For perspective, I'd consider Rain World to be the best game I've played and close to perfection. Downpour is great but the problem is that it makes a lot of changes and I am so enamoured with the base game that most of these changes feel wrong.

Where Rain World is grounded, subtle and naturally unfair, Downpour is wacky, blatant and unnecessarily frustrating. The new slugcats have ridiculous abilities that change the player from a natural part of the world to a one-of-a-kind superhero. This is countered by the environments and creatures being tougher to deal with along with. Creatures that were seen only in the 'hard-mode' hunter class are now commonplace in every new campaign along with the previously neutral scavengers being more aggressive and powerful. New creatures are mostly stronger 'remixes' of existing creatures. The game is harder now but I don't think it's more fun or interesting. The weaknesses of the new slugcats perfectly encapsulate this feeling, with each one having restrictions on their abilities in a way that was presumably intended to aid balance or immersion but for me it just made it more frustrating. See Artificer's explosion cooldown or Saint dying of cold or Gourmand exhaustion for examples.

I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to see most of the new content being focused on adjusting existing content rather than being entirely new, a lot of the regions are places that already exist but at a different point in the timeline. The totally new regions are primarily areas that the base game already teased as being part of the world but weren't explorable. As for any new depth in the ecosystem, well I wouldn't say there was any. The changes all seem focused more on gameplay and lore rather than creating a believable world.

Downpour goes out of its way to answer any questions the player might have had while playing Rain World, but I think there's a lot of value in having these questions remain unanswered. Most of the new campaigns don't give you this option, instead giving the player some kind of primary goal; performing a task that has major implications on the story. In the base game you could entirely miss the story and still have a rich experience.

This DLC is a relatively fun experience with a huge amount of quality content. It’s extremely impressive, especially considering it started as a purely fan-made expansion. Ultimately though, I feel there is an evident lack of cohesion between the intentions of this DLC and the base game, while this is high quality ‘fan content’, it has somewhat tarnished the perfect score card of Rain World and I can’t help but have a bitter taste in my mouth when talking about it.

katamari damacy is a very easy game to undervalue. there's likely a decent portion of people who have gone "oh so this is just a quirky game about rolling a ball around to grab stuff? okay" or something to that effect, and disregarded the game. it's very hard to pitch the game without gameplay footage to complement; telling a coworker about this game reminded me of trying to sell someone on ace attorney being fun in spite of its droll-sounding premise. yet, even with this obstacle, i can safely say that this game might be the single most widely appealing and approachable game on the PS2's library short of tetris ports.

this is a deceptively simple game that focuses on doing one thing, and doing it superbly: movement. it is in its precise focus on movement that anyone can enjoy this game while still leaving a high skill ceiling and appropriate challenges to match. truthfully, i think this is a very, very easy game to sit down and beat. if you're just going for the minimum size requirements, even a bad player could swing that, give or take a handful of retries. meanwhile, for anyone who wants to really challenge themselves, the game has comet times, size thresholds, and collection aspects to tickle the brain. and while i think all three of those could use more transparency for the player in plainly stating what they're asking for, that simultaneously lends itself to this mystique that katamari damacy's aesthetic thrives on. i do want the raw numbers, but also, i kind of love that the king of all cosmos will just go "that's a 4/10" and belabor the point by saying he would've done it much better instead of telling you what size would satisfy him.

there's something to be said about what katamari damacy feels like to experience. clinically, i don't think i could name a game that utilizes sound design in a more synapse-stimulating way. this goes beyond the soundtrack, which is immaculate. rolling over objects is accompanied by this extremely memorable sound that i struggle to describe. it sounds like if you were to fire a rubber band at a giant plate of jello. it's minor, but considering all you are doing in the game is moving to collect things, making the act of collecting have an intrinsically pleasing sound is an elegant way to elevate it. and the moment-to-moment gameplay of scanning for both objects your size to get right then while also looking for objects bigger than you to hunt for later as goals is diabolically brilliant design. the player makes both conscious and unconscious decisions about what to preoccupy themselves with and what to work towards. the magic is that it's done instantly and often without the player even realizing how they're being conditioned. katamari damacy doesn't fatigue the player with analysis paralysis, because it immediately makes it apparent that you want to get shit, and you want to constantly be in the process of getting shit.

as for collecting itself, many objects will have sounds that play when you get them, adding to that feedback loop. you roll up an egg and boom, a little chickling briefly hatches and peeps a bit. you roll up a truck and you can bet you're gonna hear its horn. this even extends to people when you roll them up, and often the most fun part of any given level is when you get big enough to roll up random civilians and hear their associated voice lines when you get them. whether it's random teenage girls who give their all in screaming, old men who have no earthly idea what's going on and just moan a little in confusion, or the Towel Guy who makes this sound that easily puts him in contention for most lgbt character of all time. sometimes the fun of the game is not only seeing what you can roll up, but how it will react to you.

and while the game does have only 3 main areas, the structure of each level greatly varies. you could have one level in the house where you're just collecting random household objects like food and legos and then the next level in that same house you're suddenly swarmed with crabs to collect. something i appreciated on this replay was how dollhouse-esque this game's levels feel in their arrangement. they have this exactness to them where you can feel the dev team telling their little stories through object and people placement. it all feels so neatly arranged and deliberate, and it creates this reptilian brain response of wanting to destroy something delicate when you arrive on the scene. people lowball this game a lot and chalk up its appeal to being this silly and quirky game with not much to it, but i think that greatly does a disservice to the intentionality behind the design choices here. katamari damacy organically fosters a curiosity to its world in a way that appears effortless. all of this is done without dialogue or lore drops, just visual arrangement and responsivity to player actions. it's a masterclass.

it feels very surreal to say that this game turned 20 this year. i still vividly remember the toonami mini-review of this game when it was new. i don't want to make this about how i'm getting older, things are aging, and the like, because there's no real place for it here. i don't think katamari damacy has aged in really appreciable, significant ways. there's an evergreen quality here that will never have an expiration date. the simple nature of its gameplay lends itself to this timeless quality. moreover, we're never going to reach a point in the medium where movement becomes something dated. movement will always be inherently part of any game with a world to explore and play in. katamari damacy may not have been planning for the future with its laser-focus on a game purely based around movement, but it is one that has aged better than anyone could've speculated. this is a perfect game in that sense, and it's one of the first things that i would nominate we encase in steel and eject into space to preserve it for future civilizations and species.

This is a widely praised game that I unfortunately just did not enjoy. The story sets itself up with an interesting premise. There are are two scientists who go back through peoples memories in order to alter them to make peoples wishes come true on their deathbeds. It's a very cool idea and I think there was lots of room to explore the ethics of this kind of technology. This never really happens though and the ending is played off as though it is supposed to be sweet, but really just comes off as kind of predatory and completely ignores the agency of one of the main characters without questioning it at all. It always feels like the narrative is just begging you to be moved and it never happened for me. The writing is god awful and the music is so overly-sentimental it is almost unbearable at times. The humor is cheesy and doesn't fit the rest of the narrative well, especially because it is corny AND poorly written.

Gameplay wise there isn't really anything. You just click on objects and people to gain orbs that allow you to travel back in time through the memories. There are also some incredibly dull puzzles that you need to complete in order to progress back through time and there is a pretty awful action section towards the end which is clunky and doesn't really add anything. Regardless this isn't really something I cared too much about as I was expecting the game to be mostly dialogue driven anyways. But when the dialogue isn't good it gets tedious fast with no actually gameplay being offered.

All in all this wasn't for me. Regardless, it is a grand achievement to make a game in and of itself. It is remarkable that this team made this small game that reached this large of an audience and connected with so many people. That is something to be celebrated.

To me, Katamari Damacy is the margherita pizza of video games. It's one of the simplest yet most innately fulfilling concepts in the medium: roll up things with your ball to become big to roll up more things. While this description is accurate however, it doesn't do justice towards the game's underlying complexity. Committal tank controls combined with the seemingly strewn about yet carefully placed objects of varying sizes means that Katamari forces players to consider both the micro and macro design which the game effortlessly excels at. The player must weave in and out of clusters of increasingly large objects, building up their sphere while also mapping out the optimal paths (snagging relevant objects while factoring in how their shapes, once collected, will alter the roll) and keeping in mind how larger objects must be avoided at first and later consumed in the growing mass as the world appears to shrinks around you. For this reason, I think it's not just a simple power fantasy, and instead more closely resembles pure obstacle escalation. Katamari Damacy really drills in the sense of player progression from how the world unfolds from sense of scale (which is why it gets away with only three distinct stages) and even seemingly inverts its own concepts with side stages that force you to avoid smaller themed objects just to get your katamari to the perfect size for the ultimate outcome: the reward is made that much more gratifying with just a bit of restraint.

This all works seamlessly because Katamari is the king of player feedback. It can certainly feel frustrating at first, getting tossed around like fireworks by these moving objects that dwarf you, but the game knows exactly how to communicate your inherent progress. As your ball exponentially swells, these moving objects go from sending you flying, to lacking any significant impact upon contact, to eventually spotting the player and running away from the growing catastrophe. There's nothing more viscerally satisfying than coming back to mobile obstacles that were pushing you around and flattening them, hearing their cry as they too become stuck in the jumbled mess of rolling flotsam while the King of the Cosmos quips in the background. Simply put, the concept never outstays its welcome.

Going back to the opening metaphor, it requires much finesse to make all these different concepts sing together with little friction in a video game, this fusion of audio-visual presentation and player input. That said, to successfully disguise its intricate design and depth beneath its far-reaching artistic vision and simple yet realized gameplay mechanics takes a master's touch. Katamari Damacy does not try to explain why it works or how it succeeds, because it simply is, and it just does. Perhaps I've moved onto greater and grander things since that have built off of this, but I have to admit that sometimes, you just can't beat the basics in life. It's always worth going back for a slice or two every now and then, just to remind yourself that this is why video games exist in the first place: because underneath all this talk of focus and cohesion, video games are just goddamn fun.

Also, it's fantastic hangover food for you and your buddies after a long night, when they come calling you for content and suddenly it's 3 AM in a packed Discord call where everyone is wailing "YOU'REEEEE LONNEEELLLY ROLLING STARRRR" as this growing, screaming ball of flailing limbs bounces helplessly about for yet another awry creation. Let the good times roll.

I fucking love music wow and I'm writing this while watching sanremo so you know im crazy

some part of me really wanted to enjoy this game way more than I actually did its probably one of the most artistically pleasing mechanically deep genre bending queer narrative driven puzzle adventure ever created and also probably a super slog to go through PLEASE DONT DOX ME YET PLEASE WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT

so I'm famously known nationally as a hater of puzzle games because my IQ is so below the average that I have to look up solutions after solutions to actually get the façade of a bump-less experience throughout . now puzzles in this one are not the worst shit ever because of the main mechanic being not only super interesting and ever shifting but also characterised by puzzle segments that are not super long (but sometimes could get really trying and repetitive) and not super difficult (once you understand the secret formula) and still I ended up kind of hating those parts after a while the game makes a lot of effort to shuffle things up a bit but I'm not the target audience for this type of gameplay

now the main gimmick is pretty fun !!! since youre a bard most of the stuff youre gonna do ingame is sing so most of if not the entirety of the puzzles are gonna be about you matching notes with the cues that are gonna come out of nowhere USUALLY since the developers are so fuccking intelligent thay they managed to bend this simple premise to new heights with some of the most forward thinking use of a simplistic gameplay mechanic to the point that it could rival undertale and the little bullet hell heart literally at first I thought this was gonna be a rhythm game but a part of me is super glad that is is absolutely fucking NOT a rhythm game at all for some reason you should be using the analog stick to match the notes but what these developers end up doing with it is absolutely insane

so yeah for this stuff I actually did enjoy going through the game because they just kept reinventing the main mechanic every 30 minutes and for that I'm genuinely so impressed I have no idea how they did that SURE sometimes the sing circle isn't really the most comfortable way of expressing the design philosophy the developers were aiming for but it comes real close its janky yes but also a damn blast throughout thats definitely one thing that kept me interested till the end of the game

again while this should be a praise sometimes it hindered the experience in some ways because of the puzzle segments I wish these parts were either streamlined or integrated better because they're whole areas of JUST puzzles that honestly made me go insane sometimes its not like they're hard or anything most of them are pretty easy but it's just that why would you put puzzle pieces in a narrative driven game if the reason is to make me more engaged in the game rest assured that you're doing the exact opposite ong which is basically what happened when chicory went full puzzle and to this day I still can't finish it for the life of me because wow do I hate puzzle segments

the narrative driven moments are definitely some of the best parts of the game but NOT ALWAYS the pirates arc was boring as shit the beginning of the game was really slow and I actually began to be enthralled by this whole experience when the game decided to go full majoras mask and until then I actually played this sporadically throughout the months because wow is this game slow and boring sometimes wow please don't kill me

it's not like it's inherently bad and I think if it weren't for my mind numbing adhd I wouldve probably enjoyed this laid back experience way more than I did but there's some really weird pacing throughout where either nothing really happens and you're left with countless and countless of boring dialogue or everything happens all at once - wait isn't this the title of that movie

I'm not against laid back experiences I'm so much in love with night in the woods my heart could explode and what really sets them apart is that wandersong while having basically the same structure fails to make me care for anything happening in the world or any single character appearing on screen

most of the events of the game arent moving until you actually get at least ⅓ in which isn't a lot for a 10 something hours game but it can be detrimental to the pacing nonetheless and the characters are either one trick ponies that are used for some kind of interesting dialogue interactions but then they're just taken out if the entire picture which makes me just not care for any of them UNTIL miriam comes in and im gonna talk about her plenty in a second and at that point i start caring for everything in this game all of the sudden

so yeah these are my main issues here puzzles i hate puzzles one note characters (they're not bad they're just how do you say usa e getta in english mmmmm disposable ??? yeah something like that like they're used for a single joke and then killed off screen . not cool man) and the story takes a lot to digest

it could also very well be that I wasn't in a particularly good moment that's also an interesting point of discussion

moving on the art direction is absolutely flawless now lemme just address the elephant in the room I'm not a huge fan of the art style………. but they managed to make me love it WOW the characters are incredibly well designed and diverse theres a lot of variety in the sceneries youre going to traverse in this pilgrimage the vivid colors are trying to make you wake up while you're snoozing theres a lot of expressions for the bard even though he's basically a mannequin the pop up book aesthetic has a lot of charm and while YES I don't like it it doesn't necessarily mean that I didnt find it super intriguing and gorgeous I can not like something but also praise it like I do with giottos painting they have that lobotomised use of perspective that would make everyone go crazy but you have to still understand that that was the blueprint of the art we had in the renaissance and so forward

that being said for a game with huge emphasis on music it's pretty weird how the songs can range from soothing to anonymous to epic to bopping to basically whatever they could make on a soundboard and they did a good job my only complaint is that there's a lot of good songs here and there like the ghost chant or something that get outright RUINED with the player-controlled bard noises which is probably a result of me being ass at this game but I don't think most of the time the bards singing actually has some good impact on the tunes in the background that you're gonna emulate does that make sense is that rude to say

the music is still godlike though I hope the die hard fans of this game arent already releasing my IP on the dark web hitmen pages because wow I still need to play a lot of shit please wait at least a few more years ok umh ……. at least persona 3 reload

so yeah art direction and sound design top notch we get it moving on im sleepy

some of the thematic elements of the story deeeeefinitely hit real close with stuff like inadequacy and depression which was something that I was NOT expecting for this game to dab into because it started out as this incredible positive journey of saving the world and living life at the fullest yada yada and shit like that until it actually is NOT and the game starts throwing a lot of deep shit at you like themes of loss and grief themes of not being good enough or not being worthy enough friendship and betrayal and existentialism and idealism if you had seen my fucking face when I realised the sheer variety of stuff the game explores I probably would've been munchs the scream

I do not think this should be overlooked most of the dialogues in the game can be taken as jokes and sometimes they really are but if you dig deeper you can see how sensitive the writing is to the themes its trying to convey and I swear some of them do hit . like . a . truck . some scenes of the game are forever printed on my eyelids and I not even bleach would be able to wash them away

the main trio is probably the main focus of the game and its in their interaction that all of that gorgeous luscious writing starts flowing abundantly and lemme be clear I did not care for the bard or any of them in the beginning but wow I ended up loving all of them so dearly

for some reason I think it's fitting how the bard starts as such a blank character until it actually grows a spine and some balls to confront injustices enemies and while literally the end of the world . he's definitely not my favorite one in the game and i would've preferred a more interesting approach to the protagonist BUT the way his character changed from this dilly dallying carefree bard to an idealistic mid-apocalyptic dummie is probably the best character development I couldve asked for in a game like this

I gotta give the developers an Oscar for creating my most hated character in the entire world now Audrey is a fucking pain I tried and tried to like her I cried for her I pained listening to her but she was MADE to be hated and they succeeded if I were there I wouldve showed shibuya a real incident

now

drums

my baby

my wife

my beloved

miriam

most of the reasons why I actually ended up enjoying the game as much as I did even despite all the problems I talked about can be summarized in: miriam

shes a grumpy little witch serious impatient and hates the bards attitude towards a more positive demeanour and at first I thought she was gonna be another one of those characters just falling in the background but she sure as hell became the most important character of the story for me

most of the game she just closes off from the entire world and doesn't really think about opening up to others in any way shape or form but slowly she begins to sweeten to the bards presence and starts sharing a bond that could be called friendship

while I definitely don't think this is the most convoluted character writing in the entire world I relate to her to a personal level and I think she's possibly one of the sweetest 2d beings I got to know till now just thinking about all the cute interactions she exchanged with the bard is making my heart warmer not even talking about the trauma dump or the finale literally words can't express how much I love this stupid fucking bitch I'm in love with her I want to adopt her and I want her to be happy for the rest of her life im not joking

i won't go into too much detail but miriam is special miriam deserves the world and miriam is the best character in the game bar none and if you wonder if you should play this game just do it for miriam im crazy for her

she got an inferiority complex and copes with anger issues she feels like an outsider and is scared of friendship and emotional intimacy she's just like me frfr

what got me was that the real reason saphy sent miriam on a quest to save the world and told the bard to go with her is simply because she wanted her granddaughter to make a friend before the world ended

point is I could talk about miriam forever so lets just

wandersong is perfect but also flawed it's interesting and boring it has a lot of great ideas and weird execution incredible characters and monotonous ones its such a fucking dilemma how they managed to either make me go crazy cry tear my hair out or

oh

forgot to say

cried like a fucking bitch too this game got me if you played the games you know the miriam scenes I'm talking about literally could not see the screens through the years . embarrassing

I was saying

or bore me to no end irritate me and make me regret all my life decisions

but maybe that's fine I slowly started to be seduced by this game it started to seduce me and it delivered

still conflicted to no end but I'm glad I got to play this miriam you're a part of me I will never forget you

gg it has homosexual yeti monsters fucking raw

randomly a katamari damacy ost came up while i was studying and listening to a Best VideoGame Music Ever ™ playlist and i havent been the same person ever since

now i always had an idea that katamari damacy was a game that everybody loved and adored for reasons that were outside of my conscience and since i had never watched any gameplay or shit like that i was like “people love this game ! ok next” and like saw the cover art and i thought it was probably gonna be a nostalgia filled childish videogame with okay ish mechanics and a silly story and id say i was half right

after listening to masterpiece roll me in i HAD to take a leap of faith head first into this game because that ost is completely insane im not even joking if you havent just listen to it its breath taking and the fact that it single handedly lured me into a game where you roll a fucking ball is so funny to me but im glad it did

sooooooooo whats katamari . i kind of got no clue but i realised that katamari damashi aka 塊魂 means clump spirit and its honestly the funniest shit ever and also the kanji look so similar thats probably another reason why they chose this wacky title

and you can even witness how FUCKING wacky this game is by the absolute insane opening this is the closest thing to a heavy drug trip i ever experienced im not joking

basically the story follow the little prince who got ordered by his father (fathers?) king of the cosmos to roll up some katamari > clumps to make some stars out of them because he destroyed the entire universe after a psychotic episode or something like acid LSD i guess trip since he also says he had fun so . yeah its up to the little prince (cutest character ever i want to smooch him hes soooooooooo + hes like half a feet tall so best little baby man lil lil baby man lil lil baby baby man) to get the galaxies back up there using the other main character THE KATAMARI a ball yeah its basically a ball so

apart from the weird as fuck premise something that completely took ME out was the character design that i was witnessing the king is a sight to behold completely and to this moment i still cant recover from that i dont understand how they came up with this Giga Chad ultra wide hammerhead shark non binary fellow i really want to see the behind the scenes of his design im not joking im reaching out to the art direction of this game because this is unreal

hes not the only hammerhead person here the little prince and the queen (non existent character basically) and all the cousins of the king have this weird genome something that causes them to have this incredibly weird shape but i love them theyre my babies and i will protect them from people trying to stomp on them

and also yeah theres people in this game and funnily enough one side story is about a square faced family trying to get in a space station or something i got no idea while the prince is in the meantime rolling around entire cities but ok its fun i like this game

so if i tell you this game has the most stupid story and also the most stupid gameplay ? yeah masterpiece . what you gotta do is push the katamari around which ok we settled it its a ball ok a sphere so you have a tutorial where you understand how this works its kinda weird at first but you will get the hang of it in no time im stupid and i managed to get the jist of the mechanics in like 3 levels so youre fine that being said . thats it thats the gameplay you roll this ball around and run over everything that you encounter and make the ball bigger to ingest even more stuff and/or explore new areas

this is possibly the most simple concept ever created but i can assure you its a drug theres something so rudimentary and primal about the need for a person to create a mass of junk and roll it around like youre in a dung beetle simulator im just idk this satisfies possibly every need of creativity i had in my life its just so stupid like my mind goes “hehe get things ball bigger hehe swoosh” the end some new level of zen entertainment meditation people have been real silent since this dropped

so anyway this has also quite some complexity in the physics department or else it would be boring so thereslong object such as poles and arrows or shit like that that will unbalance the katamari and make it leap from time to time or when you collapse with something too big you will lose some stuff that was in the katamari in the collision and you can push the katamari up some steps if its big enough and thats it i think the end of the depth in the mechanics

so the levels follow some kind of progression and theres 2 types the "get to a certain diameter of the katamari" OR "get a certain number of objects" and thats basically it

diameter levels have some progression in scale youll begin being really small and suck up pins or coins and till the very end of the game youll be able to roll up cars people animals entire cities or entire masses of land so thats funny as hell

object levels center around the object of the constellation youre trying to recreate so thats pretty straight forward stuff sometimes the king require only one (1) object and these levels can last for and im not joking 10 seconds at best

at the end of the levels youll get a rating but nobody cares about that and some super fucking funny comments from the king i hate that bitch i swear hes so random

and thats basically it this could be the entire description of the game if only . IF ONLY there wasnt another thing that made me reach nirvana

the ost in this game is phenomenal its jaw dropping its absolutely unbelievable songs like roll me up and que sera sera or even UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH WALKING ON A STAR but basically every single track in this game is an experience of its own and it has so many different genres like theres pop ???? electronic??? jazz ummmmmh ambient stuff and some piano bar and different talented artists its honestly absolutely incredible that a game like this has some of the most varied and perfect pieces of music in the videogame medium please just play it for the ost im begging you just do it for the incredible stuff that your ears are gonna listen to

so ugh

umh

i think im already done with considerations on this game damn that was fast but the fact that this is kind of a short review doesnt mean this game doesnt deserve praises its more about the fact that sometimes the most simple and straight forward stuff can be the most artistically evocative and im just leaving that here folks

this game makes me feel like a 7 year old again like this idea wouldve come out a childs mind

i watched a 1 hour documentary about this game thats how much i wanted to know about the thought process that gave birth to this odd ball + the fact that the objects ingame were modeled by students from some art school or something is so cool

the girl going “i feel it i feel the cosmos” might be the person with the most opened chakras ive ever encountered in my life i so aspire to be her her connection with her spiritual side is to be envied mooooooooo

still angry the king didnt visit italy are you italophobic

the fact that all the songs either say katamari somewhere or have some sort of pun on rolling stuff and balls its so fucking hilarious i cant believe this game is real

my only complaint would be that the levels might get kind of samey in the end and thats because it they reuse the same assets for every single level but thats fine i can close an eye for this one and its a thing that theyll fix in katamari 2 so ITS FINE ITS FINE ITS STILL GREAT

+ the sound design is fire nothing like hearing people scream in my ears animals cry and lands getting eradicated from earth

NOOOOOOOOOOO EMMA STAR

Katamari Damacy's controls are such a wonderful example of frictional game design. From a certain vantage-point controlling the katamari, a giant not-really-spherical mass of assorted objects, is almost undeniably clunky, awkward and a little bit of a struggle. Most of the time it will never do quite what you want it to, and on occasion things will even just go outright badly as you accidentally careen down a slope or manage to tightly lodge yourself in a not-quite-large-enough gap that you'll have to desperately wiggle out of.

I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people getting frustrated with this aspect of the game, and I have to confess that when I was starting to dive back into videogames a couple years ago I found how this game controls quite off-putting, enough so to be pretty ambivalent towards my experience with it. I was starting to explore the medium again, but from the perspective of a late-20s adult rather than the teenager I once was, and I simply hadn't had enough experiences with videogames at that point in time to really know how to cope with a one actively resisting your attempts to control it, that wouldn't just let you input what you wanted to have happen on a one-to-one basis, and for me at least that manifested in frustration. The fact that I return here two years later and find myself having so much love for this game is a great example about how our relationship with any individual artform is always evolving over time as we learn more and have a wider variety of experiences to draw from; that exact sense of friction and push-back that the game has that was so off-putting for me before now just seems crucial to the fun that can be found here.

The Prince, who finds himself rolling around these katamaris, is a rather small fellow, and remains largely a pretty similar size even as the katamaris grow wildly out of control across the course of the game; eventually he finds himself pushing something thousands of times larger than him. The most immediate upside of the frictional controls here, that sense of resistance, is how much it heightens the immersion of putting you in his shoes; you're not just pushing a ball around in a game, but you're very specifically playing as a small little guy who is going to struggle to keep this gigantic mass of stuff under control. The lack of control here just adds to the sense of weight and size and scale, and the movement growing ever-clumsier as the katamari amasses makes the game-feel translate to you how ridiculous what you're doing here is. The friction in the controls add a sense of serendipity too, the katamari is not a perfect sphere but a mass of random objects some of which jut out in weird ways making the collision so strange. Sometimes this works against you in often-funny ways, whilst other times a piece of debris you've collected will jut out against the ground just right to lift you up somewhere you shouldn't really be able to reach; either way serves to make the experience less routine and more memorable than if the katamari was just some easily-predictable-orb.

The best part of all of this is that once you're willing to make the leap to the notion that it's okay to not have perfect control over what's happening then the decisions you're faced with when you're playing become all the more engaging. Turning is slow, and even lining yourself up doesn't guarantee you'll actually go in a straight line, so sometimes you'll just want to jam the breaks on and start going in reverse; you won't be able to see where you're going as easily but you'll grab those objects behind you a lot faster provided you do hit them. Or do you want to take the time to stop, turn round, line yourself up, trading precious seconds for a bit more confidence that you'll actually grab the objects you're after? There's a middle point on this equation too, attempting to make these turns whilst on the move, but it's sufficiently finnicky to perform that this isn't just a free option; you get a nice mix of speed and accuracy here, but only if you can stop the katamari from slipping off in the wrong direction whilst you're doing this.

This lays out my varied experiences with the control scheme, and why I've turned around on the game so much, but of course there's a tremendous amount of joy in Katamari Damacy too which was clear to me even back when I wasn't as big a fan of the game but that lands more resoundingly now. I love how the game lets you continue playing a level even after the objective is completed, and how this means the reward for completing a level faster is that you get even more time to mess around in these spaces before the timer runs out. I love how the nature of the growth of the katamari, constantly needing increasingly bigger objects to meaningfully feed it, puts the emphasis on keeping moving rather than backtracking for any individual object you accidentally rolled past. I love the iterative level design of the main storyline, where later levels directly echo the earlier ones such that you already have some amount of familiarity with them from the get-go and a good idea of where the shortcuts are going to be. I love the bonus levels based around picking up the largest version of an animal you can find, and the pain that surges through you when you realise that yes that carton of milk counts as a cow, your run is now over, sorry-not-sorry. I love the affection that is shown here for people, all our oddities, our bizarre societal rituals, our cultures and passions and humble existences, and how even in the game's quiet critique of consumerism it never lets go of this affection for us. I love just how gentle all of this is, even as your katamari goes about tearing down whole civilisations, and how even amidst the chaos on display the game manages to be relaxing and comforting.