This game rocks man. Just straight fun. If you wanna blast through it, or if you wanna get into the high score aspect, there's a lot of potential. I will say that my one drawback with this game is that if you really want to get into the high scoring there is a kind of skill ceiling - at some point it's a copy monkey situation where you need to memorize if you want to get the highest score possible. But as a casual game, or a game where you and your friend take turns trying to beat each other's times and sizes without taking it to seriously, it's hard to beat.

Lots of the environments are pretty similar which kind of works out in this case because the game's progression is about getting bigger. You go from one room, to the whole house, to the neighborhood, and so on - just sort of zooming out. It's cool!

One final detail... I like being able to play as the cousins. Nice detail!

i'm not exaggerating when i say this but this game might genuinely have revived my love for video games

i had never heard about this game in my life, i merely googled "good ps2 games" and found this in a video and i saw about 3 seconds and was like "what is this about even" and i didn't look it further, i just downloaded it and booted i up

at first i was lost. everything was confusing. but once i started playing it i got really into it

the controls are a bit ... hm. i get what it's going for, it just never sank in for me, it did enough for me to play it but it just didn't ever feel good to me

other than that? absolutely lovely game, something very calming about kidnapping children and hearing people scream as i roll them up

i think i finished it? at least i filled up the constellations and finsihed all the stars and moon. i kinda sucked at doing all of it but it IS Done.

it was surprisingly short, it took me like 5 hours to finish this and i'm glad it did, it did feel like the game had showed me everything and now i can just boot it up again to replay parts if i feel like it. there's no stress or pressure to keep playing, since i have this annoying urge to play a game quickly so i can finish it. with no real sidecontent or distractions, i just have a very linear path to follow and simple goals to meet. i like that.

the visuals are really pretty (i play without any upscaling with a soft crt filter) and the music is always so good, from the level songs to the catchy theme to the weird off putting cutscenes and character designs, love the aesthetic of this game

the trailer for the rogue prince of persia came out and i watched it yesterday, leading me to me watching the entire triple i showcase, and i was surprised at how much of it was attractive to me. i usually do not enjoy indie games, i'm a realism over fun kinda person, but this really did change my mind on games for the better i think, i can appreciate so much more about different types of games now.

thank you katamari damacy, i'll get around to playing more of this series in the future at some point but for now i think i'l go replay a few levels and then venture into more games i couldn't otherwise have thought of playing

Katamari Damacy might be the pinnacle of video games. It is all things that are complex while also being extremely simple.

Thanks to Sony, early 2000s analog controls are phenomenal, and Katamari Damacy is atop of the mountain of them. I haven’t enjoyed controls in a game this much since the first Ape Escape (for real this time.) A plethora of moves you can pull off all at the movement of two sticks, immaculate.

An unbelievably, beautifully sounding game. From the text sound effects to the final credits song, there is no piece of music in this game that wasn’t crafted with love. Intimate love. Straight up sex to the ears brother.

Probably the funniest story in any game, rivaled by only Undertale, with a heartwarming message to wrap things up at the end. After every level you complete you're interrupted by cutscenes of a family talking about outer space slowly being pieced back together, by you. The young girl constantly says, “Oh! I feel it! I feel the cosmos!” and it’s both the cutest and funniest thing ever. I love it. I just love it.

The king has some of the best dialogue in gaming history, too. Namco should hold their fists high in celebration of what I think might be the best game ever made.

There’s so much to say about this game, but I want you to go play it yourself. Let this review be a guide into another dimension of gaming. Writing this review made my eyes water, because you just don’t play games like this anymore. Games aren’t made with the same kind of passion and creativity, and it’s really something to behold.

During my play through, my PS2 crashed at “Make a Star 7” and I hadn’t saved since the first level. So I immediately went back and did all that shit again, no hesitation, and enjoyed every second of it. If that’s not enough to get a perfect score, then I don’t know what is. 10/10.

katamari damacy is a very easy game to undervalue. there's likely a decent portion of people who have gone "oh so this is just a quirky game about rolling a ball around to grab stuff? okay" or something to that effect, and disregarded the game. it's very hard to pitch the game without gameplay footage to complement; telling a coworker about this game reminded me of trying to sell someone on ace attorney being fun in spite of its droll-sounding premise. yet, even with this obstacle, i can safely say that this game might be the single most widely appealing and approachable game on the PS2's library short of tetris ports.

this is a deceptively simple game that focuses on doing one thing, and doing it superbly: movement. it is in its precise focus on movement that anyone can enjoy this game while still leaving a high skill ceiling and appropriate challenges to match. truthfully, i think this is a very, very easy game to sit down and beat. if you're just going for the minimum size requirements, even a bad player could swing that, give or take a handful of retries. meanwhile, for anyone who wants to really challenge themselves, the game has comet times, size thresholds, and collection aspects to tickle the brain. and while i think all three of those could use more transparency for the player in plainly stating what they're asking for, that simultaneously lends itself to this mystique that katamari damacy's aesthetic thrives on. i do want the raw numbers, but also, i kind of love that the king of all cosmos will just go "that's a 4/10" and belabor the point by saying he would've done it much better instead of telling you what size would satisfy him.

there's something to be said about what katamari damacy feels like to experience. clinically, i don't think i could name a game that utilizes sound design in a more synapse-stimulating way. this goes beyond the soundtrack, which is immaculate. rolling over objects is accompanied by this extremely memorable sound that i struggle to describe. it sounds like if you were to fire a rubber band at a giant plate of jello. it's minor, but considering all you are doing in the game is moving to collect things, making the act of collecting have an intrinsically pleasing sound is an elegant way to elevate it. and the moment-to-moment gameplay of scanning for both objects your size to get right then while also looking for objects bigger than you to hunt for later as goals is diabolically brilliant design. the player makes both conscious and unconscious decisions about what to preoccupy themselves with and what to work towards. the magic is that it's done instantly and often without the player even realizing how they're being conditioned. katamari damacy doesn't fatigue the player with analysis paralysis, because it immediately makes it apparent that you want to get shit, and you want to constantly be in the process of getting shit.

as for collecting itself, many objects will have sounds that play when you get them, adding to that feedback loop. you roll up an egg and boom, a little chickling briefly hatches and peeps a bit. you roll up a truck and you can bet you're gonna hear its horn. this even extends to people when you roll them up, and often the most fun part of any given level is when you get big enough to roll up random civilians and hear their associated voice lines when you get them. whether it's random teenage girls who give their all in screaming, old men who have no earthly idea what's going on and just moan a little in confusion, or the Towel Guy who makes this sound that easily puts him in contention for most lgbt character of all time. sometimes the fun of the game is not only seeing what you can roll up, but how it will react to you.

and while the game does have only 3 main areas, the structure of each level greatly varies. you could have one level in the house where you're just collecting random household objects like food and legos and then the next level in that same house you're suddenly swarmed with crabs to collect. something i appreciated on this replay was how dollhouse-esque this game's levels feel in their arrangement. they have this exactness to them where you can feel the dev team telling their little stories through object and people placement. it all feels so neatly arranged and deliberate, and it creates this reptilian brain response of wanting to destroy something delicate when you arrive on the scene. people lowball this game a lot and chalk up its appeal to being this silly and quirky game with not much to it, but i think that greatly does a disservice to the intentionality behind the design choices here. katamari damacy organically fosters a curiosity to its world in a way that appears effortless. all of this is done without dialogue or lore drops, just visual arrangement and responsivity to player actions. it's a masterclass.

it feels very surreal to say that this game turned 20 this year. i still vividly remember the toonami mini-review of this game when it was new. i don't want to make this about how i'm getting older, things are aging, and the like, because there's no real place for it here. i don't think katamari damacy has aged in really appreciable, significant ways. there's an evergreen quality here that will never have an expiration date. the simple nature of its gameplay lends itself to this timeless quality. moreover, we're never going to reach a point in the medium where movement becomes something dated. movement will always be inherently part of any game with a world to explore and play in. katamari damacy may not have been planning for the future with its laser-focus on a game purely based around movement, but it is one that has aged better than anyone could've speculated. this is a perfect game in that sense, and it's one of the first things that i would nominate we encase in steel and eject into space to preserve it for future civilizations and species.