50 Years of Video Games: Katamari Damacy (PS2)
After the reign of Atari came to an end, Japanese video game developers become the new king of the industry. Despite the Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation consoles all being Japanese in origin though, for quite a while there seemed to be an unusual bit of trepidation in selling certain Japanese products to American audiences. Elements of Japanese culture were scrubbed and replaced when they could be, but just as often it lead to games deemed “too Japanese” from ever heading Stateside. This attitude even extended to games that were just “too weird” for America, and while there are probably sales charts and statistics to back up the mindsets of the time, there are also games like 2004’s Katamari Damacy where a wonderfully strange concept in a game filled with unguarded references to Japanese culture received a U.S. release after the media, industry professionals, and even players kept requesting it of Namco. It wasn’t exactly a show of faith from the Japanese publisher to release it, but by telling Japan they wanted to see this wonderfully creative game it was the American market saying they were happy to embrace eccentric ideas and games steeped in other cultures, the door to more open game exchange pushed open a bit wider by this unusual game about rolling up the world into one big ball.
Katamary Damacy’s name essentially means a clump of spirits or souls, the name already hinting at what the gameplay entails. In this PS2 title, the absolutely enormous King of All Cosmos has accidentally destroyed all the stars in the sky while cavorting around space one day, and to put things back to normal, he calls upon his absolutely tiny son, the Prince, to recreate the stars. To do so requires a fair bit of mass though, so giving his son a sticky ball called a Katamari, he instructs him to roll up objects around Earth until the ball is big enough to serve as a star. Depending on the level these stars can be mere centimeters in length or hundreds of kilometers and what they’re comprised of can be incredibly specific or rather broad, the King always on hand to judge your work afterwards. The King of All Cosmos is an aloof and unusual individual, at once fascinated with Earth and its people but rather harsh with his son despite him doing all the work. His approval is hard-earned but if you do make a suitably impressive Katamari in a level he will break from his usual distant and belittling commentary and lavish your work with praise. His strange world view provides plenty of goofy observations, although his level introductions are usually cut of a similar cloth and its things like his mid-level commentary or explanations of special level conditions where he has more room to amuse.
The King of All Cosmos isn’t the only character of importance though, because while the Prince is silent throughout, we do have another set of characters whose tale happens adjacent to the rebuilding of the cosmos. The Hoshino Family had a fairly typical day planned of going to watch their astronaut father take off in a new shuttle launch, but as they go about their day the young son starts to witness the unusual occurrences caused by the Prince’s efforts to build up the stars. The rest of the family seems oblivious to everything save for his sister who occasionally feels the return of certain constellations in the sky, the two kids providing some cute and memorable moments after levels that show a bit more progression and relevant commentary than the King of All Cosmos’s sometimes wandering attention.
In a typical level of Katamari Damacy the goal is to roll up enough objects to meet a specific diameter within a time limit. These Make A Star levels show off the game’s core fundamentals quite well, the player’s Katamari needing to be large enough to roll up an object or it won’t stick. This means the typical approach for a stage is first to roll up small objects to build up mass until you can start gathering larger objects, the exponential growth of your giant rolling ball a satisfying way of visualizing progress as not only can you see the most recent items rolled up sticking to the ball’s exterior but objects that used to dwarf you are eventually in turn dwarfed by your gradually growing prospective star. The sense of scale isn’t embraced too quickly either, the game’s early stages having you so small you can’t even initially roll up a mouse and usually ending before you’re even large enough to pick up a piece of furniture. Soon though you’ll be starting in areas like the city streets and people and cars will become part of your ball, and when you do finally reach the levels where your ball can start rolling up buildings and islands its the magnificent payoff not only to a game of gradually tackling larger challenges but even building up within that stage alone, that level still requiring you to make your way from a small start to the kind of thing that can roll up mountains.
Controlling the Katamari rolling isn’t too difficult once you come to understand it, the player using both control sticks to move the ball forward but needing to sometimes only move one to reposition yourself for a turn. Pressing in the sticks can quickly put you on the other side of the Katamari, the only control that won’t become totally reliable being the needed to hammer both sticks up and down rapidly to build up speed for a forward charge. The charge is usually good for breaking out of a tight spot, crossing a space without many good objects to grab, or going up a slope, but its touchiness in detecting it can usually be overcome by a little persistence and good play won’t often leave you requiring it at all. Of important note though is the penalty for getting your ball stuck or getting hit by something much larger moving about, objects able to pop off the ball and reducing your size either to help you break free or punishing you for not being attentive. Early levels do try to teach you this safely and there’s even a little alarm to tell you if something too big is coming towards you aggressively, and it is definitely satisfying later to roll up those characters and creatures that were bullying your ball when it was smaller. Sometimes if you’re not big enough you need to first send them flying before you can grab them and some longer objects can make your rolling less smooth, but these are all intended obstacles so that rolling up the world isn’t too straightforward and there is some challenge beyond just grabbing little things before you can roll up the large stuff.
Each selectable stage in Katamari Damacy is technically built from one of three templates, these known as House, Town, and World. As you progress to later levels where your ball starts off larger you will gradually make your way to the increasing scope of these stage concepts, but the levels aren’t the same even when they take place in the same locations. The way the level is populated will be be changed based on which level you picked, so while the level geometry is similar the way you play will rarely be the same save for the barriers the game places to try and keep you from rolling off to an area you’re not big enough to pick up anything in yet. For example an early version of the house will focus on you picking up the tiniest of objects like dice and batteries only for later ones to start focusing more on large toys or garden plants and then finally pets and people before you move onto the Town and go through a similar progression. The World stage is actually a bit of a grandiose name that only encapsulates the later versions of it well, there still being areas within this largest of rolling realms that work as entire contained levels themselves so that the next level can continue to introduce new areas and objects.
The objects you roll up are usually only needed for increasing your mass, although there is a collection angle for those interested where you can try to find every object in the game and roll it up just for kicks. There are goodies to be found though like presents that give the Prince new clothes, but even the regular items can have a bit of character. Katamari Damacy’s world is littered with all kinds of unusual objects and strange interactions between them. Punks piled high atop a motorcycle, women trying to photocopy watermelons, sumo wrestlers and mascots walking around town in their outfits, and even mythical creatures and superheroes can be found once your ball is big enough to enter their realm. Katamari Damacy takes place in a world where giant mushrooms can be decor and dinosaurs can sometimes be found wandering around still, crabs can hang from spiderwebs for a weird little surprise, and sometimes ostrich eggs are just laying in the middle of the street. Some of the design is definitely to give you a good rolling line to follow to build yourself up, but making the world so eccentric makes it easier to accept the strange item layouts. Everything is rendered in a flat shaded and simple style too, no doubt partly to keep the processing demands low but it gives everything a bright and silly air even if some people you roll up scream when they’re integrated into the ball.
The sound effects can definitely emphasize the chaos of rolling through a town and scooping up tons of weird objects, but the real excellence in the sound department comes from the phenomenal soundtrack. Katamari Damacy’s 20 in-game tracks manage to cover a wide range of musical styles while all feeling like excellent fits for this quirky concept. Many of the songs featured have Japanese vocal tracks although some a capella, instrumentals, gratuitous English, and even one full English song help to make it diverse before you even consider the tones of the tracks. Many songs are directly relevant to the task of the rolling up the world, the lyrics referencing your work or twisting in wording that fits a romantic song despite its obvious connections to the Katamari concept. Longer levels move through multiple songs but many of them are well designed to avoid repetition, progressing over the course of their run time while having clear and memorable hooks and sounds. Some are relaxing, others energetic pop tunes to psyche you up, some electronic while others are nostalgic. Recommending any single one specifically feels like it would be placing focus when the soundtrack is better for its broad reach but somehow united appeal, a lot of the music sounding like composers and singers enjoying themselves and being unafraid to embrace some strange composition that avoids anything dissonant. The main theme is a great introduction to the game coupled with the opening scene that shows the colorful and quirky world of Katamari Damacy with a song that is instantly catchy, although the credits theme and its associated brilliant concept for a finale to a game that takes things to a logical extreme is perhaps my personal favorite in the game.
While rolling up large Katamaris to rebuild the stars is the main focus though, the extra levels are really what bring this together into a magnificent package. Between the Make A Star levels you’ll be asked to rebuild constellations or other fixtures in the night sky, and rather than these levels just focusing on size, they have a range of special conditions that inform how you roll up things in a level. To rebuild Virgo you need to focus on rolling up women specifically, Cygnus’s level has you rolling up eggs and hoping what hatches out of them are swans, and Gemini wants to roll up “twins” which encompasses any two objects that are similar enough to fit the King’s broad definition of the concept. In these levels you are still allowed to roll up regular items and it is often key to building up the mass needed to keep accumulating more relevant objects, but this informs your action in a way different than regular stages without breaking too far away from the core concept. Picking up all the fish you can still requires you to figure out how to build up your ball’s size as quickly as you can, but you also need to make sure you’re grabbing the relevant targets along the way and being able to finally grab the bigger targets gives you little victories along the path to trying to grab everything in the level. There are a few more strict stages in these secondary levels, the Taurus and Ursa Major levels actually ending as soon as you roll up one cow or bear respectively, and the King’s broad definitions come back to bite you here as he will fall for things like a Beware of Bears sign or a traffic cone with a cow pattern. These levels ask you to roll more carefully and besides a few things like some deviously placed milk cartons in the Taurus stage you can usually work your way around all the targets to build yourself up to try and get the bigger bears or cows to better impress the King. The North Star is a wholly unique concept as well, the game having you end the level when you think you’ve reached 10 meters in diameter and the goal being to get as close to that number as possible.
The extra levels are unlocked at a similar pace to the Make A Star levels and inject some important variety into how you play while rarely asking you to play in a way counter to your instincts, Taurus and Ursa Major even completing with the smallest possible target if you aren’t too interested in the specific goal. The Make A Star levels have their own twists too, play not actually ending once you hit the desired size so long as you have time left. This lets you try and get the biggest ball possible just for the fun of it, but certain levels have Eternal versions where you can truly embrace the inherent fun of rolling up the world until there’s nothing left to pick up. In another self-imposed challenge you can try to earn comets, the player needing to hit the desired size in a Make A Star level quickly enough to earn this special addition to the night sky. On top of these options though there is a multiplayer mode that manages to make a fairly good competitive version of play where you roll around the same space trying to grow the bigger Katamari in the time limit. Not only does each item you pick up inherently deny the other player of that object for a consistently interactive competition but you can also smash into each other to knock off objects or even roll the other player up if you’ve grown large enough to do so. A good layer of replayability and the extra goals gives the game longevity beyond its story missions, even just the aim of getting a bigger ball than last time sometimes enough to draw a player back into the enjoyable stages of Katamari Damacy.
THE VERDICT: In Katamari Damacy, a phenomenal soundtrack backs a creative gameplay type in a quirky and enticing world, its colorful strangeness a perfect fit for a game where rolling up every little object is made more fun by the weird way everything is laid out for you. Starting off tiny and rolling things up until the rest of the world seems small in comparison gives you a gradual and satisfying sense of growth and progression that the game spaces out well so new levels can feel rewarding without needing to whip out the big objects too early. More importantly, the gameplay keeps itself fresh and changing by having levels where the goal shifts to specific targets without limiting the player too much, a few a little stricter but the game itself shakes up the formula just enough to keep the core appeal strong even under new conditions. Multiplayer, extra milestones to shoot for, and some silly story elements brings this together into an excellent experience that feels both absurd and surprisingly natural at the same time.
And so, I give Katamari Damacy for PlayStation 2…
A FANTASTIC rating. When pondering this rating I had to ask myself why this was a Fantastic when I gave Beautiful Katamari only a Good, and while the wonderful soundtrack definitely helped the first game, one of the key features the future games in the series seemed to have forgotten is the importance of doing things besides rolling up balls to make them bigger. The constellation levels are an important break from the standard format, one that still taps on the same ideas of making your ball bigger by smartly and swiftly picking which object to roll up next but shifting the way you’re judged so that you’re making more decisions than rolling into any nearby objects that are smaller than you. The character of the experience is certainly strong, the King of All Cosmos and Hoshino Family giving us two very different views of the game’s strange events, but the core rolling experience isn’t made separate from that as the world itself is rich with weird little scenes. Objects are laid out for their gameplay purpose but distributed in ways that make them more interesting to find, and by not restraining itself with logic or cultural worries the world does feel a richer place to roll up into your ball. The additional goals like the comets or finding the presents also gives you a bit more focus if you need it, but the basic gameplay is already one that taps into the simple thrills of play, the player enjoying when they can tell they’re doing well and earning new opportunities for their continued success. Even with its eccentricities and controls that can take a little bit to acclimate to, I’ve been able to introduce the game to players of various levels of gaming experience successfully, the concept captivating and the colorful world it takes place in amusing in its style and presentation to make it even more inviting.
The Katamari Damacy series would continue on for well after the first entry and the games would continue to be released overseas, but as mentioned before, some took an unusual or weaker approach in continuing the franchise. Most of the core titles are still good on some level because the basics of the rolling up mechanic are strong, but even the first game didn’t rely solely on making big stars and that’s why it hasn’t lost its luster compared to its follow ups. The first Katamari Damacy even received a remake with Katamari Damacy Reroll, the creativity that made the game so captivating certainly helped a little by HD graphics where you might be able to spot those milk cartons a little better in the Taurus level before you mistakenly roll them up. Realizing its ideas so well from the start and the unguarded embrace of imagination makes it little surprise the rest of the world loved it as much as Japan, appreciation of quality not really restricted by borders. One magnificent thing about video games is how willing players are to embrace strange and diverse ideas, and while Katamari Damacy didn’t fully break down the barriers game publishers have when it comes to considering international releases, it is at least a clear example that unusual concepts can do well all over the world, sometimes even because they’re so different from what people are used to.