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.

I once wrote up a long winded review about this game that went off to point of hardly being relevant to the game in question. Now after a long time of writing other reviews and having this game out of my mind, with its notable art style, it's paper please-esque dynamic of having to determine the fates of people with their lives up to this point reduced to paper work on your desk you have little choice but to sort through, its plot about nihilism and the potential of humanity. I think now I have the ability to say about this game what I've really wanted to say all this time.

Shit's mid as hell and doesn't actually say much of worth, thanks for listening, bye.

Ever since it's release, Divinity Original Sin 2 has been hailed as one of the best western RPGs in recent memory, the highlight of the CRPG resurgence, and is subject to such widespread fondness that it's developers got handed the keys to make an actual Baldur's Gate 3. Which has always flummoxed me, because I played this game at launch and fucking hated it.

A degree of this is that me and the game simply have different priorities. When it comes to a game like this, I want to create a character, a person to embody, rather than being handed one of the DMs shitty edgy OCs to play as, but DOS2 disagrees, and will in fact offer a fairly substantially lesser experience (losing access to multiple sidequests and altering a number of key scenes for the worse) if you don't pick one of it's stable of interminable snarky edgelords. I know that for a lot of people, not having to make a character is actually a plus (i remember all those thinkpieces positing Geralt as proof that player-created characters should be a thing of the past) so you may not find this as immediately distasteful as I did, but I'd expect more people to agree that this game is terribly written.

Every single character in this game feels like someone's edgy OC, but not in an endearing way. There's zero earnestness here, no honest investment in this world or belief that what is happening matters, just a bunch of archly smug edgelords quipping at each other, like a cut of Drakengard directed by Joss Whedon. Lohse was the only character I had any fondness for, and even she has a bizarre edgy streak that feels totally incongruous. These eminently hateable assholes will bring up a theme, float an idea, and then stick their tongue firmly in their cheek and laugh at you for wanting to engage the idea in any meaningful way.

The thing about this game that made me angry was how it brought up incredibly heavy source material on a whim (the first act of the game is you escaping what is essentially a concentration camp and genocide is a major part of the backstory) but utterly refused to engage with it on any level beyond a Redditor smugly correcting the grammar of a post detailing the very real atrocities that exist in our world. It leverages these things purely aesthetically, draping itself in a cloak of the most rancid vibes imaginable. If you're the kind of person who writes entries on TV Tropes about "deconstruction" you probably think it's genius.

CRPGs like this have been described as digital dungeon masters, creating a virtual tabletop space that reveals it's character through what aspect of the experience it chooses to focus on. Icewind Dale focused on pure combat and dungeon delving, Baldur's Gate on the charmingly amateurish emulation of epic fantasy, and Divinity Original Sin 2 focuses on all the ugliest, most cynical, and rotten tropes and expectations that players of fantasy RPGs have come to expect. If it's a dungeon master, it's the kind of guy who describes a field of brutally massacred gnomes while lighting up a blunt.

Oh, but what about dat combat though? Yeah, it's ok. There's fun to be had in throwing a barrel of oil to set on fire, or throwing a barrel of water to electrocute, or teleporting someone far away from you, but thanks to inflated health pools and interminable turn times, all the "creative solutions" that this game's passionate fanbase eulogise about eventually yield to much more standard and predictable turn-based combat with a truly obscene level curve that drags out every single fight to absurd lengths. And even this is being generous, as after the (admittedly, genuinely good) first act the quality of encounters begins to tumble down a cliff before practically giving up entirely by Act Three. I'll fully admit that I turned the game down to easy by that point because I just wanted this obscenely drawn-out overlong game done with already. These people were going to make a tactics game??? Thank god we were spared that reality.

Oh, but it's got co-op! That's fun, that's unique! Yeah, it is, but if you think I'm going to play a story-driven Role Playing Game where only the person who clicked on a character first is allowed to have any input in the story whatsoever, you must have confused me for someone who thinks Travis McElroy's Adventure Zone is good. Co-op was definitely the most fun I had playing this, but at the same time, it did make a game that was already long, slow, and drawn-out even longer, slower, and more drawn-out, a bit like this review.

The version of this game I played was the pre-definitive edition version, so this may not be reflective of the game as it is now, but the game was already receiving comically overblown praise even before that update, so clearly I'm missing something greater than was added there. Still, my impression of the game was certainly not helped by a final act so unfinished it verged on parody, which culminated in endings that would have grated enough for their abruptness, adolescent nihilism and fascist apologia if they actually Worked. Instead every time I picked an option it gave me a different one and I had to go through each one until it actually gave me the one I wanted, at which point the game called me a fucking idiot for not comitting genocide. 93 on Metacritic.

Most of the time when I don't line up with the wider consensus on a game, I at least understand why people thought that way. I cannot understand why anyone who finished this game left with positive feelings. By the time I finished it, any positive feelings I had about this game were an easy 60 hours behind me. A complete trainwreck on every conceivable level.

This is what y'all played instead of Tyranny? shake my damn head

all that being said the sex scene is so hilariously terrible that it's maybe worth playing just for that so five stars best CRPG of the renaissance