By all accounts should not work as well as it does. Arguably creatively bankrupt given its lead designer is out of thee picture. Not a single original song that cannot be found in thee previous two installments are in here. There is one level, essentially.

Somehow, perhaps through brute force or a magical whim, it's a masterpiece of contextual compounding. Every Katamari game compounds. They all start thee same way, after all: microscopic. What is to be collected, rolled up into one wad, varies, but thee scale & scope also begins at ground level, only to eventually wage war with every building on earth.

What this game does so drastically different, intentionally or not, is leans its entire mission statement onto this concept. Practically every stage is thee exact same (time of day fluctuates): always starting small, increasing its scope level by level until you become thee all-consuming ball of joy. This repetition is a constant reminder of humble beginnings, a true Sisyphean feat, an accidental greatest hits.

If you didn't know this game existed, and the first thing you thought when you saw there was a Katamari game on PSP was, "Well, how does that work? There's not two joysticks and the hardware is so weak!" You have a very accurate picture of how good an idea it was to make a Katamari game on PSP. I'm glad it came out domestically, because I would've felt like a total moron if I'd had to spend like $50 importing it.

Now, this game isn't completely worthless. The King's dialogue is still very silly and funny as ever (my personal favorite line being, "It should be "Us and Our Katamari"" because he always speaks using the royal "we.") The levels which are there are also designed fairly well, and the levels where you're doing unique missions (like collecting things with age or things with high monetary value) are also very well designed and fun.

UNFORTUNATELY, the bulk of the "levels" is where this game really shows its flaws. This game has FAR too many stages for how much content it actually has. There are like 10+ normal stages (roll the katamari X big) in this game, but there is like 1 map per size level with each of those maps having like 2 or maybe 3 variations, if any at all, of where items are located on it. This makes the game get SUPER monotonous when it really doesn't try and hide that you're doing the same thing over and over. This also pads out the story of the game to like 6 or 7 hours, which is WAY longer than it needs to be.

A lot of the levels end up being really long because instead of the normal katamari way, where you slowly get bigger and then new areas are revealed to you and you can roll up everything in them and do that process all over again, you're often given a series of consecutive stages to do, usually 3 or 4 five+ minute stages, to do in one level. And because the level variety is so small, this really doesn't help with the monotony. The hardware just really shows its limitations, especially when you reach a new size level to access a new part of the level.

When you reach a new size that requires the game to load more objects, like in the first game, (I can't remember if the second game had that but the 360 one definitely didn't) basically all of the objects, save for the very tiniest ones that were out of your vision range, would still be there in the place you were just rolling. In this game, the object limit is so small, that basically the entire field you were just in is cleared of tinier objects, so there's no point in continuing to roll there. Hardware problems are also very present when you get to the stages where you're larger, because there's REALLY obvious and bad item pop-in.

The tremendous length of the game is not helped by the BAD controls. The PSP doesn't have 2 joysticks, or even 2 joy-nubs, to replicate the traditional Katamari Damacy controls. As a result, you have to use the D-pad and the face buttons to control instead. This takes some getting used to just because of how far apart things like the face buttons are laid out and how things like the 180 degree quick-flip and the charge are differently mapped, but the bigger problem is that it just hurts to play. The center of the D-pad on the PSP is a sharp little fucker, and pressing your thumb into it for even 2 consecutive levels will really start to hurt your hands. I will say, though, that the load times aren't bad, though they are relatively frequent compared to the other games.

The last thing about this worth mentioning, as with any Katamari game, is the music. Again, it's not bad, but not great. Almost the entire soundtrack is just the first game's music. There're a few new songs present, and they're usually good (especially the main theme), but there's not a whole new soundtrack like with a lot of the console releases.

Verdict: Not recommended. Unless you're a HUGE Katamari Damacy fan like I am, there is no reason to play this game. I would go as far as to say that this game just shouldn't have been made. This is the first Katamari Damacy game where the original creator wasn't involved in the creation process at all, and it really shows. The development team was either just too unfamiliar with the series, and/or just too limited by the hardware and it just comes off that they really didn't know what made Katamari Damacy fun. Add in that most if not all of the best levels in this are probably in Katamari Forever, and this is a game you can very safely skip.

I don't have many positive things to say about this game so I'll get them out of the way: I liked the island setting, being able to see different seasons and times of day, and the 8-bit ending sequence. Unfortunately trying to control a katamari without analog sticks on a handheld is frustrating and hurt my hands. The game is also VERY repetitive. Despite the small number of unique stages I think it took me the longest to finish out of all Katamari games I've played because of the jumping from level to level system, which only made the repetitiveness of the gameplay loop even more obvious. The music is obviously good but it feels disingenuous to praise Me & My Katamari for its soundtrack considering almost all of the songs are taken from the first two games and reused here without so much as remixing. Overall I can't bring myself to hate the game too much because it is still Katamari but I wouldn't replay or recommend it, especially not in this day and age where both Reroll games are available on Switch if you want Katamari on the go.

Because of the PSP limitations the controls are worse, the gameplay loop is smaller and more repetitive and the soundtrack is almost entirely reused (Don't think this one is fault of the PSP just laziness). I enjoyed the setting, cute visuals and dialogue which as usual are all on point but the super repetitive loop and small selection of levels made it a bit of a trudge to get through. The idea of having day and night cycles for levels is great though, and nothing beats being able to play Katamari on the go. Probably ranking 5th just above I Touch Katamari

Me & My Motion Sickness

My thoughts on Me & My Katamari are rather conflicting and I don't know how much of the bad stuff I can excuse in this game for being a PSP game unlike the previous entries in the series. There are definitely flaws because of the restrictions of the Playstation Portable, but some others are just flaws in terms of weird design choices. I'm sure you'll know what I mean once you read what I wrote below.

I'm just going to name the worst offenders straight by the name: the level design and gameplay loop. Katamari's gameplay loop has always revolved about starting small, but as you roll up enough things over time, you eventually visit locations from earlier or a past level, but with a bigger Katamari. There's a sense of scale and progression, which MMK doesn't really have. The levels always play out the same and I mean that quite literally - the first city map always has the 75cm checkpoint and 1.50m size requirement, while the lake map always has the 4m checkpoint and 10m size requirement. And you're going to play these maps a lot, since for some reason the "new" gameplay loop in MMK has you going through multiple levels in a row. You would think there would be atleast some variety here, but no. After the house map, the first city map will always follow, then the lake map and so on. Every. Single. Time.
Atleast some maps have winter variants, but they're rather monotonous after the first few times too (looking at YOU, winter lake). I didn't even mention how frustrating the object placement is at times in MMK, this becomes really apparent in City 1. Now, for some reason the bonus levels all have unique map variants, but they're never used again for the "main" stages. Why? The desert map is literally used a single time in the entire game! Atleast the bonus stages are a good time and felt very refreshing to play every now and then inbetween the repetitive main story levels.

A personal major criticism I have with MMK is the shaky camera. It can't ever decide if it wants to be a third-person or top-down camera, so it keeps shifting between those two and I noticed it gets really bad when you roll over bumps. Had to quit the game two times because it made me actually nauseous and I pretty much never have motion sickness in games, this wasn't the case in Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari either. So if you're particularly sensitive to motion sickness in games, I'd think twice about playing Me & My Katamari.

I can see how people complain about the controls too, since MMK uses the buttons instead of another analog stick like in the previous games. To be honest, I only played with the original controls for three levels before I decided to remap the buttons to my right stick and it felt a lot more natural (even if it was a bit more unresponsive than in the previous games this way). Of course this wasn't possible to implement originally because of how the PSP was built and I really believe Namco did the best they could with translating the dual-stick controls onto the device. The rolling itself feels good in this game, even if it has the same issue as Damacy, with easily being able to get stuck between objects at times.

Considering my negativity towards MMK so far, you'd think I would absolutely hate it, but I don't. There are still many cool things in here worth mentioning, like the island hub world, playable cousins, the fantastic selection of the soundtrack of the previous two games (bit of a bummer that there's only a single new song with Katamari on the Funk, but it's alright since the reused songs are very good) and the great adaption of the artstyle. Like seriously, this game manages to capture the Katamari aesthetic from the PS2 games so well. Little things like the individual island designs you get as a reward for completing a stage or the ability to equip presents again made the game really more enjoyable and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have atleast a bit of a good time with Me & My Katamari! Thanks for reading.