There is no prophesy to fulfil, no
monster to thwart. Instead, the sky
was ruined by your father partying a
little too hard the previous night and
now he’s grumpily pressing you into
service to fix it.
If you stop to
examine the story, it’s
pretty bleak. The King
treats his son terribly,
gets out-of-control
drunk, and won’t face
up to his
responsibilities. But
Katamari Damacy isn’t
a moral lesson or an
exploration of that experience, it’s an
absurdist roll-’em-up. The King is a
toddler, directing your missions, and
the Prince is a silent cursor which
you use to push a ball in different
directions around the world.
The Katamari series’ whole
schtick is using a knobbly ball—a
katamari—to collect stuff. You start
off rolling the ball over drawing pins,
caramels, stamps and other doodads,
adding each one to the ball. As you
accumulate this mixture of treasure
and trash, the katamari gets larger,
and can start to roll up even bigger
objects. A snail which earlier in the
level sent me flying is now jammed inamongst the mess with the pencils,
magnets and cherries.
While your initial outing starts
with matchsticks and coins as the
fodder for your ball, by level five
you’ve skipped forward to quail eggs
and nine-volt batteries,
and by level nine it’s
hams and kids’ wellies.
The main missions
all take a similar form;
roll a certain size
katamari to repair a
star, and then spend
the rest of the level’s
time limit becoming as
large as possible. I particularly love
spotting weird scenarios before I roll
them up—two crabs with water
pistols having a standoff on the porch
was one, the mechanical monkey-
with-cymbal ensemble was another.
Interspersed with these are the
constellation missions where you
have to fulfil a themed objective. In
the Pisces mission it’s rolling up as
many fish as possible, in Cancer it’s
crabs, and in Cygnus it’s swans.
Taurus and Ursa Major are trickier.
In these you need to collect just one
cow (or bear) but you want it to be
the largest possible. That means
collecting objects for a big katamariwhile avoiding rolling over anything
cow (or bear) related until you’re
large enough to take on your target. I
hate these missions because it’s not
just the actual creature you need to
avoid. In the case of Taurus, you also
need to dodge cartons of milk and
signs which are protesting against
cows because they both have cow
print on them.
All of the levels are replayable so
you can retry them over and over
again to beat your own scores. They
have generous time limits so it’s not
the frantic score-beating you get in
some games, it’s far more soothing.DROPPING THE BALL
On the negative side I have a short
list of gripes: The two-player battle
mode is boring as hell. You have to go
through the tutorial before you can
fiddle with the resolution, so on a
modern monitor you’re stuck with a
windowed display until then. I also
couldn’t switch to a controller until I
got past the tutorial and the keyboard
controls are... really quite something.
I mean, for a speed boost you need to
alternately tap W+K and S+I quickly.
I really do not advise using the
keyboard controls.
I mostly felt the game’s age
whenever gender popped up, though.
There’s a Virgo level where you
collect maidens and encyclopedia
descriptions of men and women
hinge around outdated stereotypes—a
woman dieting for a bikini body, and
men banished from the house for golf
practise.
These gripes aside, Katamari
Damacy still feels fresh and fun. It’s
weird in a way that doesn’t feel
forced and the joy of rolling up a cat
which previously towered above you,
watching its little legs kicking about,
is as pure now as it was in 2004.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A cult game about
rolling over junk to pick
it up and get big.
EXPECT TO PAY
$30
DEVELOPER
Namco,
MONKEYCRAFT Co. Ltd.
PUBLISHER
Bandai Namco
REVIEWED ON
Core i7-5820k,
GTX 970, 16GB RAM,
Windows 10
MULTIPLAYER
Yes
LINK
http://www.bit.ly/
katamaripc85
Weird and inventive.
Katamari Damacy isn’t
perfect, but it holds its
own impressively well 14
years on.VERDICTThe levels are
replayable so
you can retry
them over and
over againK
atamari Damacy is ridiculous. It’s a vast amount of good
ridiculous, with a smattering of bad ridiculous, which serves
to remind you that it’s a game that’s very much from a
previous console era. You, the minuscule Prince of the
Cosmos, must help your father, the incredibly buff King of
the Cosmos (also unsubtly well-endowed thanks to a pair of spray-on
trousers) repair the night sky.ROLL UP
KATAMARI DAMACY REROLL finally brings a
cult classic to PC. By Philippa Warr
OBJECT ORIENTED Excerpts from the Katamari encyclopedia
MERMAN
“Everybody loves a
mermaid. Not so with
a merman.”TOILET PAPER
“Paper you use in the
bathroom. You need to cut
it off at a certain point.”SANDPILE
“He is being buried in the
sand by his friends, and he
is loving it.”BEETLE FIGHT
“These fight with their
jaws and horns. It’s a
serious contest. “REVIEW