Once Upon a Katamari, which is simultaneously frenzied and miraculously peaceful, satisfies the same sexual craving that the rest of the series consistently exhibits. It offers trippy technicolor gameplay that is soulfully fulfilling but straightforward, brain-chemistry-altering music, a wheeze-laugh-inducing sense of humor, and unrelenting charm. The Prince, the King of All Cosmos, the Queen, and their gang of goofy young relatives are treated to a lavish reception in this time-traveling adventure. And there’s more Katamari to go around than ever before, thanks to new levels and a stronger emphasis on replayability. The first new core Katamari game in 14 years doesn’t try to reinvent the malformed mass of stuff you roll around, and that’s great by me, because Katamari doesn’t need mending.
Apart from the apparent change from 480p to 4K, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference between Bandai Namco’s most recent version of Katamari Damacy and the original from 2004. This is because the game’s creator, Rengame, recognized the task: Once Upon a Katamari is as entertaining, fulfilling, happy, and vivacious as the franchise has always been.
The godlike King of All Cosmos demonstrates his ability to juggle a strong scroll before hurling it into the night sky, shattering the heavenly bodies that reside there once more. To get stars and planets to repopulate the sky, his son, The Prince, and his cousins must travel to Earth and roll up everything they can find. If you haven’t played a Katamari game—or, to be honest, even if you have—it might not make sense, but this arrangement has been as dependable as Bowser snatching Princess Peach and provides a platform for some incredibly entertaining content.
Even though he talks down to The Prince and his silly-looking cousins, everyone loves The King, a flashy, self-important, all-powerful, but generally kind god who enjoys wearing incredibly tight pants. I laughed at least once almost every time he utilized his record-scratch-sounding voice to commend himself or reflect on the nature of the cosmos, making the most of every last word of conversation. A masterwork of humorous writing and localization, Once Upon a Katamari effectively uses humor to establish the objective of each level before the rolling begins, never allowing a joke to become old.
One of the best examples of humorous writing is Once Upon a Katamari
After finishing a level, a brief and absurd scene will frequently appear that depicts the King or Queen engaging in some sort of antics, such as throwing a giant crab into the air or rolling a group of untamed west outlaws into a katamari following a standoff that honors The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. The King chastises you for making a mistake, which lessens the sometimes exasperating sting of missing the objective. Even failing a level has a certain cheek to it. Beyond the King’s haughty monologues, this ubiquitous sense of humor always brings a chuckle at almost every turn without ever being cloying or unduly self-aware.
A cow sitting at a campfire like a human, warming its hooves next to its owner, or dogs and cats walking about the Ancient Greek agora in Spartan armor are just a couple of the humorous details found in the overworld level-select maps.
Every level makes use of the abundance of items hidden among the seemingly disorganized spatter of candy, flowers, sculptures, lanterns, and TVs, which conceal a delicate, carefree sense of comedy and purpose amid the chaos.
Bears and cows get ready for an all-fronts war, mummies create TV shows beneath the pyramids, tumbleweeds chase cowboys around in circles, and enormous Super Sentai-style heroes practice their wrestling moves on kaiju over the horizon. Madness once more. Each level’s massive, occasionally overwhelming chaos notwithstanding, each object you can roll up is thoughtfully positioned for either a satisfying sequence or a humorous effect, such as an octopus wreaking havoc on a pirate ship or bottles of soy sauce arranged like bowling pins that will swiftly advance you to the next weight class so you can eventually pick up that bowl of ramen in the adjacent room.
Using your assigned roller, you will spin your enormous ball of stuff through several eras, such as the Jurassic period or Japan during the Edo period, collecting anything smaller than your dung beetle-like ball. A level the size of a matchstick or pushpin may begin, but by the end, it may have picked up cities or even planets. Getting your katamari (which literally translates to “clump or mass” in Japanese) as large as possible is the traditional objective, but occasionally you’ll need to adhere to specific guidelines.
Because the youngster who asked you to do so wants to enjoy something sweet after a large dinner, they might be as easy as gathering as many fish as you can or as complicated as just wrapping up sweet things and avoiding savory or bitter things like hot sauce or charcoal.
It’s strangely cerebral to snowball your katamari into an ever-increasing collection of books, cannonballs, eggs, and cutlery, regardless of what you’re picking up. The cleaning of Japanese castles, Ice Age caves, and pirate ship decks with a low-poly-day-glo appearance evokes the same enigmatic, brain-scratching feeling that you get from games like Tetris or PowerWash Simulator.
This serenity is sharply contrasted with the maximalist, strangely captivating soundtrack of Once Upon a Katamari. With a pleasing zhoop, various objects snap to your oddball, and some of them produce unusual sounds like a street punk scatting or a crying cat, making your katamari the most bizarre chorus you’ve ever heard. Once Upon a Katamari has music that is just as varied as your collection of different odds and ends. With or without a game to go along with it, the soundtrack to Once Upon a Katamari is a fantastic album in and of itself, standing shoulder to shoulder with the musical giants it is based on. It was inspired by the perky hodge-podge sound of the J-Pop subgenre Shibuya-kei.
The soundtrack is on par with its contemporaries in the music industry.
Paying subtle respect to the Katamari riff—that catchy one that goes na naaa nanana nana na na na na na na nana naaa—that permanently inks itself on your hippocampal region after playing any of the games in this series is the only common motif throughout the notes. From the upbeat techno-rap opening theme, Katamari Time, to the funk-jazz-fusion jam, Power of Katamari Damacy, to the surprisingly beautiful choral title track by one of the series’ original composers, Asuka Sakai, featuring the San Francisco Boys Choir, Once Upon a Katamari’s soundtrack is a varied smorgasbord of various sounds and genres. Of the 36 songs, there isn’t a terrible one.
However, Once Upon a Katamari is also pleased to satisfy your aural nostalgia games, including almost all of the series’ 21-year history’s songs in a music selection with a few adjustable settings. You can loop a particular favorite over any of Once Upon a Katamari’s levels or create a playlist of your favorite songs from the entire series. The inability to play a single game’s soundtrack sequentially and the inexplicable grouping of several games in two different eras rather than game by game are annoying, but the playlist feature at least somewhat compensates for these drawbacks.
Another strange glitch in the shuffle feature is that when you start the next level, the music that was played last starts over. When choosing shuffle, you may find that you hear some songs more than you would want because some of these levels are shorter than most of the nearly 100-song tracklist. To remedy this, you may always choose a new song before beginning a level.
Rengame skillfully steers clear of the dull traps of shallow nostalgia with its methodical attempt to recreate the series’ unchangeable charm. Almost every stage in this game is completely original, unlike the obligatory replication of 1-1 in the Mario series, which treats classic stages from the original as gospel, doomed to be worn out in every Katamari game. The newest guardians of Katamari carefully tweak the formula, adding new level types and even power-ups to enhance your rolling while being cautious not to upset the delicate balance of chaos and calm that characterizes Katamari. This adds to the flow of what I’ve come to expect from a roll-icking good time.
Once Upon a Katamari manages to balance the old and the new remarkably effectively by combining that with minor modernizations found in more current Katamari games, such as a more transparent scoring system.
For instance, it has always been purposefully tricky to use both joysticks to control where and how you roll, and as you get bigger, it gets harder to control the mass. At first, I didn’t enjoy how Once Upon a Katamari made zooming around at lower sizes feel a little more accurate than it used to, but in the end, it helped emphasize the series’ consistent ability to convey scale in vivid yellow.
In addition to adding a beautiful layer to the rolling, the power-ups allow Rengame to experiment with new design concepts that highlight the puzzle element of efficiently navigating the game. For a level or portion of a level, the trance-like flow is broken to try solving puzzle-like problems. For instance, the Rocket power-up added a new level of difficulty and strategy that I wasn’t used to, but it only lasted for a brief period of time. It let me endure a strong wind storm to pick up a few extra objects.
In one of the Ancient Egypt levels, I was able to locate certain things to fulfill a pharaoh’s sequence of demands by using the Radar power-up. For example, he requested for ten bananas or a dozen eggs. While none of these fundamentally alter or redefine Katamari’s rolling, they do introduce fresh concepts for level design that provide entertaining variations on the typical “make your katamari as big as possible” levels.
The formula is carefully and precisely toyed with by Katamari’s newest custodians
It took me about ten hours to finish every main level at least once, making Once Upon a Katamari the largest game in the series to date, despite its overall modest scope. With unique trinkets to discover in every level and unlocked challenges to keep me returning with a fresh strategy, Rengame recognizes and supports this. Three crowns are concealed in each level, offering extra challenges and genuinely compelling reasons to return, in addition to discovering cousins who operate as extra playable characters and gifts that grant them more personalization possibilities.
There will be more levels available if you have a specific number of cousins or crowns, which will give you even more motivation to roll around the same spot a few times. Challenges are a pleasant acknowledgment to gamers like me who frequently play finished Katamari games, even though they don’t offer the same prizes.
Nevertheless, the accessible stages are sadly unbalanced, with most of the levels set in Edo, Japan, which has more than twice as many levels as the next largest era. Although this series has always embraced Japanese culture, it seems like a lot of territory was left unexplored in the nine other eras within the framework of Once Upon a Katamari’s time travel notion.
Verdict
As I moved across time and space, I couldn’t help but smile as each melon, shoe, playing card, traffic cone, and house fit into place on my spinning pile of belongings. When Once Upon a Katamari tickled my ears with riffs so funky the bassist virtually reached through the speakers on my TV and gave me a stank face (and that’s meant as a compliment), that was the only time my euphoric smile broke. The Katamari series is at its best since the PlayStation 2 era with this suitably garish, exuberant comeback. There will always be space on my hard drive for Once Upon a Katamari because of its brilliantly executed changes to the incredibly rewarding series of rolling treats, its amazing soundtrack, and its plenty of quirky charm.
