To me, Katamari Damacy is the margherita pizza of video games. It's one of the simplest yet most innately fulfilling concepts in the medium: roll up things with your ball to become big to roll up more things. While this description is accurate however, it doesn't do justice towards the game's underlying complexity. Committal tank controls combined with the seemingly strewn about yet carefully placed objects of varying sizes means that Katamari forces players to consider both the micro and macro design which the game effortlessly excels at. The player must weave in and out of clusters of increasingly large objects, building up their sphere while also mapping out the optimal paths (snagging relevant objects while factoring in how their shapes, once collected, will alter the roll) and keeping in mind how larger objects must be avoided at first and later consumed in the growing mass as the world appears to shrinks around you. For this reason, I think it's not just a simple power fantasy, and instead more closely resembles pure obstacle escalation. Katamari Damacy really drills in the sense of player progression from how the world unfolds from sense of scale (which is why it gets away with only three distinct stages) and even seemingly inverts its own concepts with side stages that force you to avoid smaller themed objects just to get your katamari to the perfect size for the ultimate outcome: the reward is made that much more gratifying with just a bit of restraint.

This all works seamlessly because Katamari is the king of player feedback. It can certainly feel frustrating at first, getting tossed around like fireworks by these moving objects that dwarf you, but the game knows exactly how to communicate your inherent progress. As your ball exponentially swells, these moving objects go from sending you flying, to lacking any significant impact upon contact, to eventually spotting the player and running away from the growing catastrophe. There's nothing more viscerally satisfying than coming back to mobile obstacles that were pushing you around and flattening them, hearing their cry as they too become stuck in the jumbled mess of rolling flotsam while the King of the Cosmos quips in the background. Simply put, the concept never outstays its welcome.

Going back to the opening metaphor, it requires much finesse to make all these different concepts sing together with little friction in a video game, this fusion of audio-visual presentation and player input. That said, to successfully disguise its intricate design and depth beneath its far-reaching artistic vision and simple yet realized gameplay mechanics takes a master's touch. Katamari Damacy does not try to explain why it works or how it succeeds, because it simply is, and it just does. Perhaps I've moved onto greater and grander things since that have built off of this, but I have to admit that sometimes, you just can't beat the basics in life. It's always worth going back for a slice or two every now and then, just to remind yourself that this is why video games exist in the first place: because underneath all this talk of focus and cohesion, video games are just goddamn fun.

Also, it's fantastic hangover food for you and your buddies after a long night, when they come calling you for content and suddenly it's 3 AM in a packed Discord call where everyone is wailing "YOU'REEEEE LONNEEELLLY ROLLING STARRRR" as this growing, screaming ball of flailing limbs bounces helplessly about for yet another awry creation. Let the good times roll.

Allow me to present you with a question you might groan at the mere sight of witnessing it, fellow reader, that being: are videogames art?





To that I say a resound:... they are even better than that

I really don’t know where to even start with Katamari Damacy, much like with the weird kind-of-not-spherical bringers of chaos and destruction that give the game’s name, there isn’t really a beginning or end, it just keeps on rollin’...

I wouldn’t be the first to gush about its uniqueness, both in its completely bonkers yet adorably silly presentation and its rather peculiar control scheme, one that definitively takes some time to adjust to, but one you do it’s like riding on a bike. Managing both joysticks, knowing when to turn and when to stop, where to go and what to evade, it’s a waltz performed by a mystical otter that plays the accordion, and you may be thinking ‘’Deemon, that doesn’t make sense at all’’ and to that I say EXACTLY! It’s a hectic loop, there were times I was sweating wondering if I’d even come close to the required size to beat the game, only to steam roll while some of the most varied and oddly beautiful bangers play in the background, some even compliment you! And that’s when the stress starts to mix with an zen sensation, a melding process that culminates once you do it, you manage to reach the required size, and from your mind an profound and sound ‘’WOOOOOOOOO!’’ sensation appears as you begin to try to go even higher, reaching uncontemplated horizons by your small prince mind and achieve a perfect star shine... only for the King of the Universe to go ‘’You call this a star? Oh me oh my.’’ ...

It feels too chaotic, and yet, it’s perfectly calculated. There are so many maps that it feels like new surprises are neverending, yet there are so little that learning their routing becomes essential as well as pretty rewarding; there’s so much stuff that it may be hard to know where to start or on what you can even roll over, yet it’s placement is so finely tuned, so perfectly put together that it begins to be like a puzzle that gets easier as you go along, and even throws some extra challenges like finding the scattered gifts across the globe or trying out the constellation stages. Even when the King of the Universe throws you to repair his ‘’naughtiness’’ or time seems of the essence, there's always a moment of respite, a small victory whether it’s in pure calmness or pure ectasis, or something as simple as triying to find out a new crazy set up or what do they ask of you next. Going from having to just achieve 1 meter to the three-digit numbers was a feeling of progression that seems simple, but I wasn’t expecting to see so well-crafted in so little time, to make me keep coming back time and time again may to grab a scarf or shirt on the way, or get the biggest cow possible and make one hell of a Taurus.

The little intermissions, the songs, the movement... it’s such a silly experience, and I use that word with the best intent imaginable. Katamari Damacy is comfy and hilarious, stressful and maddening, a cocktail of emotions I don’t think a game has made me feel in such a way. There’s not a ton of games that say goodbye when closing them, and even among them, Katamari does it with an irreplicable sweetness, the same with which i does everything else.

You gotta defeat mouses if you want to go up against a Kraken, you need to see small worlds before going through the globe, and of course, if you want to make the sky shine, you gotta keep rollin’

And before I wrap this up, huge thanks to @Drax for recommending me this one, it was the reason I came back to it after giving it a go in 2022 and dropping it near the beggning and I’m so glad I returned, it was beyond worth it...

A brilliant, insanely charming, instantly enjoyable gem of a game. A relic of a sadly bygone era, where Playstation (for which Katamari Damacy was originally an exclusive) were willing to publish weird, mid-budget games with eccentric presentation and weird ideas. There's nothing like Katamari out there anymore.

Its controls are really wonky in that up and down on the directional stick don't move you forward and back, but they move you around the circumference of the ball - and then you use the other stick to move once you've oriented yourself. It's a bit hard to get used to - but I think it's to the game's benefit and adds a lot of personality. If it were as cut-and-dry as "move forward to go forward" and "move back to go back" the game would be too easy, this gives it a unique feeling and makes it satisfying to get to grips with, and I think also adds a bit of depth to what would otherwise be a pretty shallow experience.

Katamari has this brilliant, off-kilter sense of humour. The King is such a fucking weido, frequently making weird remarks during levels in which he's asked you to roll up as many women or bears or crabs or whatever-the-fuck-else as you can possibly find. He lambasts you in-between levels and makes fun of your height and the size of your head, he roasts you for your failures but also gets really excited if you manage to roll up a big enough cow. I love him. He's my absolute GOAT. We will never see another video game character like The King Of All Cosmos. The game's levels also just frequently throw shit at the wall with no care for logic. Here's a couple of giant 100-foot-tall wrestlers swinging eachother around in the middle of the beach, here's a panda bear floating down from the sky on balloons, here's a random-ass unnamed kaiju that looks like Gigan from Godzilla rampaging through the middle of the ocean. Sure. Fuck it. Why not?

I'm particularly impressed by levels like the bear level and the cow level in which you're tasked with rolling up one of a single thing in the world and can finish the level no matter how big or small that thing (bear or cow) is, but are encouraged to get a bigger one to get a better score. In these levels it's not just about what you can roll up, it's about what you can't roll up (or, shouldn't, which is small bears or cows). You go around the whole level trying to pick stuff up and get bigger so you can get a bigger bear/cow for a better score, but the whole time you're having to dodge smaller bears and cows like your fucking life depends on it so the level doesn't just end and your hard work isn't wasted for nothing. It gets increasingly harder to dodge these things the bigger you get and the more ambitious you become in your bear/cow size hunt! It's a super smart inversion of the game's mechanics and in a really gutbusting way gets you super paranoid that you're about to roll over a tiny bear that you're too big to see now en route to the one you actually want! You start hallucinating bears and cows that aren't even there!! What the fuck do you mean this tiny-ass milk carton with a picture of a cow on it counts as a cow?? In the most loving way possible, absolutely fuck off man!! (I love this shit)

It's funny all the time, and it's fun all the time, because it wraps up in like 5 hours before it can even begin to get old. And do I even need to mention the soundtrack? This shit could chart it's that good, I mean it in the best way when I say that this game's OST is like a bunch of people doing bad impressions of Nujabes and Frank Sinatra. I fucking loved it, it's everything modern Playstation should be but isn't

It's like the movie The Blob but cute.
You're a 2cm alien that agglomerates everything in your path into a giant mass of agony. Cops shoot at you, cars honk and people scream.

This ball of torment is launched into space where it replaces the missing stars. People who did not die from being pressed or asphyxiated meet their terrible end there.
It's like in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it's not shown, but we all know those kids didn't make it.

Despite the violence and frustrating controls at the beginning, it's a super relaxing game.

This game is a freaking gem. The main concept is simple but the presentation quickly turns it into something bonkers and hilarious. The game just feels like a fever dream, it’s as if a WarioWare minigame turned into its own full-blown game.

The controls are really janky and awkward but i feel like it kind of adds to the charm? Usually with games with uncomfortable control schemes, I find myself getting accustomed to them by the end. This is not the case here, the controls stay uncomfortable until the end of the game and honestly I can do nothing but cautiously applaud.

It’s hard to be articulate about anything regarding this game because it felt like a 6 hour trance. There’s just something so hypnotic about this game that transported me to another realm. I think it’s the sensory overload I get from all the colors paired with the vibration of the controller while the soundtrack loops in my mind. Speaking of, this soundtrack is freaking stellar and is filled with earworms. I wanted to list my favorites but I genuinely listed them all. Not a single miss on that soundtrack. “Que Sera Sera” is my favorite for sure though. The music is so addicting to listen to which makes the game just so addicting to play.

Overall, Katamari Damacy feels like it healed something within me and my inner child. I feel so fulfilled with my experience with it even though I wasn’t cognizant of that experience. I’m really not being hyperbolic when I say it felt like I was in a trance.

When the game told me to get the Katamari to 300m and then gave 25 minutes I was like: "No way, that's too much". At the end I doubled the requested amount and felt like what I've become, a world-destroying imposing force, and it was a total catharsis, if it weren't for the timer I would have ended up rolling everything, it was crazy.

Mechanically it starts simple, roll up things with the ball and make it grow, but when the game starts putting you in bigger enviroments with bigger and bigger objects, is when the game becomes interesting. You'll need to thoroughly choose your objects if you want to be as efficient as possible, and it is a blast when you pull it off the best way possible.

Haven't played any other Katamari game before, except Touch My Katamari for PSVita, so I can't compare, but this game alone surpassed all my expectations and was an absolute surprise. Totally recommended.

When it comes to unique and eccentric gaming experiences, few titles can hold a candle to the enchanting world of Katamari. Originally released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2 as Katamari Damacy, this game has rolled its way back onto modern consoles with a remastered version in Katamari Damacy Reroll. The result is a charming and nostalgic adventure that introduces a new generation of gamers to the quirkiest universe in gaming history. As someone who experienced the original release, I was more than excited to once again try my hand at making the largest Katamari possible and appeasing The King of All Cosmos.

The story of "Katamari Damacy" is, to put it mildly, unconventional. You play as the Prince, tasked with rolling up objects by your demanding father, the King of All Cosmos, who has accidentally destroyed the stars and planets of the solar system. The narrative, while present after completing a level, is light and doesn't take itself too seriously. The dialogue and cutscenes are filled with whimsy and humor, and the bizarre cast of characters adds to the game's oddball appeal. This story, however, is really only a vehicle to get the player behind a Katamari to roll up more and more oddities, a fun backdrop for the game's wacky antics.

At its core, Katamari is a third-person puzzle-action game, where you control a small, adhesive ball (the Katamari) that you use to pick up objects and grow ever larger. The objective is to meet a specific size requirement in each level by rolling up everything you can find, from thumbtacks to people, cats, cows, and cars. Once you reach the specified size (or larger if you are fast enough), The King of All Cosmos turns the Katamari into a planet, replacing the ones he inadvertently destroyed. The controls, although a tad quirky and hard to get used to, become more intuitive with practice. You essentially control the Katamari much like a zero-turn lawn mower with the Left and Right joysticks acting as the control sticks. While this should be simple enough, the never ending amount of objects, insects, animals, and people you need to avoid until you are large enough to stick them to you Katamari is what makes controlling the ball, and the game overall, a challenge. The Reroll remaster did implement support for the Nintendo Switch Gyro controls, but I never utilized this feature as it wasn’t how I originally experienced the game back in 2004.

One of the standout features of every Katamari game is its vibrant and quirky visuals, and this upgraded version of the original doesn't disappoint. While the remaster retains the game's original whimsical and colorful art style, it is able to take full advantage of modern hardware, like the Nintendo Switch OLED screen, to deliver crisp, high-definition graphics. Furthermore, the soundtrack, composed by Yuu Miyake, remains just as catchy as ever. From the iconic "Katamari on the Rocks" to the soothing "Lonely Rolling Star," the music perfectly complements the game's unique atmosphere. You'll find yourself humming these tunes long after you've put the controller down, especially my personal favorite “You are Smart.”

Katamari Damacy Reroll, much like the original release, offers a decent amount of content, with a variety of missions and unlockables to keep you engaged. There's also a competitive local multiplayer mode that allows you to compete with friends to see who can create the biggest Katamari. Also like the original release, however, this remastered version is still a bit short for those looking for a more extended experience and doesn’t contain any significant new content.

Katamari Damacy Reroll is as charming, whimsical, and odd as its initial release nearly 20-years ago. This slightly new, yet still bizarre experience manages to recapture the magic of the original while looking better than ever. Its quirky visuals, delightful music, and uniquely addictive gameplay make it a must-play for both nostalgic fans and newcomers. While the lack of any substantially new content is a bit of a disappointment, the game's originality and charm remain as strong as ever. So, if you're in the mood for a heartwarming adventure through the cosmos with a dash of absurdity, Katamari Damacy Reroll is well worth the ride.

Katamari has always been on my "want to play this someday" radar, but I never actually delved further into it - all I've known for many years is that it was supposedly about rolling up stuff to roll up even more stuff. But when I saw it for 4€ on sale the other day, I decided to just give it a try.

Surprisingly, Damacy Reroll already managed to set a record within the first 5 minutes in gameplay, where I was ready for nominating the game for the "worst controls of all time" award without even having finished the tutorial levels. Thankfully the award didn't go to Damacy and it didn't take me long to get used to the controls and enjoy the game properly. The twin-stick controls are really unique and simply describable as "easy to learn, hard to master", there's an additional layer of precision when you get the hang of them and it's quite satisfying to see.

The core gameplay is as straightforward as it gets - in the main missions, the Katamari (the ball you're rolling) has to reach a certain size within a certain time limit. Everything you roll over gets glued to the Katamari, so you'll have to start with coins and fruit first and when things get rolling (I'm sorry), you can roll over increasingly bigger things to a point where it's comical. It's so ridiculous, but Damacy Reroll does a great job at creating a sense of scale in each individual level. The side missions are also fun little challenges in the way that their main goal isn't having the biggest Katamari possible, but rather collecting a certain amount of something or having to guess your Katamari's size.

In terms of soundtrack, the dreamy songs fit the fever-dreamish vibe of the game's direction really well and are easy on the ears. Do yourself a favor and listen to Lonely Rolling Star. I think it's rather silly that the music is so cheerful and pleasant when there's a weapon of mass destruction mowing down everything in sight, but that's definitely part of the charm for me.

There's... not much else I have to say, except that I'm looking forward to playing We Love Katamari! Currently pretty engaged with Tekken 8, so my progress in Persona 3 Reload has been paused for the moment, but I'll get back to it soon. As always, thanks for reading my reviews!

Sometimes the simplest things can be the best. You take a ball and can rollover things to make the ball bigger but they must me smaller than the ball. This grows the ball so you can pick up bigger things. I know that probably doesn’t sound great but it’s addicting and super fun. The story is the one of the strangest things in gaming. I would explain it but I don’t know how. There is star god”? I think, and some people and giant octupus and Godzilla and a lot of other random things. You roll around and collect stuff so the star god can bring the stars back.

I realize this review makes no sense and makes the game sound dumb as hell. But you also need to realize it’s really funny and worth a few hours of your time.

i'm going to be incredibly harsh here and say that this is a remaster that does not need to exist. the graphics look more washed out and lose that sharp style that original had. more damningly, the game somehow runs worse on the PS4 than it does on PS2 and will regularly get very bad slowdown around the baseball field near shopping street. it adds no qol features that the original could've used (i.e. the ability to restart a level either from pausing mid-level or retrying at the results screen), no extra content that the original didn't already have, and it only offers the japanese voice acting with no option for the iconic english voice acting (ik this part is contentious but there really is no reason it couldn't have at least been something you could toggle). i hate to be the fun police because a lot of people got introduced to this game from this remaster, but there really is no actual reason to play this over the original, especially considering how most microwaves can emulate PS2 games nowadays. i don't recommend this remaster for anyone uninitiated to the game and i don't recommend this remaster for any fans of the original looking for either new content or to revisit a classic, so it's a game for an audience of no one in my mind.

i want to be clear that this rating isn't necessarily reflective of the whole package; even with hiccups, this is katamari damacy. it takes more than slowdown to negate the joy of saying "C'MERE BITCH" and rolling up a terrified person into your katamari to then be rewarded with their screams of fear and agony. this rating is more an assessment of what reroll does (or does not do, in this case) to differentiate itself meaningfully from just playing the original. why pay money for this game when you can emulate the original and get the better and (imo) more essential experience? there's nothing inherently wrong with playing this over the original, but i would be completely unable to make a pitch for it. that's what makes it such a failure to me.

I don't think I've encountered a game before where I've loved how it feels to move and control as much as this one. There's this perfect amount of friction and imprecision to it all, whether it's from rolling down a hill and not being strong enough to push the katamari back up, collecting a bunch of stuff and becoming too large to be able to manoeuvre your way back in the same smooth way, or even just the way that you become progressively more unwieldy the larger you get, there's a lot of fantastic nuance to how it feels to play the game. This especially serves to make each level feel engaging in how you approach it from start to finish, with your growing size frequently recontextualising pieces of the scenery, especially since the game just, isn't afraid to have those moments where it absolutely sucks to move through somewhere. I love this for the way it gives the environment a somewhat more natural feel to it despite the scattershot madness that it can embody, as if it's this whole little world that you're trespassing into and messing with as opposed to a world that feels created with the purpose and expectation of guiding this giant clump of assorted objects to destroy everything.

What makes all of this even more impressive however, is that despite this, there's almost not a single moment where this game isn't an absolute joy to play. A lot of this comes from the presentation I think, both the visuals and audio. I appreciate the absurdity of how the environment is constructed having so many strange, entirely disparate elements being slapped together and then playing it off as if it's just another regular day, as people go about their business watching polar bears sing and walking their elephants down the street. Love the character designs too, there are few things that are as cute as the prince or as playfully cursed looking as the king of the cosmos, and the random civilians on Earth are pretty funny as well with their square heads and exaggerated features.

The audio is great as well, especially with how weighty it sounds in the right scenarios, with each collision feeling like an absolutely catastrophic setback because of this, even when you're losing about 3 seconds of progress at most. The absolute chaos that the game embodies when you've got a lot of sound effects playing at once as you're rolling over a large group of objects is another highlight in this regard, since there's something that just doesn't get old about hearing a bunch of people and animals screaming at once while the cheerful background music blares. The soundtrack is one of the best ever as well and I will hear no arguments on this (not that there seem to be many anyway since it seems like a common enough take), basically every game would be improved with the inclusion of Lonely Rolling Star.

On the whole this is just one of the most delightful games I've played, with the one drawback being that I did find some of the later stages to be a biiiiit repetitive since it starts using the same big environments over and over, so I feel that even just one more place that was introduced near the end would've helped keep up a sense of variety, but even so, I see myself playing this game a lot when I'm just looking for something cozy to put on for a bit.

Katamari Damacy has inconsistent levels, somewhat janky collision, and a selection of songs that can only be described as hit-or-miss. At the same time, it's totally unique tone and gameplay, plus the songs that really-really fucking hit make it totally deserving of being a cult classic. I'm sure We Love Katamari is better on, like, every technical level, but this kind of game is what we definitely need more of: a fun, approachable experience that doesn't sacrifice it's identity and the depth of it's mechanics for broad appeal. Such a sweet thing, Katamari is.

Society Oppinion on Music:

"YOU A STUPID HOE YOU YOU A STUPID HOE"
(Amazing)

"PAYA PAPA YA PAYA PAPA YA PAPAYA PAPAYA PA PA"
(Stupid, Emo, Gay)