Katamari Damacy - PlayStation 2 Review

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One thing can be said for certain: you haven't played a game like this before. Everything about this game is off-the-wall, but it works. When you load the game for the first time, you will be greeted with giraffes, rainbows, bicycles, and a plethora of other thingsall performing some contorted dancejust for you. Welcome to the world of Katamari Damacy, where the gameplay is original and surprisingly addictive. Your goal?roll your sticky ball around to collect the "objects from earth". As your ball gets bigger, you can pick up bigger things. So you go on a hunt to keep growing your ball. The levels you play in are simply hugeI never felt like I had seen everything in a levelso replay level is quite high. Meanwhile, the background music is a lot of fun, good enough to put you in a good mood if the rest of the game doesn't. And the storywithout ruining anythinghas to be the product of mixing drugs and alcohol. The controls are quite simple, employing only the analog sticks and a couple shoulder buttons (although I never found much use for the shoulder buttons). When I heard about and found the game, I worried that it would be too simplistic to entertain meit seems my worries were unfounded; Katamari Damacy is a great game for everyone....and cheap, too!

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I really hope the success of this game convinces publishers to bring over more off-the-wall Japanese titles. This game is awesome. Gameplay is very simple: you roll around a ball (using the analog sticks in a control scheme reminiscent of Battlezone) and things stick to it. That's it. There are basically two kind of challenges: get the ball to be a certain size, or pick up as many of something as you can find. (Katamari Damacy loosely translates as "ball of stuff.")

While this may not sound like the world's most exciting way to spend your time, the flawless execution gives Katamari Damacy the simple, in-the-zone addictiveness of Tetris. The backstory is bizzare: your father, the King of All Cosmos, goes on what sounds very much like an acid trip and breaks all the stars. When he sobers up, he finds that everyone is annoyed, so he tasks you with going to Earth to collect raw material to rebuild the sky. The raw material turns out to be anything from thumbtacks to people to ships. The King's disconnected, slightly deranged speech patterns add much to the style of the game, as does the intro video, which is better seen than described. Add to that another side of the story told by following a Japanese family in very weird, stylistic interstitials and you've got a very surreal experience.

Katamari Damacy is backed by a soundtrack that would be worth $20 by itself. With replay value assured by levels that are easy to conquer but difficult to do perfectly, this game is a great addition to anyone's console library.

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After first reading about this game in PSM, in a small article in the back of the magazine, and then finding discussions everywhere on the web I was intrigued. I found it in a bigbox for cheap so I bought it. It is great. It is a nice diversion from killing people, and scoring touchdowns (both of which I enjoy tremendously). The game is a trip. It is very odd, but the music rocks, the graphics are trippy and the controls are flawless. THIS IS THE BEST BARGAIN THERE IS IN PS2 GAMES.

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A true sleeper hit in the video game market. This formerly little known Japanese game from Namco (makers of Pac Man) has slowly but surely become a big hit with fans here in the North American Continent.

You are the prince of the King of Cosmos and you have to fix a mess the King has made of the stars. It seems that the King accidently ruined the stars, moon and constilations that once glittered the Earth night sky, so being you are his son and he doesn't want to do it, it's up to you to fix it. So what's a little 5 cm green guy to do? Roll a huge ball that can pick up any item smaller then it as it rolls around. The more items you pick up the bigger the sphere gets. Each stage has a size you must get the ball to within a time limit so you can restore the stars of the sky.

The game is a very 'unique' and quite addicting. The early stages start off with very small sized goals like having to pick up items on the floor of a room in a house, then progresses to outside, into small towns, to whole cities and eventualy the planet. The real joy of this game is how simplistic and how many items there are in the game. Each item in this game eventualy you will be able to collect on this sphere of yours. Whether its a small button on the floor or a huge skyscraper , there is nothing in this game you won't be able to collect, as long as your sphere is the proper size to do so.

The game takes on a very Japanese anime type of feel to it. It has very addicting and catchy Japanese music, with a theme song that will get stuck in your head. It has a full inventory for you to look at all the items you collected along with the size you had to be to collect it and what the item actualy is. There are thousands of items in the game to pick up and while the challenges are few, the fun is constant. There are even some clips after you finish each star restoration as you follow a family noticing the weird stuff going on with the stars missing.

I can't recomend this game enough. You may get through the game in a few sessions but the replayability and fun is so high it just won't matter. It also has a mulitplayer mode where you can battle with a friend. There are hidden presents you can find in every stage and so much more. It's such a simple yet complex game and most of all.. its fun! You won't be sorry adding this game to your collections. Anyone will enjoy this and the price is most defintely right.

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Something that's tugged at the back of my mind for years now is the question of what, exactly, happened to the ingenuity, simplicity and sense of wonder that was traditionally associated with video games throughout the seventies, eighties and early nineties. There's no question, today's games are a much more detailed, beautiful, realistic and life-altering bunch than the titles that filled the SNES, NES and 2600. As a NES owner, you'd never get an experience quite like what Metal Gear Solid or Grand Theft Auto can give you today. You're afforded much more freedom on an Xbox than you were on a Sega Master System, everything's in crystal-clear high definition and the soundtracks routinely eat up several CDs all on their own. You take it for granted that Mario can fly, because that's just the way it's (almost) always been. To introduce a similarly outlandish game in this day and age where anything new is scrutinized by the overcritical eye of parents, teachers, internal boards, the media, the government, the FCC and, perhaps harshest of all, the critics is almost unthinkable.

That's why I'm amazed a game like Katamari Damacy made it to our shores virtually untouched. This game's a throwback to the absent-minded titles of gaming's infancy, when everything didn't need to make sense under the restrictions of the Earth's gravitational pull, didn't need to abide by the dynamic lighting of the sun as it floats across the sky, and didn't send you on missions that would give a real life government operative nightmares. Things just happen in Katamari, and you accept them as fact because that's just they way they are.

Basically, Katamari Damacy is a telling of the life of a dung beetle on a cosmic scale. You control "The Prince," heir to an apparently galactic kingdom, as he rolls tiny, sticky balls called Katamaris around the Earth's floors, streets and continents. When you roll over something, the item sticks and the size of the Katamari snowballs. The size of your ball is directly proportionate to the size of the items you can pick up. If you're piloting a tiny trash heap, you're just gonna bounce off if you try to roll up a tree or a fencepost. Your Katamari usually starts small, barely large enough to roll up an acorn or thumbtack, (not to mention easily tossed aside by the numerous mice that roam the city streets) and slowly increases in size to the point where it's picking up cats, then large dogs, then children, adults, motorcycles, cars, wrestling rings, houses, office buildings, etc. The real star of this show is the incredible scale of the game, how nothing is off limits so long as your Katamari is big enough.

And that's really all there is to the game. You get a time limit and a certain size that your Katamari ball must reach within that timeframe, you're dropped out onto the floor somewhere, and you just start rollin'. It's incredibly simple, yet indescribably inspirational. While it may sound lacking in depth and replay value, I dare you to spend an hour with this disc and then casually put it away. It's physically impossible. I've never been one to immediately replay a game after finishing it, but I did just that in Katamari. The only thing that'll keep you playing is the never-ending challenge to top your existing high scores... well, that and your need to constantly explore this bizarre, psuedo-Eastern world... and it's been quite a while since I felt this motivated by nothing more than a number saved onto a memory card somewhere.

Alongside its outlandishly original gameplay and story, Damacy is equally original with its simple, understated control scheme. The only buttons you'll need to use in this game are the PS2 controller's dual analog sticks and the "X" button. It plays like a weird mixture of Pac-Man and the old Midway tank-based arcade game, Vindicators. Pushing both sticks forward moves you forward. Pulling both sticks back moves you back. Pushing both sticks left strafes you left, two rights strafe you right, pushing the left stick forward and the right stick back turns the whole thing (camera and all) right, and vice versa performs the exact opposite function. The only time your fingers should leave the analog sticks is when you're reading some dialog (unfortunately, there's no prominent voice acting in Katamari) and you need to hit the "X" button to move things along.

Visually, this is far from the most stunning game on the PS2 today. Honestly, I don't think there's a single object in the game that couldn't be faithfully reproduced on the Sega Dreamcast a thousand times over. Now that I think about it, the original Shenmue puts the graphics of Katamari to shame. But if you still think the visuals are the point, you obviously haven't been paying attention. However, one thing I'm relatively sure the old Dreamcast couldn't do is scale every one of those millions of objects, both moving and still, from full-screen to ant-size with no slowdown in sight. It's not right up in your face and obvious, like the majestic beauty of Gran Turismo 3 or Final Fantasy X, but this is a great display of the PS2's sheer polygon-crunching power.

This is seriously one of the greatest games of 2004. If you haven't already played it and were waiting on some sort of official endorsement to do so, consider this your call to action. It's discount-priced right out of the gates at twenty bucks, (which makes perfect sense, because no matter how good this game is, I don't think I could've justified fifty dollars on it) and will reward you and your friends with hours upon hours of entertainment, even after you've completed all of the single-player quests.