Game is a masterpiece just like the original. Everything I said for that game applies to this one. If this is the way you want to play We Love Katamari there is absolutely no issue with that. However, how do I think it stacks up to the original? There may be nothing huge, but I will discuss all of it anyway. Let's start with direct comparisons.
Graphically I think they did a good job. On rare occasions textures can be distracting with how they were blown up, but the HD facelift looks great. The option to play with classic graphics is wonderful too, especially for me since I'm not really a fan of how the Reroll games look. However, once again I am not a fan of the character redesigns and the change to the "cousin face." They look much more generic and less charming, except now it's just jarring since the young king and all the cutscenes keep the original designs intact. I feel that switching to classic graphics should have also changed the character designs as well. My only other graphical issue is that the widescreen was applied to the overworld very poorly, with remnants from other screens clear which looks really strange. The translation has also been updated, and outside of finally correcting "star" to "planet" the other differences are pretty minor. Namco still hasn't found out that "video games" is two words though...
The music and sound design is largely untouched too, as it should be. I did notice two issues though. One is that I noticed the sound mixing seemed to be different in some places, though this only ever bothered me in the racing level where the vehicle noises are way too loud. Another is that, just like Damacy Reroll, the game has been undubbed. ...Why? What's the point of this? Dual audio is industry standard now, let people play with English audio. Another more minor thing is that the audio cueing after beating a stage is incorrect. The king is supposed to throw the Katamari into the sky before the jingle plays, but now it's cued as he throws it. This probably isn't a big deal if you haven't played the original but it distracts me and is definitely worse. More annoying is that the comically overpriced day 1 music DLC pack has poor looping in a couple tracks, mainly Katamari of Love.
Whatever, presentation flaws aside, the spectacular physics and core gameplay of the original is kept intact. There's only one issue I noticed and it's that the render distance was noticeably lackluster at many points, much worse than the PS2 version. It varied depending on the level but it was especially awful in Dr. Katamari's stage, where the pop-in for objects was very distracting and became harder to route out. On the good side though, the occasional frame drops in the Bird & Elephant's stage are completely absent. Also since I don't know where to put this, importing cosmic objects from the first game is not a thing in this remake, and has been replaced by the cousin planets from the PAL version. Pretty disappointing, but I guess it's not a huge deal.
Now for quality of life, new content, and my disappointments.
The quality of life changes for this game aren't anything huge, especially for returning players, but they're absolutely appreciated. Directing players on level goals or barriers you can now get through, an easy select for fans, and faster movement in the overworld are options that are not only convenient but easily ignorable incase you don't like them. One specific addition I want to give credit to is the note for escaping from fishing rods, which I never knew you could do despite my huge amount of runs through that level. I also greatly appreciate the added on-screen lyrics to the credits game like how Damacy did.
The new content in Reroll + Royal Reverie is... Lacking. Let's start with the new additions to the regular game.
First is the eternal mode levels. These are a series staple that
give no time limit versions for existing levels that for some reason were absent in the original We Love. Me personally, I'm not huge on eternal mode. Rolling around with no stakes can be relaxing but in levels where I can pretty much already get most of the objects in time without eternal mode, I find it pointless. Especially as someone who likes hunting for new records on stages. So either way I couldn't really care less on their addition, yet I still found their inclusion lackluster. They aren't given a special planet to look at after completion or a results screen, just the King saving your score which is really lazy. There has also only been three eternal levels added, being for ALAP 3, 4, and 5. These stages have a decent chunk of the map overlapping already, with all of them featuring the same town area. While they may not have worked perfectly with the alternate goals featured in We Love Katamari (which is likely why they were basent in the first place), a greater variety of eternal stages would have done a lot.
The sticker side quest is the definition of mediocre tacked-on remake content. Hidden in stages are these stickers of Namco characters that you can take a photo of to add to your collection. After that you can use your sticker sheet to... Look at them, I guess. First off actually being able to get them is a pain. You have to find the present for the camera first so that's guaranteed backtracking if you're trying to 100% the sticker sheet, and then you have to actually have it equipped to take photos. I never cared much about this since I never used Katamari games for photography, but why was this not added as something you could do without the camera equipped by the time the original We Love came out? We're on the eighth main release and we still can't. Basically, if you're daring enough to use the unlockable cosmetics you had to find you're punished by not being able to get the stickers since you don't have the camera equipped. On top of that, finding them just... Isn't fun? Finding them casually when playing is fine I guess (even if it means you have to have the camera equipped to do that) but searching them just leads to needle in a haystack situations, especially with how big some of the levels in this game are. This isn't even to mention that they're tied to the missions in certain levels, so you can find where a sticker would be but it won't be there since you weren't on the ALAP mission or that you'll be getting many of these photos on a time limit, or that I even had a few runs where the stickers didn't even spawn, either on purpose due to size changes or due to bugs. Not sure which is worse. For getting these you get more frames for the expanded photo taking in this game, which is nice I guess. Still not worth the hassle though.
Next is the big advertised feature of this game, the Royal Reverie. Five new stages, the first new stages to the main series in ten years. And those stages are... Unfortunately uninteresting and not good. To give these stages some credit, the reskin of playing as a Young King lead by Papa is very cool, but these concepts are unfortunately kind of wasted.
The maps have gotten nice reskins, I especially love the sunset given to the racetrack. I also enjoy the look for the Royal Reverie's overworld, it's simple and resembles the credits game which is a nice touch. Papa's dialog gives him a different characterization from The King which I appreciate, but the result screens just cuts to the regular one with The King being like "yeah we did that" which is really disappointing, not to mention that like the Eternal levels, outside of a record you get no tangible planet or anything for beating them.
As for the levels themselves, they're not great. The first is a needless reskin of the clean up level. The difference now is that instead of ending when you get all of the objects, it has a size goal that you're never going to fail at getting and a one minute time limit. You can beat the stage regularly in under a minute. This is borderline pointless. The second is a frustrating needle in the haystack hunt for five objects where certain objects grazing you leads to an instant fail. They have the same spawns everytime but it's still not fun. The third is a needless reskin of the racing level except now instead of size you're hunting for tires. The shorter time limit may make your priorities a little different but the level pretty much will end up having you play the same. The forth is an odd reskin of the firefly level where it instead plays as an as fast as possible level. This one is fine I guess. And the last one is a needle in a hay stack hunt in the zoo map for four ballerinas with random locations. What fun. Needless to say, I think that Royal Reverie was very disappointing. It doesn't really hurt the game, but if you're on the fence on buying the remake, don't let this convince you to do it.
As for my disappointments with this remake, I believe that any remake, even lazy remasters, should try to at least improve the experience of the game in some way. As much as I love it, the original Katamari Damacy has a lot of flaws which made the remake specially disappointing. However, We Love Katamari, the original PS2 game, is nearly perfect in my eyes, which makes a remake less interested in fixing issues more forgivable in my eyes. However, no game is perfect, and I would say the game has two small flaws. First, even though you rarely have to do it, climbing up walls is a little janky sometimes. The remake does not fix this. Now for the more pressing one. Unlike every other game in the series to follow, you can only collect one new cousin per run of a level. This makes grinding on collecting all cousins needlessly repetitive, especially when you need them to unlock every stage in the game. I don't mind this much since the levels are so replayable and fun, but it is absolutely not a good thing, mainly for ALAP 4 and 5, with their long level timers and multiple cousins. Despite the following games in the series fixing this, Reroll + Royal Reverie decided that it didn't want to fix this issue. Why? This was the one thing I was hoping to be fixed in this remake, as it remains the only thing close to a black mark on one of my favorite games of all time, and they didn't even attempt to remedy this issue. While I mainly pick up We Love Katamari to replay levels, if I wanted to sit through every level and then watch the true ending's final cutscene again, I would get no advantage from playing Reroll in the most tedious parts, which is a massive disappointment.
All in all, despite my many disappointments and shortcomings I found in this remake, I at least appreciate the effort. Adding anything at all is way better than what we got for Damacy Reroll, so I at minimum appreciate Namco's attempts to properly remake one of my favorite games ever. The new content may have its flaws and this nearly 18 years later remaster may have its occasional downgrades, but you can never go wrong with We Love Katamari. If anything, I'm just glad more people will get to play this game.
Graphically I think they did a good job. On rare occasions textures can be distracting with how they were blown up, but the HD facelift looks great. The option to play with classic graphics is wonderful too, especially for me since I'm not really a fan of how the Reroll games look. However, once again I am not a fan of the character redesigns and the change to the "cousin face." They look much more generic and less charming, except now it's just jarring since the young king and all the cutscenes keep the original designs intact. I feel that switching to classic graphics should have also changed the character designs as well. My only other graphical issue is that the widescreen was applied to the overworld very poorly, with remnants from other screens clear which looks really strange. The translation has also been updated, and outside of finally correcting "star" to "planet" the other differences are pretty minor. Namco still hasn't found out that "video games" is two words though...
The music and sound design is largely untouched too, as it should be. I did notice two issues though. One is that I noticed the sound mixing seemed to be different in some places, though this only ever bothered me in the racing level where the vehicle noises are way too loud. Another is that, just like Damacy Reroll, the game has been undubbed. ...Why? What's the point of this? Dual audio is industry standard now, let people play with English audio. Another more minor thing is that the audio cueing after beating a stage is incorrect. The king is supposed to throw the Katamari into the sky before the jingle plays, but now it's cued as he throws it. This probably isn't a big deal if you haven't played the original but it distracts me and is definitely worse. More annoying is that the comically overpriced day 1 music DLC pack has poor looping in a couple tracks, mainly Katamari of Love.
Whatever, presentation flaws aside, the spectacular physics and core gameplay of the original is kept intact. There's only one issue I noticed and it's that the render distance was noticeably lackluster at many points, much worse than the PS2 version. It varied depending on the level but it was especially awful in Dr. Katamari's stage, where the pop-in for objects was very distracting and became harder to route out. On the good side though, the occasional frame drops in the Bird & Elephant's stage are completely absent. Also since I don't know where to put this, importing cosmic objects from the first game is not a thing in this remake, and has been replaced by the cousin planets from the PAL version. Pretty disappointing, but I guess it's not a huge deal.
Now for quality of life, new content, and my disappointments.
The quality of life changes for this game aren't anything huge, especially for returning players, but they're absolutely appreciated. Directing players on level goals or barriers you can now get through, an easy select for fans, and faster movement in the overworld are options that are not only convenient but easily ignorable incase you don't like them. One specific addition I want to give credit to is the note for escaping from fishing rods, which I never knew you could do despite my huge amount of runs through that level. I also greatly appreciate the added on-screen lyrics to the credits game like how Damacy did.
The new content in Reroll + Royal Reverie is... Lacking. Let's start with the new additions to the regular game.
First is the eternal mode levels. These are a series staple that
give no time limit versions for existing levels that for some reason were absent in the original We Love. Me personally, I'm not huge on eternal mode. Rolling around with no stakes can be relaxing but in levels where I can pretty much already get most of the objects in time without eternal mode, I find it pointless. Especially as someone who likes hunting for new records on stages. So either way I couldn't really care less on their addition, yet I still found their inclusion lackluster. They aren't given a special planet to look at after completion or a results screen, just the King saving your score which is really lazy. There has also only been three eternal levels added, being for ALAP 3, 4, and 5. These stages have a decent chunk of the map overlapping already, with all of them featuring the same town area. While they may not have worked perfectly with the alternate goals featured in We Love Katamari (which is likely why they were basent in the first place), a greater variety of eternal stages would have done a lot.
The sticker side quest is the definition of mediocre tacked-on remake content. Hidden in stages are these stickers of Namco characters that you can take a photo of to add to your collection. After that you can use your sticker sheet to... Look at them, I guess. First off actually being able to get them is a pain. You have to find the present for the camera first so that's guaranteed backtracking if you're trying to 100% the sticker sheet, and then you have to actually have it equipped to take photos. I never cared much about this since I never used Katamari games for photography, but why was this not added as something you could do without the camera equipped by the time the original We Love came out? We're on the eighth main release and we still can't. Basically, if you're daring enough to use the unlockable cosmetics you had to find you're punished by not being able to get the stickers since you don't have the camera equipped. On top of that, finding them just... Isn't fun? Finding them casually when playing is fine I guess (even if it means you have to have the camera equipped to do that) but searching them just leads to needle in a haystack situations, especially with how big some of the levels in this game are. This isn't even to mention that they're tied to the missions in certain levels, so you can find where a sticker would be but it won't be there since you weren't on the ALAP mission or that you'll be getting many of these photos on a time limit, or that I even had a few runs where the stickers didn't even spawn, either on purpose due to size changes or due to bugs. Not sure which is worse. For getting these you get more frames for the expanded photo taking in this game, which is nice I guess. Still not worth the hassle though.
Next is the big advertised feature of this game, the Royal Reverie. Five new stages, the first new stages to the main series in ten years. And those stages are... Unfortunately uninteresting and not good. To give these stages some credit, the reskin of playing as a Young King lead by Papa is very cool, but these concepts are unfortunately kind of wasted.
The maps have gotten nice reskins, I especially love the sunset given to the racetrack. I also enjoy the look for the Royal Reverie's overworld, it's simple and resembles the credits game which is a nice touch. Papa's dialog gives him a different characterization from The King which I appreciate, but the result screens just cuts to the regular one with The King being like "yeah we did that" which is really disappointing, not to mention that like the Eternal levels, outside of a record you get no tangible planet or anything for beating them.
As for the levels themselves, they're not great. The first is a needless reskin of the clean up level. The difference now is that instead of ending when you get all of the objects, it has a size goal that you're never going to fail at getting and a one minute time limit. You can beat the stage regularly in under a minute. This is borderline pointless. The second is a frustrating needle in the haystack hunt for five objects where certain objects grazing you leads to an instant fail. They have the same spawns everytime but it's still not fun. The third is a needless reskin of the racing level except now instead of size you're hunting for tires. The shorter time limit may make your priorities a little different but the level pretty much will end up having you play the same. The forth is an odd reskin of the firefly level where it instead plays as an as fast as possible level. This one is fine I guess. And the last one is a needle in a hay stack hunt in the zoo map for four ballerinas with random locations. What fun. Needless to say, I think that Royal Reverie was very disappointing. It doesn't really hurt the game, but if you're on the fence on buying the remake, don't let this convince you to do it.
As for my disappointments with this remake, I believe that any remake, even lazy remasters, should try to at least improve the experience of the game in some way. As much as I love it, the original Katamari Damacy has a lot of flaws which made the remake specially disappointing. However, We Love Katamari, the original PS2 game, is nearly perfect in my eyes, which makes a remake less interested in fixing issues more forgivable in my eyes. However, no game is perfect, and I would say the game has two small flaws. First, even though you rarely have to do it, climbing up walls is a little janky sometimes. The remake does not fix this. Now for the more pressing one. Unlike every other game in the series to follow, you can only collect one new cousin per run of a level. This makes grinding on collecting all cousins needlessly repetitive, especially when you need them to unlock every stage in the game. I don't mind this much since the levels are so replayable and fun, but it is absolutely not a good thing, mainly for ALAP 4 and 5, with their long level timers and multiple cousins. Despite the following games in the series fixing this, Reroll + Royal Reverie decided that it didn't want to fix this issue. Why? This was the one thing I was hoping to be fixed in this remake, as it remains the only thing close to a black mark on one of my favorite games of all time, and they didn't even attempt to remedy this issue. While I mainly pick up We Love Katamari to replay levels, if I wanted to sit through every level and then watch the true ending's final cutscene again, I would get no advantage from playing Reroll in the most tedious parts, which is a massive disappointment.
All in all, despite my many disappointments and shortcomings I found in this remake, I at least appreciate the effort. Adding anything at all is way better than what we got for Damacy Reroll, so I at minimum appreciate Namco's attempts to properly remake one of my favorite games ever. The new content may have its flaws and this nearly 18 years later remaster may have its occasional downgrades, but you can never go wrong with We Love Katamari. If anything, I'm just glad more people will get to play this game.