Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari are two of those games where it feels like the stars aligned in the best way possible. They're the type of games that could only be dreamed up by one really eccentric auteur, that being Keita Takahashi. They could only be made in the sixth generation of consoles, an era ripe with experimental games particularly from Japanese developers. They were published under Namco during what is arguably their most experimental era, right alongside other weird gems like Ribbit King and Mr Driller Drill Land. They were miraculously approved for a western release and performed really well both critically and financially. Everything went right with the Katamari duology, and what resulted are two of the freshest and most artistic games in the entire medium.
Before talking about the Katamari Damacy games, I should probably talk about their creator, Keita Takahashi. Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari are very much his babies, and you can learn a lot about him just by playing the game. The first Katamari Damacy is both a surreal celebration of the mundanity of life (in a similar vein to Nichijou, more on that similarity later) and a satire of the rampant commercialization of modern society. We Love Katamari, on the other hand, is a commentary on fanservice and sequel culture whose plot is literally about you playing more Katamari to satiate fans of the original game. None of this is explicitly stated to you though, the messaging of both of Takahashi's Katamari games are left completely vague and up to your interpretation, but the fact that it's there to begin with adds a lot to the appeal of Katamari. Part of the reason why none of the sequels to We Love, as fun as they still are, managed to reach its heights is because they lack that clear vision and purposeful meta-textuality.
Katamari Damacy is one of my favorite examples of video games being art, not just because of how much meaning you can gleam out of it, but because it says so much without sacrificing the gaminess of its medium. Katamari Damacy is as classic and arcade-y of a video game as you can get, taking a single endlessly inventive premise and stretching it out as far as it will go. The main concept of Katamari Damacy is that you play as a little Prince who has to collect tons of miscellaneous objects with an adhesive ball called a Katamari by rolling it onto them. As you get more objects stuck to your Katamari, the Katamari gets increasingly bigger and you can collect even larger objects, culminating in the final goal of rolling up the entire Earth. It's such a simple but creative and satisfying concept. Just seeing your Katamari grow increasingly larger and being able to latch onto objects that used to be too big is always a great feeling, and the way each successive level increases in scale particularly in the first game lends a great sense of progression.
That being said, Katamari Damacy is not an easy game, it's actually quite touch. Simply getting to grips with the controls may take a bit, as it uses a weird twin-stick setup for rolling the ball around. It may seem off-putting at first, but once you put in a bit of time, I think Katamari's controls are actually perfect for the game. They give you an incredible range of movement and precision when rolling the ball around and positioning the Prince, while also really making you feel like you're physically pushing a giant Katamari around. But even once you get adjusted to the controls, you'll have to deal with some very strict time limits for each level. It may seem daunting, but feeling out the best path through each stage and pulling off a successful run feels great, and since the game keeps track of your best times and sizes, you're encouraged to keep honing your technique and refining your runs. The difficulty once again fits Katamari's vibe really well, since the Prince is doing all this work for his possibly abusive father, the King Of All Cosmos. These stages are supposed to feel like daunting tasks given to you by someone with way too high expectations of your capabilities, but being able to pull them off feels rewarding, only aided by the game's light-hearted atmosphere which helps to mitigate any potential frustration.
We Love Katamari, the sequel, improves on the formula even more by giving you a wider variety of objectives to complete. While Katamari Damacy is mostly focused around the same few maps, We Love Katamari has a far larger and wider variety of eclectic maps and biomes to roll up, and there are far more inventive objectives like an underwater stage, a stage where you can't stop rolling, a stage where you have to get as big as possible with a few items, a stage where your score is calculated by the cost of each item, and one of my personal favorites, a stage where you roll up a snowball and make a snowman. Where Katamari Damacy did a great job at establishing and fleshing out the core premise of Katamari, We Love shows off how versatile this unique style of gameplay can truly be. It's generally a lot less challenging than the first game as well, which I think was a good call to prevent it from falling into that frustrating kind of gimmickry. We Love Katamari is certainly a more gimmicky game than its predecessor, but when most of the gimmicks are fun, that's not really a bad thing.
Both Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari are also chock-full of side content for people who really want to invest into these weird games. While the campaigns are short, both games are filled with a ton of optional side missions you can do, and a ton of collectibles. There's a bunch of accessories you can find for the Prince some of which even having their own perks, there's a ton of the Princes's cousins scattered around who you can even play as in We Love, and there's a bestiary of every single item and person in the game each with their own quirky description. Both games also have special objectives you can meet by going above and beyond the requirements for each stage too, and the first game even rewards you with some endless stages for reaching them. And of course, I can't not mention We Love's multiplayer mode and experimental postgame levels (the highlight being the one where you have to role up 1,000,000 roses, it's as long and tedious as it sounds). Despite being released as budget titles, the first two Katamari games are filled to the brim with content which makes for games I love to randomly revisit whenever I feel like.
The Katamari Damacy games also look... well, I guess unique would be the best word? These games are very surrealist, using a colorful low-poly style that could come off as outdated if it wasn't entirely purposeful. It's not a Katamari game if you're not picking up cartoonish low-poly objects, it's a part of the charm. But what really strikes me about the presentation in Katamari, and to a larger extent the games as a whole, is how much they remind me of the anime, Nichijou. Told you I'd get back to this. Despite being made almost a decade apart, Katamari Damacy and Nichijou scratch the same exact itch. They're both absurdist, proudly Japanese pieces of media with a distinctly geometric art style, a quirky soundtrack, and a love for the mundane. After all, Nichijou is Japanese for "everyday life". While Katamari Damacy satires the massive amount of unnecessary stuff humans accumulate, it also takes the time to linger on each individual object and person you roll up, display each lovingly crafted low-poly item in the bottom left of the screen. In a strange way, by depicting everything a weird low-poly artstyle, Katamari gets you to stop, smell the roses, and take notice of the little things in life.
And of course, I can't talk about Katamari without bringing up those incredible soundtracks. The first two Katamari games are known for their eclectic collection of ridiculously catchy j-pop tracks of all sorts of tempos, genres, and vibes. There's jazz, mambo, rock, animal sounds, but it all maintains the same happy vibe, and every song manages to incorprate something about rolling or love. Both Katamari soundtracks could easily be released as their own albums and work totally fine, but they also heighten the games' absurdist tones incredibly well. Out of the two, I do think I slightly prefer the first game's soundtrack due to its abundance of truly iconic tracks like Katamari On The Rocks, The Moon And The Prince, Katamari Mambo, Roll Me In, Que Sera Sera, and of course, Lonely Rolling Star. However, We Love still has its great tracks like Everlasting Love, Bluffing Damacy, and Baby Universe.
Oh yeah, and the first two Katamari games even got remakes recently! They're great remakes, pretty much perfect if you ask me. Both remakes look brighter and sharper than the originals, but they don't lose their low-poly appeal. The controls are untouched, the soundtrack is untouched, nothing is removed. The only major improvements are the first game making some of the time limits less strict and the second game adding some alright extra stages. Compared to Namco's recent remake of the Klonoa games, I think the Katamari games got a much better deal. Nothing was compromised and the only things that needed improvement were improved upon, the Reroll remakes are probably the definitive way to play these two gems nowadays, and that's just great!
Overall, the Katamari Damacy duology is probably the gold standard of what I love about these kinds of quirky, experimental video games. They take a single inventive and fun concept, push it as far as it'll go, and embue themselves with a ton of weird visual style, phenomenally off-beat music, a ridiculous amount of side content, and a clear directorial vision that ties everything together. Like many of my other favorite games, the Katamari games are truly one of a kind.
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