Beautiful Katamari has all the characters, cousins and katamari chaos you would expect from a game in the series but you can tell that it's missing a certain something.
The levels you're given are great and expand in entertaining ways but there isn't much variety on offer - you have two different smaller starting locations which eventually grow out into the same larger overworld which is a nice idea but growing out into the same wider world for every level does tend to get old a bit quickly. There's a bunch of levels stuck behind DLC which may address this, but I haven't been able to try these out yet.
The objectives too are pretty stale. The base request you'll receive is to reach - or ideally beat - a certain size while also rolling up as many objects of a particular type which is fine in theory. However, it's almost impossible to fail in collecting enough of those object types (and quite easy to get more than you need to get even the highest scores) which makes it pretty redundant, leaving you stuck with the base 'as big as possible' objective. You do get a couple of requests that are a bit different (like having to keep your katamari warm by rolling up warm things and avoiding anything cold as you try to reach 10,000 Celsius) but these are few and far between and don't match the creativity on display in the two previous PS2 games.
But the main thing that I think is lacking is purpose. I don't want to romanticise the first two games too much, but among the silliness there were interesting ideas. The first entry showed us the concept and executed it to a tee, the second developed it alongside a smart meta story about fanservice and having to do the same things again. In Beautiful Katamari, the only progress is in how nice the game looks. The story has nothing to say and is even more of a non-entity than before while its corporate nature shines through with a level about collecting 'cool' things being filled with Xbox 360s - this title of course being an Xbox 360 exclusive despite the history of the series elsewhere - along with the aforementioned locking of 7 of the game's 20 levels behind DLC
With all that said it's still a Katamari game where the simple act of rolling something up is incredibly satisfying, so much so that you're able to block out some of the weaker elements in this entry and just enjoy the ride. It's not perfect by any means but I'm super glad that this made it into the Xbox backwards compatibility program and that I've now been able to play a game I missed 14 years ago
The levels you're given are great and expand in entertaining ways but there isn't much variety on offer - you have two different smaller starting locations which eventually grow out into the same larger overworld which is a nice idea but growing out into the same wider world for every level does tend to get old a bit quickly. There's a bunch of levels stuck behind DLC which may address this, but I haven't been able to try these out yet.
The objectives too are pretty stale. The base request you'll receive is to reach - or ideally beat - a certain size while also rolling up as many objects of a particular type which is fine in theory. However, it's almost impossible to fail in collecting enough of those object types (and quite easy to get more than you need to get even the highest scores) which makes it pretty redundant, leaving you stuck with the base 'as big as possible' objective. You do get a couple of requests that are a bit different (like having to keep your katamari warm by rolling up warm things and avoiding anything cold as you try to reach 10,000 Celsius) but these are few and far between and don't match the creativity on display in the two previous PS2 games.
But the main thing that I think is lacking is purpose. I don't want to romanticise the first two games too much, but among the silliness there were interesting ideas. The first entry showed us the concept and executed it to a tee, the second developed it alongside a smart meta story about fanservice and having to do the same things again. In Beautiful Katamari, the only progress is in how nice the game looks. The story has nothing to say and is even more of a non-entity than before while its corporate nature shines through with a level about collecting 'cool' things being filled with Xbox 360s - this title of course being an Xbox 360 exclusive despite the history of the series elsewhere - along with the aforementioned locking of 7 of the game's 20 levels behind DLC
With all that said it's still a Katamari game where the simple act of rolling something up is incredibly satisfying, so much so that you're able to block out some of the weaker elements in this entry and just enjoy the ride. It's not perfect by any means but I'm super glad that this made it into the Xbox backwards compatibility program and that I've now been able to play a game I missed 14 years ago