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.
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.