Les étoiles dans le ciel ont disparu. Remplaçons-les par le bordel dans lequel les êtres humains vivent. Car, et c’est une vérité prononcée par le roi du Cosmos, « la Terre est vraiment pleine de choses », de trop de choses, pourrait-on ajouter. La mission de notre avatar le prince est d’utiliser une balle adhésive pour incorporer le désordre des Terriens, commençant avec des objets de petite taille (boutons, punaises, chewing-gums, dés…), pour ensuite gagner en dimension et absorber tout le reste, un peu comme s'il roulait sa boule de neige pour former le corps d’un bonhomme de neige ou, si l’on prend une analogie encore plus appropriée, traînait et façonnait sa propre merde à la manière du bousier. Après tout, chaque niveau de Katamari Damacy est parsemé de tas d’ordures, d’objets qui se retrouvent là où ils ne devraient pas se retrouver. Les maisons, les rues et les parcs sont absolument bordéliques, les surfaces étant recouvertes de gogosses, de bidules, de ce qui déborde de nos frigos, s’empile dans nos remises et s’amasse dans les dépotoirs. Des objets identiques sont généralement regroupés ensemble dans un même rayon comme pour nous rappeler les rendements de la production en chaîne qui dépassent nos réels besoins. Le plaisir de nettoyer les pièces d’une maison aboutit à l’euphorie d’assimiler la maison elle-même, ses habitants et tout le reste du décor. Dans un sens, le but du jeu n’est pas vraiment de ramasser le fouillis dans lequel les humains vivent, mais de débarrasser la Terre de l’humanité. Voilà un message radicalement écologique !

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.

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.

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.

Cute, bright, weird, and fast - like any good Katamari game should be. I still think We Love Katamari smokes Damacy any day of the week, but fully understand why this one got the first reroll given that it released prior (and it's still a damn fine game in its own right). Like the best remasters, does very little to change the original gameplay experience - essentially just adds a fresh coat of paint and calls it a day. You can't just deny that music either, good shit! The controls being purposefully obtuse makes it all the better imo, fits the funky tone like a glove and otherwise this would be way too easy. All that being said, I feel similarly towards this game as I do to - say - a Splatoon, where I can play it for a couple hours at a time and be totally invested but anything more than that starts to drag. And like others have said, this does get super repetitive on or around the halfway point. But man, when it's on... this gimmick is satisfying.