Katamari Damacy's controls are such a wonderful example of frictional game design. From a certain vantage-point controlling the katamari, a giant not-really-spherical mass of assorted objects, is almost undeniably clunky, awkward and a little bit of a struggle. Most of the time it will never do quite what you want it to, and on occasion things will even just go outright badly as you accidentally careen down a slope or manage to tightly lodge yourself in a not-quite-large-enough gap that you'll have to desperately wiggle out of.
I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people getting frustrated with this aspect of the game, and I have to confess that when I was starting to dive back into videogames a couple years ago I found how this game controls quite off-putting, enough so to be pretty ambivalent towards my experience with it. I was starting to explore the medium again, but from the perspective of a late-20s adult rather than the teenager I once was, and I simply hadn't had enough experiences with videogames at that point in time to really know how to cope with a one actively resisting your attempts to control it, that wouldn't just let you input what you wanted to have happen on a one-to-one basis, and for me at least that manifested in frustration. The fact that I return here two years later and find myself having so much love for this game is a great example about how our relationship with any individual artform is always evolving over time as we learn more and have a wider variety of experiences to draw from; that exact sense of friction and push-back that the game has that was so off-putting for me before now just seems crucial to the fun that can be found here.
The Prince, who finds himself rolling around these katamaris, is a rather small fellow, and remains largely a pretty similar size even as the katamaris grow wildly out of control across the course of the game; eventually he finds himself pushing something thousands of times larger than him. The most immediate upside of the frictional controls here, that sense of resistance, is how much it heightens the immersion of putting you in his shoes; you're not just pushing a ball around in a game, but you're very specifically playing as a small little guy who is going to struggle to keep this gigantic mass of stuff under control. The lack of control here just adds to the sense of weight and size and scale, and the movement growing ever-clumsier as the katamari amasses makes the game-feel translate to you how ridiculous what you're doing here is. The friction in the controls add a sense of serendipity too, the katamari is not a perfect sphere but a mass of random objects some of which jut out in weird ways making the collision so strange. Sometimes this works against you in often-funny ways, whilst other times a piece of debris you've collected will jut out against the ground just right to lift you up somewhere you shouldn't really be able to reach; either way serves to make the experience less routine and more memorable than if the katamari was just some easily-predictable-orb.
The best part of all of this is that once you're willing to make the leap to the notion that it's okay to not have perfect control over what's happening then the decisions you're faced with when you're playing become all the more engaging. Turning is slow, and even lining yourself up doesn't guarantee you'll actually go in a straight line, so sometimes you'll just want to jam the breaks on and start going in reverse; you won't be able to see where you're going as easily but you'll grab those objects behind you a lot faster provided you do hit them. Or do you want to take the time to stop, turn round, line yourself up, trading precious seconds for a bit more confidence that you'll actually grab the objects you're after? There's a middle point on this equation too, attempting to make these turns whilst on the move, but it's sufficiently finnicky to perform that this isn't just a free option; you get a nice mix of speed and accuracy here, but only if you can stop the katamari from slipping off in the wrong direction whilst you're doing this.
This lays out my varied experiences with the control scheme, and why I've turned around on the game so much, but of course there's a tremendous amount of joy in Katamari Damacy too which was clear to me even back when I wasn't as big a fan of the game but that lands more resoundingly now. I love how the game lets you continue playing a level even after the objective is completed, and how this means the reward for completing a level faster is that you get even more time to mess around in these spaces before the timer runs out. I love how the nature of the growth of the katamari, constantly needing increasingly bigger objects to meaningfully feed it, puts the emphasis on keeping moving rather than backtracking for any individual object you accidentally rolled past. I love the iterative level design of the main storyline, where later levels directly echo the earlier ones such that you already have some amount of familiarity with them from the get-go and a good idea of where the shortcuts are going to be. I love the bonus levels based around picking up the largest version of an animal you can find, and the pain that surges through you when you realise that yes that carton of milk counts as a cow, your run is now over, sorry-not-sorry. I love the affection that is shown here for people, all our oddities, our bizarre societal rituals, our cultures and passions and humble existences, and how even in the game's quiet critique of consumerism it never lets go of this affection for us. I love just how gentle all of this is, even as your katamari goes about tearing down whole civilisations, and how even amidst the chaos on display the game manages to be relaxing and comforting.
I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people getting frustrated with this aspect of the game, and I have to confess that when I was starting to dive back into videogames a couple years ago I found how this game controls quite off-putting, enough so to be pretty ambivalent towards my experience with it. I was starting to explore the medium again, but from the perspective of a late-20s adult rather than the teenager I once was, and I simply hadn't had enough experiences with videogames at that point in time to really know how to cope with a one actively resisting your attempts to control it, that wouldn't just let you input what you wanted to have happen on a one-to-one basis, and for me at least that manifested in frustration. The fact that I return here two years later and find myself having so much love for this game is a great example about how our relationship with any individual artform is always evolving over time as we learn more and have a wider variety of experiences to draw from; that exact sense of friction and push-back that the game has that was so off-putting for me before now just seems crucial to the fun that can be found here.
The Prince, who finds himself rolling around these katamaris, is a rather small fellow, and remains largely a pretty similar size even as the katamaris grow wildly out of control across the course of the game; eventually he finds himself pushing something thousands of times larger than him. The most immediate upside of the frictional controls here, that sense of resistance, is how much it heightens the immersion of putting you in his shoes; you're not just pushing a ball around in a game, but you're very specifically playing as a small little guy who is going to struggle to keep this gigantic mass of stuff under control. The lack of control here just adds to the sense of weight and size and scale, and the movement growing ever-clumsier as the katamari amasses makes the game-feel translate to you how ridiculous what you're doing here is. The friction in the controls add a sense of serendipity too, the katamari is not a perfect sphere but a mass of random objects some of which jut out in weird ways making the collision so strange. Sometimes this works against you in often-funny ways, whilst other times a piece of debris you've collected will jut out against the ground just right to lift you up somewhere you shouldn't really be able to reach; either way serves to make the experience less routine and more memorable than if the katamari was just some easily-predictable-orb.
The best part of all of this is that once you're willing to make the leap to the notion that it's okay to not have perfect control over what's happening then the decisions you're faced with when you're playing become all the more engaging. Turning is slow, and even lining yourself up doesn't guarantee you'll actually go in a straight line, so sometimes you'll just want to jam the breaks on and start going in reverse; you won't be able to see where you're going as easily but you'll grab those objects behind you a lot faster provided you do hit them. Or do you want to take the time to stop, turn round, line yourself up, trading precious seconds for a bit more confidence that you'll actually grab the objects you're after? There's a middle point on this equation too, attempting to make these turns whilst on the move, but it's sufficiently finnicky to perform that this isn't just a free option; you get a nice mix of speed and accuracy here, but only if you can stop the katamari from slipping off in the wrong direction whilst you're doing this.
This lays out my varied experiences with the control scheme, and why I've turned around on the game so much, but of course there's a tremendous amount of joy in Katamari Damacy too which was clear to me even back when I wasn't as big a fan of the game but that lands more resoundingly now. I love how the game lets you continue playing a level even after the objective is completed, and how this means the reward for completing a level faster is that you get even more time to mess around in these spaces before the timer runs out. I love how the nature of the growth of the katamari, constantly needing increasingly bigger objects to meaningfully feed it, puts the emphasis on keeping moving rather than backtracking for any individual object you accidentally rolled past. I love the iterative level design of the main storyline, where later levels directly echo the earlier ones such that you already have some amount of familiarity with them from the get-go and a good idea of where the shortcuts are going to be. I love the bonus levels based around picking up the largest version of an animal you can find, and the pain that surges through you when you realise that yes that carton of milk counts as a cow, your run is now over, sorry-not-sorry. I love the affection that is shown here for people, all our oddities, our bizarre societal rituals, our cultures and passions and humble existences, and how even in the game's quiet critique of consumerism it never lets go of this affection for us. I love just how gentle all of this is, even as your katamari goes about tearing down whole civilisations, and how even amidst the chaos on display the game manages to be relaxing and comforting.
NOWITSREYNTIME17
2 years ago