"Wake up! Time to start another fantabulistic day!" The alarm clock rings you awake. Groggy and fatigued you get up in your usual rut. Stuck working under the boot of those who treat you as a tool rather than a person, yet forced to manufacture a smile as this is the only way in your current life. You don't want to do this anymore, you told yourself this a while ago, yet you continue out of demand rather than of passion. Hey, if it makes others happy then it has to be worth it right? So you trudge along, stretching yourself until you find yourself deflated, only to go back home and lay in your bed only to hear your alarm clock signal you to do the same thing over and over again. This is We ❤️ Katamari.

Knowing anything about the history of this game makes the humorous tongue-in-cheek dialogue feel more cynical. It's still funny, but it's obvious that this game was written this way as a way to cope and reason for the need of this game. "Welcome to the sequel to our hit game Katamari Demacy" is very blatantly the theme of everything that happens, it even says so in the opening cutscene. While there is still more work to be done, the King is rather dismissive of continuing to make katamaris. Only when a fan of his work mentions how much they loved what "he" did does he entertain the idea of continuing work. Now, with new ideas being thrown at you, you are forced to continue with the demands, no matter how zany or obtuse.

Everyone praises the work, so we must continue going. Everyone looks up to the King of All Cosmos as this bringer of joy, when the worker, you, are made to mass produce. When you get things right, all goes well and we continue on to work on more Katamari making, but when you slip up or underperform, then you are met with the wrath of your boss. Everything mirrors what it must have felt like for Keita Takahashi to work on a sequel he never wanted, or just anyone suffering from industry abuse. Working on products well past their time because they are popular and make money, one of the most dreadful outcomes of any franchise or IP in media entertainment.

It should be noted that unlike other Katamari games where the game over screen is a playable minigame with a high score to track that makes losing arguably fun, this game holds no punches. It is impossible to avoid the onslaught of lasers from the King, and there is no scoring system. Once he is done berating your "incompetence", you are sent back to the level again to make it right this time. Forced to continue after mental and physical harm come your way.

I should also just mention the abuse you suffer in this game. I had only played Forever and Reroll before this game, and it's very apparent that the King is not a good father/uncle. Disregarding the physical abuse of his child nieces and nephews, there is also this general dismissiveness he holds against you. Only if you surpass his completely made up expectations does he shower you in praise, but not reaching those bars is met with a blase reaction. Going for the standard set isn't enough, it has to be better. You ARE royalty, after all. Even in this game which does not have a scoring system and he is generally nicer on stage completion The King still shows his ugly side when rating you every now and then if you do not meet the goals he never tells you about. Only now, as I played this game did I find out the reason.

Generational trauma is something that affects many, including myself. The awful experiences of an event cause us to be met with abuse and neglect in a viscous cycle, and it appears that The Prince and his cousins deal with it themselves. We get to see a younger version of The King in flashbacks during this game, The Prince of All Cosmos if you will. His father holds this same level of dismissiveness as The King would later go on to adopt, from physical abuse to seeing anything below the best as failure. Granted, it is a kid's game, and eventually The King makes amends with his father and inherits the crown, but it doesn't feel right. The last cutscene of the game is seeing The King, all grown up when his wife shows him the newborn prince and they all party around. A sweet moment soured by the realization of the torture that would be inflicted later.

Honestly it all rings true, to me at least. I will not go into it but I did grow up in similar, although not as hyperbolic scenarios. Physical abuse was common as a child, and even now as an adult, while everyone around me saw me getting straight B's in my last semester as something to be proud of, my own mother didn't, which made me undermine my own success when I had felt like I was going to fail two of those classes. I want to say this is something I have gotten over, but that would be a lie. Having this type of behavior be what I'm exposed to has damaged me. Even while trying to be better than those before me I still have a short fuse and get easily frustrated, just like my mother and my grandmother before her. I've lost friends to it and much worse as I tried to end the cycle. It's not gone, it is currently a part of me, but I like to believe it's gotten better.

For a surreal arcade game about becoming a giant mass of objects, something about this game specifically is very profound to me. Maybe I am reading into it too much, but it's hard to overlook what is being shown when I relate to it so much.

I normally like to end reviews with a shitposty type joke, and I was going to do one with the sumo level and how you just vore people, but I think I found my own capitalism metaphor in it. In that level you help a sumo gain weight so he can defeat another sumo, and what starts as a humble binge of food and random objects eventually leads to him getting so fat that he devours other people and destroys the city if you go big enough. The fact that to often fulfill your life's ambitions requires trampling over others regardless if you know of it or not is reflected in this level, and if I'm still reading too into it you can just say it's the funny vore level and laugh.

That's what I would say about this game in general. My views and experiences are mirrored here, so the game is a lot more profound to me, but I know for many others it is just a silly game that is very very fun. And sometimes that is all a game needs to be.

What a disappointment for a game I was hoping could at least be passable. I should have expected this, and I partially did, but wow.

Cosmic Shake claims to be the sequel to Battle For Bikini Bottom, but it's not the sequel to that beloved classic from our childhood, no it's for the overly saturated slow and clunky remake we got a few years ago. 3 years later and we not only have the same bugs and glitches but completely new ones to this game. You're not supposed to go backwards like that! It honestly just reeks of a strained budget and a team who doesn't know what they are doing at this point, which seems to be a thing with most modern Nickelodeon games.

Gameplay is...there? Yeah you platform across big levels, but there is just this emptiness that exists in each area. What made BFBB so much of a joy is that while there was a main objective to each area, there were still side objectives and goodies to find that were mandatory to beat the game, incentivizing exploration. Here it's just jellies and doubloons which are only used for an optional costume shop. Without the incentive of primary (golden spatulas, goober tokens) or secondary (socks, extras) collectables and all we have are the tertiary ones, there just feels like there is no point to going around looking for secrets or doing anything but the main objective. So you are just left in large linear areas with the most forgettable music of all time and nothing to do besides barebones platforming and combat that was nerfed from BFBB. Yeah let's get into the combat...

There are now set action scenes that require you to fight enemies to progress. Sure that's fine, but the issue lies when the enemies in this game are not fun to fight. They're all loosely based off robots from BFBB, but they just feel worst to fight. The duplicatotron expy has 3 hit points and between each hit has an aoe unblockable stun attack, or the giant beefcakes who can't be damaged until they just conveniently do that one attack that makes them able to take damage, who also have 3 hp. It makes combat a slog when it was very snappy in other Spongebob games, not just BFBB or Movie but like Creature as well. Sure, you unlock new abilities in each level, but they all feel clunky to use like nearly everything else in this game.

This show also has that modern Spongebob folly to never stand on its own two feet and must rely on stuff from the show to keep going. While I understand it's cool to have references in a license game, I loved when BFBB did that, it is just so ham fisted that nearly everything in this game was "LOOK AT THE THING! ITS THE THING FROM THE SHOW/BFBB!!!!!" and it feels like this game barely has an identity to stand on. I think the trailers mainly using Band Geeks music as well as showing off all the costumes from other episodes really shows how little creativity went into this game. It hopes you cling onto your nostalgia the entire time without any substance.

Oh yeah speaking of those costumes, fun fact. This game came with a day 1 DLC for all the costumes you would most likely want that were shown in trailers mind you. Kind of fucked to see that you can play as spongegar in the trailers and then realize hes locked behind a $10 paywall. I know it's not important but this kind of backhanded marketing kind of fucked me up. Like there is already an in game costume shop but w/e.

I was originally going to give this game a 5/10 / 2.5/5, and in my mind it still is that. That is basically the dead zone of games for me, those that do absolutely nothing and while are technically functional give me nothing to enjoy or even really hate besides a massive blah. That swamp of mediocrity where games are forgotten, the worst fate any media could have. The only reason I gave this game a lower score was mainly because of how much it pisses me off, how the bugs are even more apparent, how there's DLC that isn't needed, how this is supposed to be a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time without knowing what made that game great. It all just breaks my heart and I wish I had bought Pizza Tower or fucking hell even Fire Emblem Engage over this, at least that game would've been funny bad with good gameplay as I've heard.

Do yourself a favor and just play BFBB. The original, the one that's actually good. Or even the movie game, which is a lot better of a sequel despite its flaws.

We owe that IGN guy an apology.

I had this game only as a child, losing it because when I got a Playstation 2 my mom thought that having a Playstation 1 was redundant and threw it out, along with half the games with it. This was one of the most memorable games for some reason. I just remember it being really weird and having a lot of colorful canisters you pick up and a lot of gibberish I couldn't understand because I was around 3-4 at the time I played it.

I recently got a totally legit copy of the game after it came to my mind one day like it occasionally does while reminiscing on my childhood. I decided to stream it with some friends as a silly game from my baby years.

Holy shit.

This game is garbage. maneuvering ranges from too stiff to way too touchy depending on if you're drifting or not, Gallon, the character with 1 acceleration, takes over 5 seconds to get to his maximum speed from standstill, weight classes cause characters to fucking die (I was playing as the lightest character, so I had to avoid everyone as characters with 2-3 weight would spin me out or tumble me and those at 4-5 would just flatten me if I even touched them), the main character has the worst stats in the game, and the track layouts are fucking abhorrent. The second stage has cacti that are literally right after turns and boulders that fall with no warning, the third level has extreme ice physics, the fourth level is extremely with asshole tier turns, and the sixth level has a mandatory off road section. Oh also, if you crash into a wall you just tumble out and lose shit tons of time, sometimes even being turned in a different direction which causes you to wrestle with this game's very archaic reversing controls. I'm so glad that you only need to get 3rd place in each race to progress, as I never once had gotten 1st.

Oh, and that gibberish I mentioned I couldn't understand. Yeah the dialogue in this game is completely untranslated with no subtitles, so those weird fever dreams of trying to remember what the pre-race announcers said ending up being meaningless to me was really funny honestly.

That's how I would describe this game. Streaming with a few friends and taking the piss out of this really made it better, joking about all the absurdities, like how Captain, the character who his bio states is "hellbent on winning" gave me tips before literally every track, or how the character I was playing was really bad at driving because she's 4 or just how broken the level design is.

One final thing to note, this game has pre rendered maps for each level, and the final level had a rainbow road like texture on its course, but when you play it the course texture is more like Saturn's rings.

WE WERE FUCKING CLICKBAITED IN A 2000 PS1 GAME!

This game is pure dog shit, but it's my dog shit. Will probably never play again, but it certainly has a lot of memories now, both from my youth and my adulthood.

I played this for an arcade where they had Genesis/SNES/NES classic systems hooked up to the bar while you drink the most toxic shit ever like holy shit look at this menu. I told myself only 15 minutes because I wanted to play all the japanese rhythm games there and immediately in my first round of combat I was instantly game ended. This game understands my wishes, truly the Sword of Peakmillion.

Bonus points because you can name yourself literally nothing, loses those points because the part of the bar I was at was themed after SAO

What a complete shit this game is.

I wasn't too happy with my initial review. Copping out my conflictions by refusing to rate a game I know that even half a star is too generous a rating. Just because I like the gameplay doesn't mean I should cloud my my judgement.

I remember when I first played this game. It was just after my 18th birthday, and I thought games that were full of offensive and edgy humor were what you were supposed to play as an adult. I had friends saying how cool this game was. Needless to say I was a reactionary chud, and I did like this game back then, even if some stuff was too much for me. I let everything slide because "mechanics good" and I liked some designs. Honestly my memories of this game continue to gaslight me to some extent, but I try to move past that.

Yes, game is fun, but even in the gameplay there was stuff that made me uncomfortable. When trainer classes and pokemon designs are meant solely to make fun of minorities, as someone who is a minority themself, I have a hard time laughing. I can't simply "turn off brain" and "enjoy things" when said things prepetuate such harmful mindsets. Even if they're passing jokes, they normalize hate and can snowball into thinking these ideas are ok.

For every mon I think genuinely works as a fakemon, there's a nazi furnace. For every meme I think is funny, there's a ones that lack taste. For god's sake the default name for the male protag is french for rape. Yes, I'm offended, and yes I'm a soy leftist crybaby tr*nny who uses tumblr and twitter; I literally made this review because someone told me to cry about it on my previous one.

I could have just said "good gameplay doesn't excuse hate", but this review isn't for backloggd, it's for myself. I needed to tell myself to let this game go. It's not like there aren't good Pokemon games official or not, and I shouldn't let myself rot as I try to figure out if this game should be praised or bashed.

The game may be made with passion, but it was not made with love.