Katamari in itself has always been such an interesting and fun series for me, I personally didn't start in this game but with 2011's Touch My Katamari for the PSVita, and thus I was really excited to finally revisit the series starting by the beginning. Katamari Damacy is a fine game, it's innovative enough as its incremental mechanics have never been done anywhere else, with an immense amount of care and attention to details such as every single little or big object having a presence in the game, a description and a name that eventually goes on your collection menu, and honestly it feels like a marvel in development at that time, since absolutely everything in this game is something you can roll over once you're bigger than said thing. It's a lot of fun and it's super easy to get in to.
So, Katamari Damacy is a fun little game, a start to a very beloved franchise and straight up iconic as a PS2 puzzler with a banger soundtrack, but it does have some faults which could just be the case of first-game-syndrome, problems which have been resolved in latter entries but making the retrospective when coming back a bit worse. It's namely just the physics, the selection of stages, the weird challenges and the grind aspect of it if you truly want to get 100%.
With the physics it's mostly that the recognition on rolling over different items sometimes won't work, and then to climb over places it's nearly impossible unless you are super big and then you just step onto the higher ground, but to climb over an obstacle or a wall or something is just a waste of time since 90% it'll result in your katamari losing objects that were previously rolled into it.
The selection of stages, in my opinion makes the game a little repetitive because it's always just the same place, the same park or the same house over and over again, and I get it's to have a sense of progression but most of these don't ever make you that big in order to actually see the difference, with the exception of Make a Star 8, 9 or Make a Moon.
Challenges that tell you to collect objects in a certain theme that aligns with their respective constellation are fine, except for when they tell you to only roll only one specific object related to it, this also makes the collection of objects for 100% straight up hell if you need to pick up one of these exclusive objects that only appear here, and once you pick them up you get booted out of the stage.
But, I've heard that some of these issues are straight up resolved in latter entries, which makes sense. But I'm glad this game exists, it has such an unique charm to it that no real game has ever tried to replicate, and even with its caveats and the anger it caused me in the process of getting all items or rolling all presents, I can forgive the silly story of the monarchy literally messing around and destroying all the stars, just to command their little kid into rolling up straight up HOUSES and PEOPLE into creating new ones, who says this game isn't political after all?
By the way, weird thing to not include an actual auto-save, or making the gameplay be more than 30 FPS for a remaster of the game. But that's Namco for you I guess.
So, Katamari Damacy is a fun little game, a start to a very beloved franchise and straight up iconic as a PS2 puzzler with a banger soundtrack, but it does have some faults which could just be the case of first-game-syndrome, problems which have been resolved in latter entries but making the retrospective when coming back a bit worse. It's namely just the physics, the selection of stages, the weird challenges and the grind aspect of it if you truly want to get 100%.
With the physics it's mostly that the recognition on rolling over different items sometimes won't work, and then to climb over places it's nearly impossible unless you are super big and then you just step onto the higher ground, but to climb over an obstacle or a wall or something is just a waste of time since 90% it'll result in your katamari losing objects that were previously rolled into it.
The selection of stages, in my opinion makes the game a little repetitive because it's always just the same place, the same park or the same house over and over again, and I get it's to have a sense of progression but most of these don't ever make you that big in order to actually see the difference, with the exception of Make a Star 8, 9 or Make a Moon.
Challenges that tell you to collect objects in a certain theme that aligns with their respective constellation are fine, except for when they tell you to only roll only one specific object related to it, this also makes the collection of objects for 100% straight up hell if you need to pick up one of these exclusive objects that only appear here, and once you pick them up you get booted out of the stage.
But, I've heard that some of these issues are straight up resolved in latter entries, which makes sense. But I'm glad this game exists, it has such an unique charm to it that no real game has ever tried to replicate, and even with its caveats and the anger it caused me in the process of getting all items or rolling all presents, I can forgive the silly story of the monarchy literally messing around and destroying all the stars, just to command their little kid into rolling up straight up HOUSES and PEOPLE into creating new ones, who says this game isn't political after all?