Katamari Damacy is one of those games I consider “perfect” : as in, it delivers wonderfully on everything it sets out to do, with in my opinion no flaw that comes to hinder the fun and doesn’t outstay its welcome. But outside of being a “perfect” game, there is something special about Katamari Damacy; it’s just more fun than most games I’ve ever played or seen. When I play it I just smile the whole way through. And as someone who very often wonders what makes one happy or feel enjoyment, I really wanna dig into what makes me feel this way when playing this game - and since it’s my favorite game ever, I do have a lot to say about it…

I remember once an article explaining Splatoon’s popularity by how it digs into the pure, juvenile desire to make a mess with paint or anything we had in our hands when we were kids, which I honestly can’t disagree with. It may seem weird to pick the following as my first point about how fun KD is, but I believe it’s a fundamental one.
Pretty much every living being, may they be animal, vegetal, or funky fungi, have in common how they spend their entire life growing. Thinking about it, Earth really is just one big turf war of who can take the most place. And more than an instinct, it’s something fundamentally written in our very genes, we don’t want to grow, we simply do. And I honestly think that the basic goal of KD’s gameplay being something Life itself has been doing since it’s been a thing creates the basis for how good of a concept it is. Just like how Splatoon uses innate desires to stir the player into inking the ground, KD uses raw, genetic impulses to make growing your katamari an inherently satisfying experience. Now, this isn’t unique to KD, lots of games like Spore and the “Snake” genre have the same premise, and it is such a primal urge you can’t argue KD inspired them… But I very much enjoy the originality of making something grow not by eating, but by going like a dung beetle and simply wanting to have the biggest ball around ( “having the biggest ___ around” being another goal very much ingrained in our psyche). It’s so simple yet so unique, it’s so… unlike everything else. KD very much and expertly capitalizes on what our DNA defines as universally “satisfying” and turns it into a fun game through hyper creative ideas; you’ll probably have a hard time finding someone who doesn’t enjoy this game in any capacity.

Secondly, you can’t talk about KD without mentioning the presentation. I’ll include here the story and stuff like the characters too, since they’re all really the wrapping for the gameplay. But my gosh is it a wonderful wrapping - I’ll just cut to the chase and talk about the King of All Cosmos. How do you make a deadbeat, drunkard, abusive, self-entitled, absentee (implied he hasn’t seen the Prince for a while at the start of the game) dad, one of the most enjoyable, memorable, flamboyant characters in all of gaming? I guess it just takes fun and snappy dialogues, a design that goes so silly and so hard all at once, and a sick record-scratching loop. I also do like how He will compliment you if and only if you do a max score in missions; it just gives Him that little touch of humanity that makes you realize you’re not just talking to a wall of ungratefulness.
And I think, in general, this is something KD excels at : going the extra mile to make sure every corner of the game is stuffed with personality and charm. This may just be what makes KD such a memorable experience and keeps you smiling the whole way through… You’re always going to find a little joke, detail or fun thing the developers added to make your time worthwhile. The game is simply choke-full of interactions and gags you absolutely won’t see on your first or even second playthrough, which by design is a genius move given the game isn’t long. I will find myself booting up the game and playing a few missions, not just to see if I can beat my score, but just because it’s fun to roll around and take in all the care that has been put into placing every element. Something that stuck out to me during my art school years is how the more you practice and look at art, the more you become familiar with the creative process; to the point you can see what the artist thought about when they created their artwork, step by step. Not to say placing a golf ball in a nest egg because funny joke is similar to the thought process of Picasso when he painted Guernica, but I honestly find the where’s, when’s and how’s, of all the little scenes very inspiring and comparable to a renowned painter deciding his piece’s composition; even more so if you take into account the limitations of making a game like Katamari (may it be from hardware, disc space, or art style).
I think a lot of the enjoyment of these jokes stems from how the developers seemed to really find the perfect way to convey their joke in an understandable but still funny way - keep in mind that you’re always on a timer, with a big ball of everything blocking your view. Really, most people will simply not see every easter egg. Most people will simply roll them up and not even know those 2 punks in front of a turtle formed a little visual gag. But the developers put them in anyway. Was it for the off chance that someone will notice the funny and have a chuckle? Was it to make the town look more lively? Was it because filling a world full of repeating models gets boring and you thought putting 2 punks with a turtle for no reason was a fun way to break the dullness? Whatever it was, I really can only applaud the effort to go out of your way to make something that may make someone out there smile. Like a theater play, a subway comedy routine or a friend that just came up with a bad joke, it always feels like KD’s intent is to make you happy.

Also impossible to not mention when talking about KD is the music. However I won’t spend much words on it because I really can’t add much more about it that it’s fucking good, man. And so varied too! Lots of composers worked on this, lots of singers too; and straight from Yuu Miyake, the sound designer’s, mouth, singers were chosen because they used to be popular but fell out of the public eye since then. This is pure speculation on my part but, just like what I said at the end of the previous paragraph, I can’t help but think everyone who got to work on this soundtrack had a blast being there, deliberately so. Just people having a good time. May just be wishful thinking, but, just the fact that Yuu Miyake’s favorite song in the whole series apparently is Cherry Tree Times, the one track sung by a chorus of children, accompanied by such a wonderful group of strings… I don’t know man, but the whole thing just feels like a work of the heart.

Kept the gameplay for last because I think it’ll wrap up nicely what I talked about so far : KD is consistent with how it treats both the core stuff and the wrapping, so really I could say for the gameplay what I mentioned previously. While yes, the controls are a bit weird, I think they represent well the struggle of a 5 centimeters little man rolling a ball hundreds of times His size… And thankfully the Switch port has a simplified control scheme too.
It’s really absurd how simple the core gameplay is. You roll a ball. That’s it! It’s such a simple action it’s honestly hard to categorize KD. I saw it being qualified as puzzle-action on Wikipedia, but honestly I can’t really agree it’s puzzly… It’s as puzzly as, say, a 2D Sonic game is. You mostly go as fast as possible, and sometimes stop to see where to go. you don’t and can’t really plan your route, and as such I can’t qualify it as strategy either. Let’s just call it a ball-like. Anyway, that very loop of rolling and sometimes stopping to where to go also digs in that inner crave we have like I said earlier; more specifically here, just being able to bulldoze over things smaller than you. Make no mistake, having limited visibility because of the katamari is absolutely on purpose and I very much believe the game would be less fun had they made the katamari transparent or something like that. Which is why it’s so apparent that very careful sound design has been thought of for the rolling of items : here, the satisfaction relies on your ears, not just your eyes. Usually, the bigger, rarer, or funnier the item you rolled up is, the more interesting the sound will be. Sometimes they give a random small item a funny noise to capitalize on a gag they placed, like phones ringing because they filled a plaza with ‘em. Like I said, for a game you might think just goes for “hee hee random” type of humor on surface level, its philosophy is surprisingly well-thought and consistent.
Finally, I’ll point out something that I don’t see mentioned much… The game is easy. Very easy. On your first playthrough, you’ll fail a mission a couple of times at most. I had my 10 years-old niece play along a few times, both in story mode and VS mode (VS mode is fun for what it is, not really memorable enough to talk about much here though) and she never had much trouble with finishing missions on time. It is a byproduct of the “bulldoze without a thought” philosophy, as it’s not in the game’s interest to prevent you from rolling every 2 steps, that wouldn’t be fun - thus, the alternative is just letting you roll up most things with ease and letting you finish most missions without much of a sweat. And honestly, could you imagine a hard Katamari game? I think that would be actual hell. You’d get stuck everywhere, running out of time, losing girth and getting belittled by the King all the time. The devs wanted the exact opposite of that : proof of that are the Bear and Cow missions, notoriously ‘hard’ but really the easiest missions in the game, as you can finish each in a couple of seconds. They’re only hard because they have a tangible, elusive 100% goal - and it’s done so hilariously too, probably one of the funniest ways I’ve seen a hard challenge in a game be presented (I have to admit I never got neither biggest bear nor cow…), but they won’t roadblock you, there really is no roadblock in KD. The game doesn’t want to bother or annoy you, because it knows its gameplay is inherently fun and doesn’t need difficulty, and GOSH I wish I could say that about more games. A wise man once said, “if it’s not fun, why bother?” and I wish more devs out there would understand that. The KD devs completely did.

I’ll conclude this whole rant with the best way I could describe Katamari Damacy : it’s a game that rewards you for playing it. It gives you amazing music, fun visuals, silly dialogues and story and so, so fun gameplay; not behind a difficulty wall, but simply because of all video games out there, you chose to play this one, and wow you made a good decision. It knows it’s fun as hell, and it doesn’t want to restrict the player, it doesn’t want to give you satisfaction only after you passed a trial; it is just a video game that “perfectly” delivers on what a video game should set to do, let the player have fun and have a good time, smiling their whole playthrough. And as a way to wrap up, I’ll simply call back to the credits theme and how in my opinion it resumes the whole experience so well : it’s funny, it’s over-the-top but the more you pay attention and listen to it, the more you feel the sheer sincerity and passion of people who love fun, the world, the Earth, the Cosmos, and wanted to share it around. Thank you.