! It's a super smart inversion of the game's mechanics and in a really gutbusting way gets you super paranoid that you're about to roll over a tiny bear that you're too big to see now en route to the one you actually want! You start hallucinating bears and cows that aren't even there!! What the fuck do you mean this tiny-ass milk carton with a picture of a cow on it counts as a cow?? In the most loving way possible, absolutely fuck off man!! (I love this shit)

It's funny all the time, and it's fun all the time, because it wraps up in like 5 hours before it can even begin to get old. And do I even need to mention the soundtrack? This shit could chart it's that good, I mean it in the best way when I say that this game's OST is like a bunch of people doing bad impressions of Nujabes and Frank Sinatra. I fucking loved it, it's everything modern Playstation should be but isn't

A great remaster of one of my favorite PS2 games of all time.

Katamari Damacy is a delight. The gameplay of starting small and rolling up stuff to get bigger and bigger is still cool as hell almost 2 decades later. The art style, the vibe, the music - all flawless. God what a perfect game. It's so weird in the best ways.

+ Extremely fun gameplay
+ Perfectly weird
+ 10/10 soundtrack
+ Best vibes

- Controls are occasionally frustrating especially when you get wedged between two objects and can't move
- The level timer can sometimes be stressful

It's no wonder why Katamari Damacy is loved by so many people. This is my first Katamari game and I fell in love with it by the end. I'm incredibly excited about the upcoming release of We Love Katamari Reroll and I plan on picking it up sometime in the future.

The soundtrack was absolutely incredible. Definitely gonna be listening to it repeatedly on my own time.

There was a bit of jank to it every now and then, but it never flat-out ruined my overall enjoyment.

Also I hope the camera is improved upon when I inevitably pick up We Love Katamari Reroll because the camera in this game could’ve been better. I feel like the camera is always just a little too slow when you're adjusting it which is a bit of a problem when you're almost always on a time limit in this game.

Also also I practically never used the charge move cause it was way too clunky to move the sticks up and down repeatedly and you have to basically stop in place in order to do it. I wish I could just press a button to use this move.

Also also also it's really damn satisfying when you get to the really huge sizes and just roll up EVERYTHING in plain sight.