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.
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.