Beautiful Katamari

The King of All Cosmos and the Prince have returned in amazing Next Generation brilliance! The game that took the video game world by storm is set to continue rolling with new stages, cousins, and visual style. When Katamari Damashi (meaning “pushin’ the round thingiee”) came out on the Playstation 2, it was a refreshing, original concept with fantastic execution and oodles of Japanese cultural insanity. Now that we’ve reached the what, third or fourth iteration of this series, the idea has worn off and the initial exuberance is no longer there. When even the King of All Cosmos is bored, you know you are wasting your time.

First Impressionsby Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

When Katamari Damashi (meaning “pushin’ the round thingiee”) came out on the Playstation 2, it was a refreshing, original concept with fantastic execution and oodles of Japanese cultural insanity. Now that we’ve reached the what, third or fourth iteration of this series, the idea has worn off and the initial exuberance is no longer there. When even the King of All Cosmos is bored, you know you are wasting your time.

To be fair, it is fun to see just how big your katamari can get when rolling it around town, the world, the solar system, etc. There is a pleasure in excessive magnitude… unfortunately taking it all the way to the top requires you to pay extra to download a key that unlocks content already on the disk. This feels too much like someone selling you a novel with the last two chapters torn out, and then trying to get you to pay separately for the ripped out pages. This poor choice of wallet-pinging on the part of the developer should encourage people to boycott the game on general principles. But I doubt that most gamers will have to grapple with any great moral dilemma here… with little added to the mix and far less charm than the original, I doubt the game made many Xmas lists this year.

Nonetheless, I still found the rolling to be engaging, particularly when you are picking up car-sized objects and such. The game has a model railroad appeal at this point, allowing you to wander around neat little model cities with the added bonus of systematically dismantling them in the process. My father incidentally has a model railroad in his basement. He added a number of unique touches, such as a menacing paper-mache Godzilla, a milk carton 3-Mile Island undergoing meltdown and a flashing LED Mt. Saint Helens eruption in the background. He also bored holes in the walls between the two basement rooms so the trains could pass through… Mom wasn’t too thrilled with that particular decision. At any rate, I could see him enjoying the many giant monsters and Ultraman robots menacing the various Katamari cities and towns.

Speaking of Dads, the King of All Cosmos remains the central character of this series, speaking his non-sequiturs and looking resplendent in his royal finery (happily this time around he has pants on.) In Japan, there are said to be three great traditional fears… fire, tidal waves, and fathers. The King plays his part, always disappointed in your efforts and menacing when you fail. This time however I found him to be particularly annoying, as he chats with you incessantly as you are trying to roll things up. The King’s big speak balloons hover in the center of your screen, obscuring your vision even at those rare times that you’ve managed to get the camera to behave, and you have to perform finger yoga to hit the x button a bunch of times to make him go away. Between fighting the onslaught of his running commentary and the meandering, caught behind every wall camera view, you are almost guaranteed a character-building undercurrent of annoyance and frustration.

And then we come to the infamous “cool palace” level. Charged with the task of rolling up things that are cool, you are dropped into an orgy of Microsoft self-love. Literally hundreds of 360 controllers and consoles lie scattered about a wealthy mansion setting, each one of course counting as a “cool” object. Playing this level just suffused me with a vague embarrassment… it felt like a product placement wonderland, a Microsoft advertiser’s dream come true. At least there were martinis scattered around as well… if you could only drink one of those each time you rolled one up, the level might be more palatable. But then again, the idea of mixing drinking games and Katamari sounds like the fast road to queasyville followed rapidly by the great Technicolor yawn.

As a Japanophile with experience in the language and the culture, I wish I had more good things to say about this game. The same playstation graphics in HD just made my eyes kind of hurt, and the addition of many more cousins and presents to collect failed to inspire more than a curious apathy on my part. Multiplayer options and other attempts to expand the environment are well-attempted, but just couldn’t make up for the lack of invention in the basic game play. In the end, Beautiful Katamari is fine but nothing special, by no means an awful game but also not as good as the original. In ten hours I finished all the levels once and achieved almost 80% of the collection… that’s simply not an equitable exchange for your hard-earned cash.