One of the purest expressions of the childlike understanding of Play imaginable. Picture it: a painstakingly constructed diorama, each piece crude and small on its own, but weaving together to create little places, little stories, some sad, some thoughtful, some funny, all very very silly and creative, that in turn each weave together to a larger picture, a larger statement of the world and the vision it constructed it.

And then you come in with a wrecking ball, yelling "NEEEOORRRMMMM" and destroy it all.

Katamari Damacy captures Play how I remember it, silly, crude, anarchic, bursting with imagination and reflective of the world around me whilst having a callous disregard for permanence, consequences, and sense, with a voice from on high always on the edge of hearing, waiting to call an end to playtime.

Keita Takahashi's directorial work tends to lean more towards the idea of games as toys rather than a more modern conception of them, utilizing family-friendly graphics and very simple mechanics with de-emphasized win and lose states to make games that emphasize play for the sake of play, without drivers such as plot, mastery, or levelling up. However, Katamari Damacy raises itself above Noby Noby Boy and Wattam because of the constraints on that play it offers, the timelimits and the extra modes about avoiding or collecting specific items, are frictional elements that contextualise the experience wonderfully, like a father figure setting arbitrary tasks or constraints that push back against the barriers of a child's imagination. As much as I would prefer to just roll a big ball around sucking things up, these elements provide a sprinkle of thematic salt on an experience it would otherwise be easy to breeze through without thinking about.

And then there's the final moments of the final level, which twice now have struck me as a strangely lonely, boring experience where all you have left to do is hoover up the last few things in a vast empty space, a chore that pulls back the curtain on the artifice and pointlessness of what you've been doing. Where the diorama pieces just look pieces, when the dolls just look like dolls, when your imagination bounces right off them. When it's not Fun anymore, what is it?

There's a lot of really good pieces out there discussing this game from a variety of angles, and I agree with a lot of them, particularly those looking at the depictions of father-son relationships in the King and the Prince, but they aren't why I love Katamari Damacy.

No, I love Katamari Damacy because it makes me feel like a kid again. For good and for ill.

FromSoft's first open world game and they absolutely nailed it. I was initially worried that the move meant they would have to compromise on level design, but that wasn’t really the case here. Despite its vast and seamless world, the majority of it still has the same level of varied intricacy as the rest of their games. Like sprawling castles with detailed interiors and immense verticality, random caves you may stumble across that lead to massive underground systems, and of course plenty of unique bosses to fight.

That’s its biggest strength for me, the exploration. What sets it apart from many others is the complete lack of endless map markers or quests to focus on, rather just letting you get lost in a world with so much to see on the horizon that you can’t help but want to explore. And it rewards this curiosity by always having something worthwhile to find, whether it be useful items, boss encounters, or even paths to entire new areas. This also makes approaching difficult bosses a bit more manageable, as you can always just go somewhere else if you’re stuck and try again when you’re stronger.

And as a setting I loved The Lands Between. I’m not sure how much influence GRRM had over the world-building, but its mysterious lore is ever present all over and it’s wonderfully realized. It’s still as somber as From games have always been, but it also felt more grand given how open it is in comparison.

The only real gripe I had was the smaller catacombs you can find felt a bit too repetitive. Most of them look the same and some bosses are reused for them, basically serving as ER’s version of chalice dungeons which is eh. But I still enjoyed going through them so didn’t mind too much. Performance also seems… not great on most platforms, but I played the BC version on PS5 so was pretty much locked 60 for me. Hopefully they can iron its issues out for everything else.

But overall it’s yet another masterful game by From and now among my favorites. I’m excited to see where they go from here, cause it really did feel like a culmination of all their work up to now.

1. imagine being a triple a videogame developer, you know what Fromsoft is capable of- the phrase "the Dark Souls of ... " rings in your heart; it is the tinnitus of your soul. But Fromsoft stays in the corner, gurning, keening, laughing at the end of sentences, this grants you a measure of peace. One day you come into work, and they're sitting at your desk. they own your fucking desk.
2. the greatest videogame adaptation of the works of Hieronymus Bosch
3. little guy in the foreground of landscape concept art simulator
4. the definitive answer to the question "would the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich be improved by letting you throw fireballs at skeletons"
5. did Hidetaka Miyazaki come up with "The Loathsome Dung Eater" or did George R R Martin, or did they simply both announce the name out loud at the same time at their first meeting, before offering so much as a "hello"
6. with Bloodborne, they came for the shield guys, with Sekiro, they came for the dodge guys, with Elden Ring, they came for the Fox Only No Items Final Destination guys
7. Elden Ring is a 100 hour game that feels like a 200 hour game that feels like a 50 hour game

Security system TAKES CONTROL OF SQUIDWARD'S HOUSE and begins ATTACKING THE CITY, leaving the mayor to give Squidward community service for the damage he caused, EVEN THOUGH Spongebob and Patrick were in his house the WHOLE FUCKING TIME, and were responsible for EVERYTHING! GAAH! FUCK THIS EPISODE! This episode is when the Squidward torture porn started to become a regular staple in Spongebob's episodes and this one is one of the meanest, cruelest, and just plain unfair of them all. All Squidward wanted to do is enjoy one day to himself, but that can NEVER HAPPEN when he lives next to Spongebob and Patrick, can it?

I would have a hard time coming up with a solid list of games I would consider to have absolute perfect game design, but I know for sure Katamari Damacy would be on there. Despite how antithetical Katamari Damacy may feel to our collective perceived notions of videogame conventions and norms, Keita Takahashi still managed to tap into that same escapism primeval soup that characterizes so many of our favorite games, abstracting its violence to a family friendly degree while maintaining its appeal and utilizing it to create one of the most cathartic power fantasies in the medium.

What’s truly brilliant about KD is how much of its chaotic and free form nature ends up dictating its narrow and tightly focused design by default without resorting to any hand holding or pushing the player in any particular direction beyond the main premise of rolling a ball over stuff to make it bigger. Its progression naturally unfolds before you, as you increase the scope of your katamari and more things become available to be consumed by it, immediately a consequence of every choice the player makes in their unconscious toddler rampage. And whatever frustration that might arise from its more clunky mechanics and physics is quickly subverted when you finally get big enough to roll over that annoying bear that would always stop you on your tracks.

Funny then how that stroke of incredible originality and genius seems to have sparked by mere accident from just approaching video games from an outside perspective and being dissatisfied with the industry’s modus operandi and never taking itself too seriously. The final stage that beautifully represents the apex of the experience unveils the artifice of the game in its final moments, showing that you have been playing in a playground all along, and that recess time is over, the self indulgence was fun. Pardon my boomer-ism, but it’s a major bummer that we probably will never return to an age like the PS2 gen where people like Keita Takahashi get the opportunity to take the wheel and produce a unique title like this one that sits nicely next to its big budget pals.

It might come across as corny or histrionic of me, but the feeling I get while playing Katamari Damacy is one of love. This is a labor of love, a life affirming appreciation of all things that encompasses our planet, and while it does have something to say about consumerism or capitalism, it does it in a humorous and non condemning way in the same vein as Jacques Tati would with his films and without ever sacrificing the joy of rolling up everything on sight as people scream and a cheerful jazzy song plays in the background. Katamari Damacy is above analysis or interpretation, it is an achievement of ludology, up there with the likes of Tetris, and you don’t have to question where the art is because you can see it right in front of you, and you can play it. Truly a lonely rolling star in a sky filled with static dust.

i go back and forth alot figuring out whether this game or its sequel is better. we heart feels nicer to play, its soundtrack has an emotional depth and even more eccentricity to it that endears me to it more even if it isnt as fantastic as the first game's as a whole, the visual aesthetic of these games is at its peak, and the new stuff like co-op and playing as different cousins adds a lot to me. technically speaking its the best katamari, and i come back to it more.

but there's 2 things that might make me default to the original as the best one. the first is that i will never ever forget the christmas afternoon i played the last level of damacy, laughing the hardest that i ever had in my whole life probably, so hard that i scared other family members in the house. the purest sense of fun ive ever gotten from a game, capped off by a beautifully sincere sequence in the credits. we heart, great as it is as "more katamari", couldn't measure up to those 25 minutes i had, and i don't think it would've even if i happened to play it first. so i highly suggest playing the original first, in the hope that you can also have that feeling that i did.

the second thing, tying into the first a bit, is that we heart has a bit too much cynicism underneath it, injected by a director who did a good job but wanted to let us know, personally, that he hated doing a sequel. i dont blame takahashi that much for feeling that way, and maybe you could say it adds a more interesting angle to the game as the start of katamari inevitably being a franchise i guess, but pitting the two games together makes me a little sad. because the bells and whistles reluctantly added after the original, as genuinely great as some of them are, cant make up for a lack of the excitedness and ingenuity that inherently came with dreaming up with the idea of katamari in the first place. the first game wears this on its sleeve without any qualifiers (even the message abt consumption behind it or the prince's deadbeat dad don't really drag it into ~dark and fucked up~ territory or whatever), beaming with its unique kind of purity and optimism that its imitators, wearing the katamari name or otherwise, can't distract me from. the first might be the best because it 100% wants you to love it; its both unapologetically happy and intensely cool without being too cool for itself. pessimism can poison games too easily, and ill always love a game that refuses to have any.

beautiful story about robots dealing emotionally with surrogate parents

like many of you im sure, ive played this game a couple hundred times. im logging it only now because there was a long stretch of time where i just didnt replay it until now, and wanted to see if my opinions still held up.

they did. for a sequel to Portal, one of the most critically acclaimed and iconic puzzle games of all time, there is a distinct lack of puzzles in this game. it could be classified more as a cinematic platformer visual novel than anything else. there is an absurd amount of time in this game spent walking around decrepit environments with the puzzle being what bit of wall to shoot a gun at in order to progress.

despite that taking up what feels like a majority of the playtime however, when it does decide to be a puzzle game it can stand toe to toe with its older brother, possibly even outmatch it at times. there were several puzzles that stumped me, and they all hold they same ideal the first game has that once a puzzle is solved it should take almost no time at all to go through with the solution - something that inherently feels immediately satisfying and something that makes the first game so easy to go back to. even when its not being a satisfying puzzle game - something it clearly can be, just isnt all the time for some reason - it does have its shining moments. particularly, the writing.

i once heard this game described as a competition between three writers to create the best character ever, and it ended in a tie. Wheatley, GladOS, and Cave Johnson are all so charming, cleverly written, and fantastically voice-acted that listening to them is a reward in itself. Wheatley as an antagonist is serviceable for what is demanded of him and Cave Johnson is only in a small portion, but its how they tie into GladOS that makes them special. Her sharing the main character role with Chell fills the gap of a silent protagonist which the first game didnt need to worry about like this does and lets the writing really glow when Wheatley or Cave Johnson speak to her indirectly and open up more about her character. i could just write "the cave johnson part" for this review but then i'd have to give it a perfect 5/5

it is a truly great game, for sure, and there are some glimpses of pure perfection, but there just is not enough game in this game for it to stand as one of the best of all time for me.

also, not a single slice of cake in this game. god bless valve. may they rest in peace.