We Love Katamari?
By Fuseball

Please Sir, can I have some more?

Sequels are often a tricky prospect. Some games demand one. Wipeout and Pikmin both needed a second bite to show their true potential. While others provide nothing more than iterations on a theme. Diminishing returns. Maybe some just never really need a sequel at all.

Katamari Damacy got it right first time. Wonderfully, thrillingly right. All who played it fell under its spell. It was everything we’ve loved about idiosyncratic Japanese video games over the past fifteen years all rolled up into one sticky ball of joy. It was, and of course still is, this console generation’s one true moment of wide-eyed originality. Indeed, everybody loves Katamari Damacy, and as cutting-edge consumers, with one eye always on the next cool thing, we hoped and longed for a sequel. We wanted more. We wanted another hit of beautiful lunacy from the Prince and his oh-so-demanding King. We wanted more sing-in-the-shower tunes, more disbelieving grins blossoming into outright belly laughs. We wanted lightning to strike us a second time.

It has.

But it doesn’t feel the same.

Any similarity to persons living
or dead is entirely coincidental.
Honestly.

It’s not for a lack of effort. The new levels are delightfully varied and plentiful. If there’s something vaguely spherical then the Prince is probably rolling it somewhere in the game. The number of presents and cousins and things in the game have expanded dramatically. Everything they could think of and the proverbial kitchen sink has gone in there. But they forgot something.

He’s got some neck on him.

People never played Katamari Damacy for the collect-‘em-all theme. The log of weird and wonderful items was a distracting aside. We played it for its charm, for its madcap ambience. It was the simple things that kept us returning. The jolly welcome sing-song of the title screen. The delightfully tactile simplicity of pacing the planets to select a stage. With the gameplay so familiar, the changes in presentation are what stand out here, and also where it pales next to the original.

You won’t be seeing this on your desktop this time then?

For all its genre-hopping ambition, the soundtrack falls flat. There’s nothing here to match the joyful pop bounce of Lonely Rolling Star. No sign of the tinkling oompah lullaby that accompanied the original’s menu planets. In its place a chattering of birdsong and irritatingly repetitive shouts. It seems such a trivial complaint but it makes the difference between leaving it on or switching it off while you eat your dinner. Indeed the whole flick-screen stage selection, with its fuzzy felt ‘fans’ and cacophonous backing, feels makeshift and clunky; the game’s spell momentarily broken.

We Love Katamari. Not quite enough for us to blow its trumpet, though.

Along with the idyllic charm went the difficulty too. The unlocking of new stages fails to feel special when any remotely competent Katamari Damacy player will breeze through them all on the first attempt. All the great ideas are wasted when you’re only likely to see some of them a couple of times at best. Of course there are the cousins and presents to collect, but when you’ve seen all there is to the game within a day, they are a poor incentive to return.

You have to set your own goals and challenges in Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy. It won’t stretch you the way most games, including its predecessor, aim to. It takes a certain kind of dedication to plough that particular ‘personal best’ furrow, and only those players will really get the best from it. We asked for more and that’s exactly what we got.

Feels a heck of a lot less though.

September 2005

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