The magic of Katamri Damacy is definitely still here, but this is definitely the first "not as good" game in the series.

You're still doing the usual rolling stuff up to some of gaming's greatest music and terrorizing the world because your dad said "Ah my dipshit son I need you to make this cat a cute island" (and if you fail your dad will tie you up and beat you). But once you get used to the controls and the little too tight level design you'll do fine. There's not much variety in how you do it despite the specific missions saying "oh I want mine cute, fast, heavy" so prepare to go through the motions however.

The "not as good" part comes in the constant re-using of levels (with different themes) that gets even worse with the new mission structure. Now, the further in you go, you will roll up a Katamari in one area, then once you meet the requirement you'll migrate to another level, and late game this repeats for up to 5 level migrations for one super long mission. A decision that not only leads to the constant re-use of levels due to not having enough maps to support the idea, but each level becoming really long which is an odd decision for a portable game. By the end you do the big grand roll up the everything multiple times which kinda kills the excitement of getting to do that.

While Katamari Damacy and We <3 Katamari are excellent experiences despite having similar gameplay, Me & My Katamari is the first entry that really feels more of the same and drawn out. It will scratch that itch for more Katamari however so if you need to roll some stuff up and already played the first two, well, this exists just for you. I'd give this game a 3.25 if I could.

While suffering from crappy controls and repetitive levels, Me and My Katamari offers a nice, not too serious set of levels to play in quick bursts during the day.

I recently picked up this game to pass some time with the Vita on my school bus, knowing already how the series plays since I have already played the other games in the series, consisting of short and engaging levels, full of joy and creativity

At first, it really felt like Keita Takahashi's passion of the series remained even after not dealing with this project, but soon after a few levels I realized it was a not so great demake of the more polished We Love Katamari

The concept of animals asking to create new islands became stale instantly, the controls were making me think I started to develop arthritis and the levels/soundtracks were constanly recycled for every damn level, even the ending one, and many of these are poorly designed, too easy or too claustrophobic, no inbetween

After all things said, you want to play this if you want to check everything in your Katamari backlog, but for casual PSP players I would rather avoid this title to have a better time playing the PS2 titles that have aged masterfully, but still you can have fun even without the other alternatives

What a weird game... the elephant in the room here is that this game fucking sucks on original hardware. On vita, which is how I played it, which both analog sticks, it's pretty good. Playing it with the d-pad and face buttons actually is painful. It sucks.

This feels like a weird budget spin off more than an actual Katamari game. The missions are super repetitive and while some of them change the formula in an interesting way, most of them are just "oh roll bigger." It's like, I've done this before! Just on a console where it feels much better! I guess playing on a smaller handheld is pretty novel, but overall I would skip this one.

I don't have many positive things to say about this game so I'll get them out of the way: I liked the island setting, being able to see different seasons and times of day, and the 8-bit ending sequence. Unfortunately trying to control a katamari without analog sticks on a handheld is frustrating and hurt my hands. The game is also VERY repetitive. Despite the small number of unique stages I think it took me the longest to finish out of all Katamari games I've played because of the jumping from level to level system, which only made the repetitiveness of the gameplay loop even more obvious. The music is obviously good but it feels disingenuous to praise Me & My Katamari for its soundtrack considering almost all of the songs are taken from the first two games and reused here without so much as remixing. Overall I can't bring myself to hate the game too much because it is still Katamari but I wouldn't replay or recommend it, especially not in this day and age where both Reroll games are available on Switch if you want Katamari on the go.

Me & My Motion Sickness

My thoughts on Me & My Katamari are rather conflicting and I don't know how much of the bad stuff I can excuse in this game for being a PSP game unlike the previous entries in the series. There are definitely flaws because of the restrictions of the Playstation Portable, but some others are just flaws in terms of weird design choices. I'm sure you'll know what I mean once you read what I wrote below.

I'm just going to name the worst offenders straight by the name: the level design and gameplay loop. Katamari's gameplay loop has always revolved about starting small, but as you roll up enough things over time, you eventually visit locations from earlier or a past level, but with a bigger Katamari. There's a sense of scale and progression, which MMK doesn't really have. The levels always play out the same and I mean that quite literally - the first city map always has the 75cm checkpoint and 1.50m size requirement, while the lake map always has the 4m checkpoint and 10m size requirement. And you're going to play these maps a lot, since for some reason the "new" gameplay loop in MMK has you going through multiple levels in a row. You would think there would be atleast some variety here, but no. After the house map, the first city map will always follow, then the lake map and so on. Every. Single. Time.
Atleast some maps have winter variants, but they're rather monotonous after the first few times too (looking at YOU, winter lake). I didn't even mention how frustrating the object placement is at times in MMK, this becomes really apparent in City 1. Now, for some reason the bonus levels all have unique map variants, but they're never used again for the "main" stages. Why? The desert map is literally used a single time in the entire game! Atleast the bonus stages are a good time and felt very refreshing to play every now and then inbetween the repetitive main story levels.

A personal major criticism I have with MMK is the shaky camera. It can't ever decide if it wants to be a third-person or top-down camera, so it keeps shifting between those two and I noticed it gets really bad when you roll over bumps. Had to quit the game two times because it made me actually nauseous and I pretty much never have motion sickness in games, this wasn't the case in Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari either. So if you're particularly sensitive to motion sickness in games, I'd think twice about playing Me & My Katamari.

I can see how people complain about the controls too, since MMK uses the buttons instead of another analog stick like in the previous games. To be honest, I only played with the original controls for three levels before I decided to remap the buttons to my right stick and it felt a lot more natural (even if it was a bit more unresponsive than in the previous games this way). Of course this wasn't possible to implement originally because of how the PSP was built and I really believe Namco did the best they could with translating the dual-stick controls onto the device. The rolling itself feels good in this game, even if it has the same issue as Damacy, with easily being able to get stuck between objects at times.

Considering my negativity towards MMK so far, you'd think I would absolutely hate it, but I don't. There are still many cool things in here worth mentioning, like the island hub world, playable cousins, the fantastic selection of the soundtrack of the previous two games (bit of a bummer that there's only a single new song with Katamari on the Funk, but it's alright since the reused songs are very good) and the great adaption of the artstyle. Like seriously, this game manages to capture the Katamari aesthetic from the PS2 games so well. Little things like the individual island designs you get as a reward for completing a stage or the ability to equip presents again made the game really more enjoyable and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have atleast a bit of a good time with Me & My Katamari! Thanks for reading.

Definitely has some problems (reusing the same maps too much, weird controls etc.) and is nowhere near as good as We Love Katamari, but considering the hardware and the loss of the main series creator, this is still a very good time over all. The level designs are pretty great, the graphics are just as good as the console counterparts with the added bonus of some of the levels have a day/night and weather system that really makes them stick out more than they would've otherwise, and once you get used to the odd controls it still plays very well.

It's maybe a bit quaint when compared to the games that came before it, but its still a perfectly good katamari game regardless.

At the core, this game is still great because it's a Katamari game, and every Katamari is very fun and addicting. This one just falls a bit short due to its obvious limitations of being a PSP game. That being said, it is a smaller-scale game that is charming and works well on this console. The controls work fine, it's about as good as they could get trying to replicate dual analog on a PSP.

The main issue I really have with this game is it doesn't do anything new, and it gets a little repetitive. It has the same level probably over 5 times in a row of going from 20cm to 1.5m to 70m. You're going to do that in the same 3 areas many times. Also there's basically no new soundtracks besides "Katamari on the funk" (great song btw) which is too bad, even though all the PS2 Katamari music is great. Anyway, besides that issue it's still Katamri at the end of the day, meaning it's fun and weird and addictive.

Also I want more of that 8-bit Katamari from the credits...

By all accounts should not work as well as it does. Arguably creatively bankrupt given its lead designer is out of thee picture. Not a single original song that cannot be found in thee previous two installments are in here. There is one level, essentially.

Somehow, perhaps through brute force or a magical whim, it's a masterpiece of contextual compounding. Every Katamari game compounds. They all start thee same way, after all: microscopic. What is to be collected, rolled up into one wad, varies, but thee scale & scope also begins at ground level, only to eventually wage war with every building on earth.

What this game does so drastically different, intentionally or not, is leans its entire mission statement onto this concept. Practically every stage is thee exact same (time of day fluctuates): always starting small, increasing its scope level by level until you become thee all-consuming ball of joy. This repetition is a constant reminder of humble beginnings, a true Sisyphean feat, an accidental greatest hits.

If you didn't know this game existed, and the first thing you thought when you saw there was a Katamari game on PSP was, "Well, how does that work? There's not two joysticks and the hardware is so weak!" You have a very accurate picture of how good an idea it was to make a Katamari game on PSP. I'm glad it came out domestically, because I would've felt like a total moron if I'd had to spend like $50 importing it.

Now, this game isn't completely worthless. The King's dialogue is still very silly and funny as ever (my personal favorite line being, "It should be "Us and Our Katamari"" because he always speaks using the royal "we.") The levels which are there are also designed fairly well, and the levels where you're doing unique missions (like collecting things with age or things with high monetary value) are also very well designed and fun.

UNFORTUNATELY, the bulk of the "levels" is where this game really shows its flaws. This game has FAR too many stages for how much content it actually has. There are like 10+ normal stages (roll the katamari X big) in this game, but there is like 1 map per size level with each of those maps having like 2 or maybe 3 variations, if any at all, of where items are located on it. This makes the game get SUPER monotonous when it really doesn't try and hide that you're doing the same thing over and over. This also pads out the story of the game to like 6 or 7 hours, which is WAY longer than it needs to be.

A lot of the levels end up being really long because instead of the normal katamari way, where you slowly get bigger and then new areas are revealed to you and you can roll up everything in them and do that process all over again, you're often given a series of consecutive stages to do, usually 3 or 4 five+ minute stages, to do in one level. And because the level variety is so small, this really doesn't help with the monotony. The hardware just really shows its limitations, especially when you reach a new size level to access a new part of the level.

When you reach a new size that requires the game to load more objects, like in the first game, (I can't remember if the second game had that but the 360 one definitely didn't) basically all of the objects, save for the very tiniest ones that were out of your vision range, would still be there in the place you were just rolling. In this game, the object limit is so small, that basically the entire field you were just in is cleared of tinier objects, so there's no point in continuing to roll there. Hardware problems are also very present when you get to the stages where you're larger, because there's REALLY obvious and bad item pop-in.

The tremendous length of the game is not helped by the BAD controls. The PSP doesn't have 2 joysticks, or even 2 joy-nubs, to replicate the traditional Katamari Damacy controls. As a result, you have to use the D-pad and the face buttons to control instead. This takes some getting used to just because of how far apart things like the face buttons are laid out and how things like the 180 degree quick-flip and the charge are differently mapped, but the bigger problem is that it just hurts to play. The center of the D-pad on the PSP is a sharp little fucker, and pressing your thumb into it for even 2 consecutive levels will really start to hurt your hands. I will say, though, that the load times aren't bad, though they are relatively frequent compared to the other games.

The last thing about this worth mentioning, as with any Katamari game, is the music. Again, it's not bad, but not great. Almost the entire soundtrack is just the first game's music. There're a few new songs present, and they're usually good (especially the main theme), but there's not a whole new soundtrack like with a lot of the console releases.

Verdict: Not recommended. Unless you're a HUGE Katamari Damacy fan like I am, there is no reason to play this game. I would go as far as to say that this game just shouldn't have been made. This is the first Katamari Damacy game where the original creator wasn't involved in the creation process at all, and it really shows. The development team was either just too unfamiliar with the series, and/or just too limited by the hardware and it just comes off that they really didn't know what made Katamari Damacy fun. Add in that most if not all of the best levels in this are probably in Katamari Forever, and this is a game you can very safely skip.

Because of the PSP limitations the controls are worse, the gameplay loop is smaller and more repetitive and the soundtrack is almost entirely reused (Don't think this one is fault of the PSP just laziness). I enjoyed the setting, cute visuals and dialogue which as usual are all on point but the super repetitive loop and small selection of levels made it a bit of a trudge to get through. The idea of having day and night cycles for levels is great though, and nothing beats being able to play Katamari on the go. Probably ranking 5th just above I Touch Katamari

a cute little game but honestly its VERY repetitive. you do the same few size goals on the same few maps, with the only level variation (if you can call it that) being kind of island an animal wants (hard, soft, loud, etc.) and there are only 5 stages with special rules (i.e. roll up as many sweets as you can). that and the king is strangely too nice in this game. all that being said though, i am a sucker for how the game looks, being on a psp n all. the low res texture they used for the cousins' faces is really charming.
about the controls, i cant really say much cuz i quickly mapped the buttons to the analog sticks on my controller. but maybe that in itself says all you need to know.
overall i wouldnt say you shouldnt play it but i wouldnt say its a must-play. check it out if you really want to cuz its somewhat of a novelty, having katamari on the psp