The first game without the creator on board and a huge step down.

The first thing any Katamari fan will notice are the controls, which are different since the PSP obviously does not have two analog sticks. Thankfully, this can be ammended with the Vita version or an emulator, which makes it feel better even if it's obviously not as smooth as real dual analog. What's more annoying is that the new quick turn is really hard to get use to using and the dash lacks the fluidity of We Love Katamari's since it's used by spamming up on digital inputs. That being said though, it is playable, and I will defend the game on that.

That's not the big issue here though. It's the level design. This game has four unique main levels. Three for the super large stages are unique and the final stage's last part is also unique. The game mostly consists of different versions of these four maps with different objects, similar to Katamari Damacy, however just like that game it is pretty repetitive. Even more so this time though in my experience. By the end of the game, even for the specific versions of each stage I had played some of these over five times. It doesn't help that some of these levels have you play one level of each size except the final one too, so it just overall makes for an extremely repetitive game. The level design for the smaller stages is at least alright, but on the larger ones it honestly feels almost braindead since you start so large with no real threats to you. Especially the stages where you start at 10 meters.

This game is for fans only, otherwise, skip it.

I've seen a few reviews on here that claim Katamari Damacy has terrible controls. In Katamari you need both analog sticks to move; move both sticks up to roll forward, down for backwards, hold the left stick up and the right stick down to quickly move the Prince to the left, and vice versa. Rapidly move the analog sticks up and down for a few seconds to perform a dash and you can press both sticks in to do a 180-degree turn. I personally think these controls are perfect; sure, it may take a while to get used to them, but just because they're weird or different doesn't mean they're bad. I kind of see it like tank controls, except I see more people bitch about that. Katamari NEEDS two analog sticks to work! So, what do you get when you put Katamari on a console with only one analog nub? You get one scuffed Katamari game, probably the worst in the series! Everything the right analog stick used to do is now on the four face buttons. Triangle replaces holding up on the right stick and x replaces holding down. For the dash you need to press the nub up and the triangle button alternatively, and for the quick turn press left on the nub and the circle button twice in quick succession. Just like with other Katamari games, you can get used to them eventually (remapping the face buttons to the right analog stick helps) but there are issues beyond the controls here.

This is the third game in the series and is the first game made without the involvement of series creator Keita Takahashi and it shows. Each level plays out the exact same way. Roll up to this amount, then get transported to a new map, timer resets and roll around again. Now repeat this for about 4 and a half hours. This may sound like a normal Katamari game, but the problem is that every level is the god damn same thing every single time. Rollable objects are always in the same position; the size number you need to achieve is the same, and the order the maps appear in is the same; they could have at least randomized them! I didn't count how many maps are in the game, but there's really not too many. Your objective is always the same, just roll and get bigger; it gets mind-numbing real quick. We Love Katamari introduced a lot of stage variety like rolling a sumo wrestler around so he can eat and get bigger for an upcoming sumo match. A boy got caught up with studying and didn't pay his electricity bill; now go roll up fireflies so he can continue his studies. There's a stage where you enter a race and now your Katamari will automatically accelerate. This game offers nothing of that caliber. There's a few levels off to the side that amount to rolling up as much as you can for a few minutes with no real way to fail.

I saw a comment somewhere that the described this game as soulless and that's completely accurate. I can't even complement the music as most of the soundtrack is ripped from the first two games.

Ich liebe die Katamari Reihe, aber Me and My Katamari ist etwas schwierig... Falls ihr noch nie Katamari gespielt habt, man steuert den Prinz mit beiden Analog Sticks. Der Linke Analog Stick für den linken Arm vom Prinz und der Rechte Analog Stick für den rechten Arm. Das Ding ist, die PSP hat nur einen Analog Stick. Also hatten die Entwickler 2 Optionen:
1, Katamari mit dem linken Stick steuern und Kamera auf die Knöpfe belegen.
2. Analog Stick Steuerung auf das D-Pad und die Knöpfe belegen.
Ich glaube ihr könnt euch denken welche Option die Entwickler genommen haben und OH JUNGE es ist echt nicht geil. Katamari mit nur einem Analog Stick zu spielen ist zwar lame aber für dieses Spiel hätte man eine Ausnahme machen sollen. Aber ansonsten ist das Spiel ganz okay.

Me & My Katamari? Well, I love Katamari but I'm not sure if I want to marry one...

The third original entry in the Katamari franchise, not only was it not made by its original creator like any following entries after this one it's just a bit mediocre as a third Katamari game. To its credit, it's a PSP game so it's fine if it's not as mindblowing as the previous two which were home consoles release, my issue with it is that all stages feel the exact same and feel way too repetitive like near the end of the game, hell even halfway through the main missions you just play the same maps over and over in the same order with the same size goal every time!
This entry is more like a sequel to Katamari Damacy as it does the same thing where all main missions are just about the size and not quirky gimmicks. I actually did not know until the very end of the game that there were some side missions as they are on another island in the hub so I thought the game only had these main missions. (Anyway they aren't anything to write home about either)

The worst part of the game would be the controls as this is a PSP game and if you already played a Katamari game before you know that it uses dual sticks to do actions, and if there's a single thing that you should know about the PSP it's that it only has one stick. Playing with the face button sucks.

This game also only has one original stage song that I was aware of and it's Katamari on the Funk which is just the unique opening theme of the game used in the intro video and the last stage.

Should you bother with this game? Not really it's just not fun to play with the bad controls and bad camera, you'll get more out of replaying Katamari Damacy.

so there i was playing me and my katamari on ppsspp and then i close the emulator and im like oh shit i didnt save for like 3 hours and i dont have it in me to play another 2-3 hours of the same levels when theyre just worse and shorter versions of the ps2 games. but from the near 3 hours i played its still katamari(remap buttons to analog sticks please i beg you if you play) and we love katamari so despite everything i love about it being recycled from a better game i cant deny that i love to roll and listen to one of the best osts in gaming.

if anyone knows if theres a way to get back to the part i was tell me thx

levels kinda get stale after a while since its the same levels with the same size goals, soundtrack is reused from the first 2 katamaris, controls are weird but adaptable, but hey its katamari on the go and it runs OK so thats worth something i guess. You can tell the people in charge of this one were a little confused on what to do since keita takahashi left them after we love katamari. They eventually figured out the formula a little better with the later games in the series, this one definitely shows the growing pains of that though, and is probably the weakest in the series because of that. Still, the weakest katamari game is still stronger than a lot of other games.

any evaluation I have of this game is colored by the fact that it's a faithful translation of katamari to a handheld device. on that merit alone? well done, namco. running this on psp benefits significantly from the original's low-poly style, and in a screenshot you'd scarcely be able to tell the difference between this and its two predecessors. in motion the engine chugs more than on ps2, and the draw distance is noticably lower in certain areas, but these concessions never ruin the primary game experience. the controls do shift away from the traditional twin-stick setup in favor of simulating the same scheme with the d-pad and the face buttons. while the switch to digital control brings a bit of a learning curve, I think it's rather intuitive after a stage or two. what would be the primary issue - the inability to smoothly change a turn radius - is mitigated by the addition of mid-range turning on the shoulder buttons. by adding them into regular turns, provoking turns with them solely, or feathering them throughout a turn, you can approximate the original's turning gradients just fine. I'd even go as far as to say I prefer alternating the up buttons for the dash more than I do pressing the sticks forward rapidly. biggest issue for me is that rolling my thumbs across buttons as required leaves my joints sore after 15-20 minutes of play; I never played more than a stage or two in a single sitting because of this.

I was initially skeptical of the complaints about takahashi leaving, not because I wouldn't acknowledge him as a auteur, but rather because I assumed many of the lead developers must have stayed on. that doesn't seem to be the case? nearly all the katamaris were worked on in some form by NOW PRODUCTIONS, but it seems like they rotated out their developers a lot for various projects. from the namco side, lots of various people who worked on various klonoa or time crisis or tales games got ported over to helm this one. not exactly sure why, although at least some of the leads on the ps2 katamaris didn't stick around in the games industry, so that may explain it. regardless, this is all just me poking around on mobygames, so it's second-hand knowledge on my end.

the general structure of the game is to fulfill tasks by various animals who want islands of specific things: smart objects, heavy objects, warm objects, etc. this makes every primary mission both a traditional diameter check ("get to this size within this time") and also a measure of how many specific objects you picked up in an awkward, poorly communicated way. instead of telling you in real time how well you're doing with a particular theme, you're only told on loading transitions with a ludicrously large score that has to be interpreted for you by the king of the cosmos. it feels tacked on at best given how vague the prompts are, but unfortunately it directly ties to your end-of-level score along with your size and speed. we <3 katamari did this much better by making each individual level more focused in terms of objective and by clearly communicating the rules of a level's theme to you. regardless, in the latter half of the game it feels much easier to hit the theming requirements given that a lot of them are very well-oriented for the 70m+ objects, so it was ignorable to me by that point.

what is more difficult to ignore is the stage design. there are five stages, which comprise a house, a small town (think the start of town from katamari damacy), a larger town (more like the start of the world map from damacy), a city (mid-range area from we <3 without the various cultural objects), and then the world (flat like damacy). while five is a generous amount (esp compared to damacy's three), it quickly becomes apparent that each stage is confined to only one or two different scales. to explain: the house from the original katamari takes you from just a handful of centimeters across to over a meter in diameter; from a table tchotchke to something capable of wrecking the house's structure. the house in me & my takes you up to about 20cm and then ends abruptly, giving you a few rooms to roll around in with no outside area. each of the areas is like this, and while some are better about giving you external areas to explore once you've reached a certain diameter (both town stages are good for this imo, even if the smaller one is really derivative of damacy), overall you'll learn the ins and outs of each area disappointingly fast.

to create full-sized levels, the game chains together these stages as if they were continuous, restarting the clock and revising the diameter goal on each transition. past the halfway point, you will be playing the same three- and four-area sequences back-to-back over and over again. sure, the object layouts and starting areas do change (except for the city area, which is bafflingly prone to repeating layouts ad nauseum), but the small scale thwarts the traditional katamari feeling of starting from a small part of the environment to eventually swallowing a place whole. this also has the effect of ruining any difficulty for the later stages. katamari level design often prioritizes obstacles at lower levels, where tracking your diameter against objects around you is key, while prioritizing space between collectables at higher levels, where efficiently manipulating the massive, unwieldy katamari becomes the primary test of skill. in larger stages where space is still heavily confined, objects are far too close together and you end up absent-mindedly rolling around picking up literally everything in your way. thanks to the time bonuses you can earn from stage to stage (though you can also negate these by simply rolling away before the king gives it to you), I occasionally ended up running out of objects to pick up with 60+ seconds on the clock, leaving me to idly roll in circles until time expired. not really ideal, even if the final stage does give you some more breathing room with a more spacious ocean area.

as a condolence, there are a meager selection of gimmick levels also available, tho no cow or bear stages unfortunately. they're pretty solid overall though! the treasure collection one shockingly uses a unique map where sands envelope you and make it difficult to see what exactly you're picking up. there's a revolving requests one that's also neat in theory where you have 15 or 20 second windows to find and collect certain objects in the world. this falls apart once you reach person size tho, as the game runs out of unique types of objects to give you and instead just asks for children over and over again, of which there are so many that it renders the challenges trivial. one of the ones I'm struggling to remember is just a normal "pick up stuff in this theme" level, and then the other requires you to pick up as much energy in the area as possible and then deliver it to a rocket before it launches a la the light collection for homework level from we <3. not very novel if you've played we <3, but at least it's the most solid use of the city map by far.