All entries for Wednesday 05 July 2006

July 05, 2006

We Love Katamari

Title:: We Love Katamari (PS2)
Publisher:: Electronic Arts
ASIN:: B000CC15U0
Rating:: Not rated

This was the first time I’d rushed through a game for the sake of a review and I barely played it enough to do it justice. The way items are arranged through the levels implies some kind of optimal path for collecting them all, suggesting a strong highscore based element to Katamari, though I didn’t have time to explore this.
Despite having to rush things, I was happier with this review than I was with the previous two that were published. I specifically wanted to avoid writing sentences saying “you do this, you do that”, since I did this far too much in my Fahrenheit review, and I’ve rarely seen it in professional games journalism.

I was immensely pleased that I got this out before a similar take on it appeared in Edge magazine as part of a comedy games feature.

The King Of All Cosmos went on a bender and accidentally destroyed all the stars in the sky. To fix this he sent to Earth his five centimetre tall son, The Prince, to roll katamaris to replace the stars – a katamari being a strange sphere that picks up anything smaller than itself, which then adds to the size of the katamari snowball-style, allowing ever larger objects to be collected. This was the plot of the critically acclaimed, and never released in Europe, Katamari Damacy. In We Love Katamari, you again, or most likely for the first time, take control of The Prince. However, in a self-referential twist, you are now rolling to satisfy the requests of fans gained by The King Of All Cosmos following the release of Katamari Damacy.

Stripped of its story and Lemon Jelly stylings, down to the raw mechanics, it would be hard to see Katamari as much more than a novelty. But the appeal lies in its unashamedly childish sense of humour. There is the game’s central visual gag, the katamari itself. The sight of people and wildlife fleeing in terror from this ridiculous amalgamation of random everyday items is uniquely entertaining. The sound effects that items make as they are added to the katamari also amuse, particularly those for living creatures – the unholy cacophony made by collecting a clowder of cats, or the bizarre mix of screams and laughter from rolling up a crowd of people, for example. In fact, the game itself is a piece of surreal, participatory, physical comedy. It helps immensely that the katamari isn’t simply modelled as a sphere. Collect an item barely smaller than the katamari, and it becomes unbalanced and unwieldy, lurching as it rolls.

Like the best children’s literature, We Love Katamari tempers this lightness with a distinct dark streak. Between missions, we are given the story of The King Of All Cosmos’s troubled childhood and turbulent relationship with his father. Failing a mission leaves The Prince quivering with fear of his own father’s wrath, and with good reason.

We Love Katamari’s levels are remarkable pieces of design that skilfully support an avatar whose size can increase by several orders of magnitude through the duration of a mission. The realization that objects that define the very structure of a level for a small katamari, walls, houses, hills, are up for grabs by a larger katamari is a memorable videogame moment. There is only a bare minimum that cannot, theoretically, be rolled up. On every scale Katamari’s world is full of incidental details, ranging from a cat’s tea party, with mice making their escape along paper chain decorations, at one extreme, to a rampaging Godzilla at the other. It is the desire to see all these, rather than the desire for a higher score or faster time, that drives repeated plays of each mission.

Katamari’s flaws are few. Unwelcome mid-level loading pauses, controls that can frustrate in the heat of the moment, and the odd occasion when the script falls flat, stretching to be funny but succeeding only in being weird, are about their extent. Like Killer7, We Love Katamari displays unwavering confidence in its design. It is an original idea, executed with aplomb, and through sheer force of personality We Love Katamari cannot fail to raise a smile.

Bryan Gale : 05 Jul 2006 22:56 | Tags: Boar Game Review | Comments (2) | Close comments | Report a problem