Beautiful Katamari (Xbox 360)

As Microsoft continues to take great efforts to make the Xbox back catalog available on the Xbox One and other systems, the pool of true Xbox 360 exclusives continues to shrink. One game has held on with unusual determination though, Bandai Namco’s Beautiful Katamari staying locked to the 360. The Katamari Damacy series made me a fan with its quirky humor and unique and relaxing gameplay style, so having one title just out of reach for so long made its exclusive status stick out more to me than it might other people. However, now that I have a proper Xbox 360, I was finally able to play the game that evaded me since 2007.

After having rebuilt the cosmos and a devastated island chain in the previous games, the King of All Cosmos, the one whose careless behavior was responsible for such destruction, takes his family on vacation. During a seemingly innocuous tennis match, the gargantuan King hits a serve so hard that it tears a whole in the fabric of space, a black hole sucking up the planets of Earth’s solar system and once again requiring someone to create replacements and ultimately seal the black hole up. Just as he did before, the King delegates this task to his son the Prince and his cousins, the unusually small Prince asked to roll up objects with a special sticky ball called a Katamari so that they can build new planets. Deliberately absurd, Beautiful Katamari has fun with its odd premise, the King of All Cosmos a particularly ridiculous character who is both incredibly condescending but eccentric enough that his harsh standards for decent Katamaris is more part of his personality than something disheartening. He seems a bit loopy and distracted at times, not really malicious so much as flamboyant, airheaded, and perhaps oblivious to how putting his son on a giant pool table and firing meteors at him as punishment for failure could be seen as something less than proper motivation. He might not be likeable because of this, but his unusual behavior sustains the game as he’s the only one who ever speaks, and when he is impressed by your work, it certainly feels well-earned.

Beautiful Katamari gets its name from being the first Katamari Damacy game in HD, but high definition graphics don’t really do much for the game. Katamari titles are already heavily stylized and Beautiful Katamari doesn’t deviate from the regular look. Since so many different objects can appear on screen at once, many designs are kept simplistic, humans often having boxy shapes and objects lacking fine details. Many things have bold, solid colors and basic shapes, objects reduced down into something recognizable but unable to really benefit from having greater graphical fidelity. There aren’t even any stages designed to take advantage of HD, which is odd considering We Love Katamari previously had some gorgeous levels despite being on older hardware. Luckily, the music in Beautiful Katamari is still excellent, one of the series’s best features intact and packing some new tunes that make for relaxing or energetic background tracks. There is one outlier in the form of Unity, a song where girls with high-pitched voices chat more than sing, but the J Pop and techno mixes match the game’s tone without getting too strange, providing a good variety between them and tracks like Guru Guru Gravity and Boyfriend a GOGO making an already bright and happy game a little bit brighter and livelier.

When it comes to the core Katamari gameplay, Beautiful Katamari follows the series formula. The Prince, or if you’ve found and rolled them up in a level, one of his cousins, will enter a level at various sizes, the goal being to push the Katamari ball around and roll up objects until you reach a certain size. The ball is controlled with the two analog sticks, needing to be pressed in the same direction to effectively move the ball. You can move just one stick to position the Prince around the ball better, movement much faster and easier when rolling forward, but you can also wiggle the two sticks back and forth for a massive speed boost if you want to get somewhere even more quickly. This can be used to overcome slopes, but the levels and physics both do a good job in ensuring you never get trapped in a valley or stuck in a tight space. Only objects smaller than your Katamari ball will adhere to it, but as you add more and more to it, the ball will begin to grow, allowing it to pick up new larger objects. Some moving objects need to be hit first to disable them and some shelves can have their contents knocked off, but for the most part, all you need to concern yourself with it finding whatever objects nearby are small enough to be rolled up and added to your mass, a timer ticking down to serve as the pressure to do so quickly. Levels are designed to start you off in an area your sometimes inch tall ball can find plenty to work with, the scope of the level expanding as your ball gets bigger and bigger. You might start no bigger than a mouse in a stage only to roll up the building you began in later, one of the big appeals of the gameplay style being the process of working up to gathering entire mountains and islands into your ball. Early stages are designed to be too short to ever get this large, but they still provide visible progress and plenty of variety when it comes to what you’ll be adding to the ball’s surface, items still visible on it for a while until they get covered with new rolled up objects.

Unfortunately, Beautiful Katamari’s approach to levels is more iterative than expansive, another oddity considering how much We Love Katamari tried to give new level goals and variety to its stages. Beautiful Katamari’s stages are mostly built around the idea you’re rebuilding a planet from our solar system, some involve building a comet or Earth’s moon instead. Each stage asks you to try and favor some object the King of All Cosmos thinks represents the planet you’re rebuilding, although how Mercury ties to Drinks is something that can only make sense within his unique warped logic. No matter what is being asked for, the level is usually packed full of so many objects related to it that it will inevitably be the dominant item type in your ball when time is up, but besides earning a special score that goes towards unlocking the endless version of the stage, there isn’t a major incentive to try and appease his requests. As long as you meet the size requirement you’re fine, and while this prevents there being too much pressure in a stage, it does mean the game mostly relies on its basic Katamari gameplay. That isn’t a bad thing since the process is enjoyable on its own, but there are only a few truly different stages. While you may not get big enough to see one in its totality, many areas that appear as a level early on are part of the larger levels later, many of them going for fairly simple domestic or urban environments. The rich person’s house at least has a different style to it, but even with weird and interesting entrances on the level select screen, they don’t seem to break the mold all that often. The items placed about a location change based on what level they’re featured in, but its not enough to hide the more locked in level geometry and setpieces.

There are some stages that have somewhat unique concepts, and while rolling up ring shaped objects for Saturn doesn’t really require a change in approach since normal objects are still useful for increasing your mass, Mars shows off some incredibly creativity that would be appreciated elsewhere. The goal with Mars is to reach a certain high temperature instead of size, meaning that you want to roll up plenty of hot items to reach it. However, there are cold items in the stage as well as water that will quickly cool you off if you roll into it. The need to be discerning completely changes how the rolling up process is approached and would have been a nice way to diversify non-standard levels, but instead the game sits in a safe zone where the main goal is to just keep growing in size. The worlds are thankfully still filled with plenty of interesting sights and objects, with plenty of people, animals, plants, foods, fictional creatures, and structures to roll up. You may not get a special reward for adding a centaur or Mount Rushmore to your mass, but it is still great to find them and add them to the ball you’re working on, the kooky chaos too silly to view as true devastation of the planet. There are also presents and your cousins to find in each stage to encourage you to look around and explore, these more tangible rewards than the hard to obtain endless modes. A focus on specific item collection does see more implementation in multiplayer where it’s not just a battle to be the biggest, the battles more interesting for the ability to sabotage each other and the need to focus on finding what qualifies for your assigned item type. There are some weird classifications like Powerful where it feels like you’re just hoping the game judges objects the same as you, but most are thankfully pretty lenient to make up for this.

THE VERDICT: Beside the creative heat-focused level, Beautiful Katamari seems pretty content to only ask the player to play similar levels focused mostly on growing their Katamari, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The gameplay is still enjoyable even though it’s pretty much the same as older titles, the process of going from a small ball to an enormous sphere that can roll up cities satisfying and backed by a wonderful soundtrack. There are little gifts to find in each stage to motivate a little exploration and the item placements changing between levels prevent reused locations from feeling identical, so the game does have enough variety to remain enjoyable despite its lack of ambition. While unexceptional within its own series, Beautiful Katamari still provides the quirkiness and quality gameplay that makes Katamari Damacy so satisfying.

And so, I give Beautiful Katamari for Xbox 360…

A GOOD rating. While I rate games based on their independent merits rather than things like how they improve on predecessors, Beautiful Katamari is in an odd spot where it feels more like a first game in the series than Katamari Damacy did. The core gameplay is the focus and is done pretty well with no major physics or camera hiccups, rolling up objects is fun and there are plenty to find and interact with, but the stages are built off similar templates and the goals aren’t very ambitious. Bandai Namco Games seems to have been going for mostly the basics here and thankfully, Katamari gameplay is incredibly satisfying even when it’s not being tinkered with. The growth mechanic makes for tangible progress and the possibilities continue to expand as you can start looking for new prey to roll up. While the game never makes that process difficult, the item diversity leads to constantly shifting focuses even if the end goal is almost always to get as big as possible. More experimentation would definitely be required to make this feel more like a sequel instead of something meant to just introduce the gameplay style, and it’s a shame that the HD it finds so important it based its title around it isn’t pushed in any interesting ways beyond the occasional special effect, but there is still a solid game formed from going with what works instead of pushing the envelope.

Beautiful Katamari is a safe installment in a unique franchise meaning that it can essentially get by just by providing more of a rare but enjoyable gameplay mechanic. Even the repeated elements within the game are mixed up well enough to avoid growing stale and the ball rolling remains fun throughout the short experience so you can’t say the game did anything poorly. Had the game been given more love and imagination though, it could have been a beautiful new entry in the series instead of one that just toed the line.