Katamari Damacy REROLL (PC)

Remastered -	Developer:	Monkeycraft	|	Release Date:	2018	|	Systems:	Win, Switch, PS4, XBOne
Original Game -	Developer:	Namco	|	Release Date:	2004	|	Systems:	PS2

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This year on Super Adventures, I'm mostly playing games that have appeared on a 'top 10' somewhere, and I found Katamari Damacy REROLL on Hard Drive's Top 10 Games That Came Out This Year After We Published our Top 10 List list. According to the site's 'About' page "Hard Drive is a very real video games news site that you should not question," (as opposed to being the video game equivalent of The Onion), and that's good enough for me.

I've played the game before, back when it was just called Katamari Damacy, but I've suddenly found a good reason to come back to it with this remake: my friend surprised me with a copy as a gift and is expecting a proper review in return. And he'll get a review alright, I'm going to tell everyone exactly what I think about this game...

But first here's some trivia, straight from Wikipedia:

Those kanji sticking out of the Earth up there are a bit wonky, but when they're written properly they look almost identical to each other, as a bit of clever visual alliteration. When you read them out they say 'katamari damashii', shockingly, which means something like 'clump spirit'. You know, like 'team spirit', except for clumps. The kanji are even on the American cover, because they go along with the wacky Japaneseness of it that they were using as a selling point. They assumed it would be too weird for Europeans though, so the classic PS2 game was never actually released in PAL regions. It never got ported to other systems either... until it was remade in Unity for this REROLL remastered re-release.

One more fact: it was not too weird for Europe. In fact the series has been a massive worldwide hit and now everyone knows what the game is and how it plays. Describing it for you would likely be pointless, but hey I've already explained how to play Super Mario Bros. and Pokémon Red, so this is far from the first time I've wasted both your time and my own. It's what I do.

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The game begins with a mysterious figure rising up from beyond the hills and catching the attention of some cows. He's got a salmon-coloured tetrahedron for a nose and a butt for a chin, and the cape and tights makes me think he's a superhero. The crown on his head indicates that he's royalty of some kind though. Either that or he found it inside that Christmas cracker he's wearing.

He stretches out his hands and takes to the sky, allowing the bovine spectators to bear witness to his full majesty. The cows flee in terror as clover leaves start raining from above and a baby-delivery stork carries a tiny green person across the screen.

Suddenly two columns of waterfowl emerge to add some vocals to the tune playing in the background, while a giraffe and and elephant pop up in the distance.

A rainbow springing from the mountain comes back down to wash everything away and reveal the mysterious figure from earlier playing guitar with his family.

You know, there's something a bit weird about this intro. I mean the theme song doesn't even seem to have any guitar in it. The theme does have singing, with a guy saying "Na na na na na na na na na Katamari Damacy", but the mysterious figure is keeping his mysterious mouth shut, so that's nothing to do with him either.

Here's what the scene looked like in the original PlayStation 2 version if you're curious.

PlayStation 2

It's definitely the same picture, it was widescreen even back in the day, but the Queen's face used to be smaller and her eyes were squintier. I'm not sure why it looks so dark though.

The cutscene continues with pandas and mushrooms and rainbows and more mushrooms. Man this intro becomes very mushroom-heavy by the end. Then the family drives home to their castle (which is painted like a mushroom) and the tiny green person floats away into the sky on a balloon.

Alright, the song's over, time to get to work.

Man I'm glad I didn't waste any time getting a screenshot of this tutorial screen, as I accidentally skipped past it a moment later while trying to bring up the options menu. All I wanted to do was set up my graphics settings! I can see a lot of people making this mistake as the game actually defaults to a 1280x720 window for some reason. Not much fun if you've got a 4K screen.

Turns out I'm controlling the tiny geen person, aka. the Prince, and that antenna on his head is so he can receive signals from the player's Xbox pad (or keyboard if you prefer). You press both sticks up to go forward, both sticks back to... actually you can just read this off the screenshot. It basically uses tank controls, proper ones straight out of the classic arcade game Battlezone, except you can roll the katamari sideways as well.

The game's website claims that the game is easy to control with no buttons to press, but if you're on keyboard you'll be pressing WASD with the left hand and IJKL with the right (good luck with that). Also it's not entirely true even on controller as there are buttons to get a top-down glimpse of the area or let me look around in first person. I can even tilt the camera up and check out the ceiling.

Bloody hell! I wasn't expecting that. Who let him into the Looney Tunes logo?

Why won't this game just let me change my options? Also why does the sky look like it's been rendered wrong? That's a strange look they've gone with.

Alright, the guy from the ceiling has come back, and it turns out that he is the King of All Cosmos. Though the very first thing he does in the game proper is destroy the cosmos in an epic drunken bender. He is a bad king.

He's also a bad father as he's decided that seeing as he brought the Prince into this world, the kid owes him a debt, so it's now his job to fix the sky. Scientists believe there are about 70 billion trillion stars, but you can only actually see 9000 from Earth with the naked eye so I'm sure that'll be enough.

Man, look at those beautiful low polygon models and pixelly textures! They've remade the entire game in a new engine and apparently changed nothing in the process. The art style is preserved.

If you're wondering about the weird capitalisation in that text, the King is royalty so he uses the royal 'We' in his dialogue. Not that he actually has a voice, he sounds like a DJ scratching a record. You'd think that would get annoying and in most games it probably would, but I'm just too distracted by all the mad things that he says to even notice. The guy's not entirely of this world. In fact I'm not sure he's even slightly of this world.

Alright I'm controlling the Prince, he's got a katamari to push, and I need to do whatever it takes to increase its size to 10cm. (The Prince is tiny... also he uses the metric system). No time limit on this first level, it's basically a practice run.

Hey I'm on TV! Man that television was retro even back when the original game came out. Okay what I have to do here is go towards the tiny objects and roll over them so that they stick to the ball, that's it. It's pretty simple.

The control scheme is a bit unusual, but I got the hang of it pretty much immediately. This isn't one of those games where the challenge comes from fighting awkward controls. I'm basically steering the ball itself, not the Prince, and there's no danger of it ever rolling off without him.

PlayStation 2

Here's the PS2 original for comparison. It's not exactly the same as REROLL: it's darker, you can see less on the sides because of the 4:3 ratio, and I think I spot a little extra blurriness in the distant walls... but it's basically exactly the same. Same gameplay, same graphics, same frame rate.

Actually that's not entirely true, as there's a different song playing. Seems like the NA version of OG PS2 Katamari made a few changes, including a change to the level 1 music, but REROLL stays true to the Japanese version. The soundtrack apparently syncs up after this level though, and they've kept the NA PS2 translation as far as I've noticed. Thankfully.

I cleared everything I could from the table, but I can only pick up items of a certain size relative to my katamari so I rolled down the side of the tablecloth to a new hunting ground. I can go back up there later, but I have to go after smaller prey first.

Man, I wouldn't like to go anywhere near this floor without shoes on; this is a messy house. It's also very Japanese. They haven't tried to localise the game for the West and turn the yen coins into quarters or whatever.

Oh damn, that's an interesting fake game console. It's got square button controllers on the sides like an early Famicom, a NES colour scheme, games on memory cards like a Sega Mark III, and it has the base of a PlayStation 2. It's like a glimpse at what a Sony console would've looked like in the 80s.

Crap, that mouse just rammed me while I was getting a better look! What a cheeky bloody rodent! I'm going to go get some more stuff to make my katamari grow, then I'm coming back to roll him up too.

Huh, I'm already at 10cm? But... my revenge... oh whatever. Fine. The mouse lives this time.

The King appeared and vomited up a rainbow that took us into space, then it was time for another tutorial. This time a non-interactive animated one.

This is a good image I reckon, saves me from having to explain it myself. In fact I should just post scans of game manuals instead of screenshots in future, as then I won't have to write anything at all! I won't even have to play the games.

PlayStation 2

Here's the PS2 version explaining that yes you can roll up people, but you probably shouldn't as it's immoral and bad for their health. Especially considering that you're launching these katamaris into space afterwards.

Oh hang on, my mistake, the game actually says you SHOULD roll up innocent people. This is a game about rolling everything up. Everything. No exceptions.

That is a weird-ass image, but it really shows off the scale. The King's pretty big and the Prince is absolutely tiny. Genetics are weird.

The King has assessed my katamari and discovered that it's mostly stationary, though there's a few snacks in there too. Absolutely no rats though! I really need to do better on the rats next time.

He lets the katamari float away into the sky to form a bright new 10cm star... called Cram.

Now I get to visit the Prince's home planet! It doesn't have a name I guess, but it does have a massive gramophone and an equally giant gift. This is that menu screen I've been looking for! I can finally change the resolution!

Turns out I didn't actually have to mess around with the graphics settings after all though as there's barely anything in there and it was already set to 'on'. Anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, vignette, that kind of thing.

The planet has some other features, plus I can fly off to a multiplayer mushroom, but it's the house at the top I'm mostly interested in right now. That's my save point, and I need to remember to visit before turning the game off or my progress will likely be lost. The port's old school.

I can also visit the Earth, which is good because all my levels are here. Now I can either go back to Make a Star 1, or I can visit Make a Star 2, here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

This level select is going to get a bit awkward when I've unlocked more stages and it's covered in balls and stars, because the level name doesn't appear until I'm right on top of them. It's going to be like scanning for minerals in Mass Effect 2.

MAKE A STAR 2

PlayStation 2

Hey this isn't in the middle of the ocean at all! In fact it's put me back in the same house I was in on the last level, and I'm back to a tiny katamari.

There's different stuff on the floor though, and that's enough to make it feel like a new place. Like I didn't spot any frogs worshipping a Lego car on Make a Star 1. Clearly these people are addicted to buying stuff they don't need and leaving it all over their damn floor. This works to my advantage though, as I've got a time limit instead of a size limit this time, so with all this stuff at hand there's nothing stopping me from growing powerful enough to get my revenge on the mice.

PlayStation 2

Soon, my unsuspecting rodent friends. Soon my katamari will be big enough to catch you all!

There's a lot of stuff moving on these levels, sometimes because it's being pushed by a mouse, sometimes because it just wanted to spin I guess. I saw some blocks moving around and didn't think anything of it, but it turned out that they were being carried away by tiny ants! Which I can pick up!

Also there's a portable stereo here surrounded by cassettes and now I'm really wondering what decade this game is meant to be set in anyway. Anyway I nicked the batteries out of it and moved on. I'll have to come back for the cassette tapes later.

I escaped out of the house into the garden! There's a whole new area out here! Also it's Christmas apparently!

The time limits in REROLL are apparently more lenient sometimes than in the PS2 game and I can believe it as I've already gone way past the 20cm target for this level. But I'm still frantically grabbing stuff, because why not? I want to see how much bigger I can get this thing in the next 2 minutes or so.

PlayStation 2

The table I started on seems so small now! I love how the perspective shifts as you play.

Okay, that's about as big as it's going to get this time. I had to put up with an annoying alarm sound playing for the final minute before I got Royal Rainbow'd back to space for the post-game analysis. Turns out I picked up a Royal Present on that level, though I don't remember seeing it.

Got to remember to save when I get back to his home planet.

Oh hang on, this is new. I've reached a cutscene with creepy box people and actual human voices! They're in Japanese though so I still have to read the subtitles.

These two kids were watching some kind of tokusatsu on their antique television when the broadcast was interrupted by a brief news update. The news anchor just wanted to let viewers know that all the stars have disappeared. He could've waited a moment though as when the show comes back the hero has vanquished the monster!

Their mother was out of the room and missed everything, but she's got no time for tall stories about absent stars anyway as it's time to go! Apparently.

PlayStation 2

Here's the PlayStation 2 version for a comparison. I've cropped the black bars and boosted the brightness so you can compare the art better, and it's not as close a match as I expected. The shading's smoother in the original art and it looks more airbrushed. No less weird though.

A bigger difference is that the voices in the American PS2 game are in English! The delivery is very low key either way though and I don't really have a preference.

MAKE A STAR 3

Man, the expression on that cat is amazing. Also is there a pizza on that car's wheel?

I've escaped the house now but this is still a fairly small area I'm rolling around. It's a little hard to judge size though when you're pushing a 22cm ball around. Like, am I going to be able to collect those plastic bottles over there or will I just bounce off them and lose stuff?

It's easy to tell with animals at least, as if I'm a threat to them they'll generally panic. Mice now flee in terror when they see me coming! In fact, I'm going to grab a bit more stuff and then see if I can roll up a cat.

Sometimes the King of All Cosmos will interrupt with some more of his commentary and wisdom. I wish I could screenshot everything that comes out of his mouth, because it's kind of loopy. In fact I wish I could understand Japanese and read the original script. Not because it comes across as mistranslated, much the opposite.

Here, have a bit of his speech from the intro:

"We felt the beauty of all things, and felt love for all. That’s how it was. Did you see? We smiled a genuine smile. Did you see? The stars splintering in perfect beauty. So many there used to be, almost a nuisance. Now there's nothing but darkness. Hee... 'Tis but a dream... Hee... But a beautiful one. B❤︎U❤︎T❤︎ That miraculous fabulous moment has passed, it's over."

This is how he talks all the time!

MAKE A STAR 4

Oh man, the room at the start is looking a lot smaller right now that my katamari is on a diet of buckets and cats. In fact it might almost be big enough to grab a human...

YES, I got them! That person who kept staring at me while I rolled across their dining table. They are now one with the katamari, at least until I accidentally hit something while navigating this rapidly shrinking space.

There's a few games that let you explore real life locations from perspective of a tiny character, but not many I can think of that change the scale like this.

Nooo, let me escape into the town, I want to keep growing! Stop fading to white, I'm not done yet.

Well, that sucks. I didn't even manage to find the Royal Present. Oh by the way, that last present I found turned out to be this winter scarf the Prince is wearing now.

Meanwhile, on the PS2 version, I accidentally fell out of the room into the garden too early and was faced with a severe shortage of stuff my size. I eventually scavenged enough to get big enough to get back in, but I wasn't gaining size fast enough to make up for lost time. This earned me one of the most terrifying 'you lost' screens in video game history:

PlayStation 2

Okay it's just the King with his hands up in the rain, it's not like he's shooting lasers from his eyes or anything, but he's a creepy guy at the best of times. Also why is it raining in space?

So it is actually possible to lose a level, especially on the PS2 game, you just have to really screw yourself over somehow.

PlayStation 2

It doesn't help when the game starts pulling this crap. There's no room in there for the camera so all I get is a wall and the symbol for katamari to assure me that my ball is still there, collecting light bulbs apparently. It's not a huge issue or even a common one really, it's just annoying sometimes.

Fortunately REROLL has fixed this by letting me see through walls when necessary!

By the way, there is a point to the game telling you what you just picked up in the bottom left of the screen.

You're actually building up a collection listing everything you've ever found, sorted by size (or even location if you want). It tells you what you got, how much you're still missing, what's rare, and gives you a little picture you can spin around like you're playing Resident Evil.

It's a little hard to go hunting for specific objects when the timer's constantly pressuring you to clean up the floor, but there are three stages with an 'Eternal' mode to unlock. Get a big enough ball on one of them and you can return with all the time in the world to explore.

MAKE A STAR 5

Make a Star 5 started small as usual, but I just got my katamari big enough to smash through a '50 cm' barrier and now I've escaped into the world! Not much of the world mind you, just a few streets, but this is a lot more than just a house and a garden.

1m30cm later and the streets are filled with the screams of my victims. Seriously, people panic and actually yell out in terror when the giant ball is finally big enough to come for them. They're not eager to sign up for this ride.

Though the downside of having a massive katamari and eating everyone with it is that it gets jammed when you try to go down narrow streets afterwards.

MAKE URSA MAJOR

Half the levels in the game are just about grabbing as much of everything as you possibly can, but there's also the constellation stages that complicate things a little. Like in the Pisces stage you're only being judged on how many fish you picked up (the King wants fresh fish to make the sky fresher).

This is the Ursa Major stage where you only have to collect one single bear. That's it, any bear will do. Any bear-like thing at all and you've won, you can move on. You never have to see the level again.

That's not very satisfying though and the King's definitely not impressed. You want to build up your size and get the biggest bear possible. Trouble is, you have to avoid every lesser bear along the way, and you can imagine how hard that gets when they become tiny specks in the path of your 1m93cm6mm monster ball. I had no idea there was a teddy bear lying there in the street!

MAKE A STAR 7

Man, I'm fascinated by this guy. The King I mean, not the one with POWER written across his ass. By the look of this podium the guy apparently came second to a pint-sized Prince before the level even began, he's rubbish.

The King on the other hand, he's a dick who continually belittles his own son when he's busy fixing his mistakes. He's flaky, he's impatient, he's completely full of himself, and he's generally a bad person. He does keep getting the Prince Royal Presents though, and his excuses for never actually giving them to him are pretty great:

• He threw it to Earth for the dog to fetch.
• He got bored and gave it away.
• It got pick-pocketed during morning rush hour.
• He "had an issue" and "just sort of pitched it away".

And so on.

Plus he does give credit where credit is due. If you come back with a huge katamari he'll be suitably impressed and the Prince will finally get all the validation he's probably been craving. (It's hard to tell with that guy, he never actually talks).

MAKE A STAR 8

Oh cool, I'm starting off under a car this time. Some areas, like this, you can only get to when you're very small so you've got to be careful not to grow too big if there's someplace you want to be with something you need to get.

Okay I've got a massive 18 minutes on this stage, so let's see how big I can get this thing before the timer's done.

15 MINUTES LATER

I rolled up the whole town. Well, okay not quite all of it as the katamari's still not big enough somehow to roll up that hot air balloon on the top. Also I've missed a car at the bottom of the screen. Man I hope that's the car you start under on this level. I definitely ain't getting back underneath it now!

If you look carefully you'll see that the road to my right is the long hill I rolled down five screenshots ago. I'm revisiting a lot of familiar places over and over in these levels (I'm definitely not on a world tour), but they open up a bit as they go. I'm basically stuck in the area you see on screen now, it's surrounded by mountains, but I bet if I ever come back on a later stage I'll be able to escape.

You'd think it'd be easy to get around with all the buildings removed, but it's hard to tell what bits of the scenery you're going to run into at this scale. I keep losing houses and I don't even know what I hit!

MAKE THE MOON

Okay on this level I went from running away from cows to rolling up skyscrapers in just 15 minutes. The Prince is insanely powerful.

Hey there's the space rocket from the cutscenes! After every 'Make a Star' level I've been getting scenes of that family from earlier getting on a plane and heading over to the rocket to watch their astronaut dad fly to the moon. There's not much going on in them, but it's interesting to see what the humans are thinking about all this. Unfortunately the moon got blown up and the mission was cancelled, but I'm fixing that right now!

I'm a bit concerned about those giant mushrooms though. They're everywhere all of a sudden and they're creeping me out.

Man, it's a rare to see an ending screen as overwhelmingly positive as this one.

I did it! I've improved everyone's lives by restoring 9 individual stars, 9 constellations and the moon over the course of 19 stages. It's not a huge game to be honest, though there is still one final stage left... which I won't spoil.


CONCLUSION

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Katamari Damacy is a game where you play as an alien child pressured into destroying the world by his jerk of a dad, who continues to belittle him on every stage, and yet it's one of the most joyful games I can think of. Against all odds and sense, they've made a collect 'em up fun to play!

It can trace its lineage all the way back to Pac-Man, where there's a screenful of things that need picking up and opponents that get in your way. The game relies on the player's desire to face this chaos head-on, pick up what they can and clear the area. Though there's no temporary power pellets here, everything you pick up makes you bigger, so it mimics that RPG feeling of constantly growing stronger until you're capable of beating up everything that was giving you trouble earlier. Not just creatures, but boxes, fences, buildings... whatever was in your way. Then you get to launch everything that annoyed you into space. Man, this game would be very dark if it wasn't so bright and cartoony.

The game's a celebration of stuff, from thumb tacks to ocean liners. Everything has an entry in the database and you can get one of everything if you feel like 100%ing the game. Well, you can get it, but you can't keep it. The Prince is perhaps the most successful thief in history, but the only things he wants for himself, the only things he uses, are the gifts from his dad. It's a bit of a shame their relationship isn't healthier, but there are signs that the King really does care for his kid. Like he actually bothers to stick around pay attention to what he's up to for 7 minutes or so a level! Then he gets bored and ends the stage.

I'm usually not a fan of time limits, they stress me out and cause me to make mistakes, and I'm somehow only remembering that I have this problem now. The whole game has you racing against time limits and it didn't bother me at all! I suppose it helps that it's kind of a pushover. Unless you make a mistake and get isolated from your items you're probably going to beat a level, especially in the REROLL version. But it may take a few tries to get enough to items to win the King's praise, or find the Royal Present. You don't have to learn the levels, but it helps. The trouble with the game is that that there aren't actually whole lot of levels. It took me just over 7 hours to complete it, and I was taking notes, replaying stages, and generally screwing around. There's plenty of replay value, but there's not much variety in the places you're visiting so it gets a little repetitive and disappointing.

The game's got that Micro Machines charm to it, where you get to explore real world locations as a tiny character, then it takes it a step further by letting you grow in size and see the same places from a different perspective. It's an amazing feature that you basically don't see in any other game, but you get to start inside a house, or outside, and that's basically it. The King starts every stage by greeting you in a different language and saying you should visit that country some day, then he sends you right back to that one town in Japan again! It feels like the game promises more than it ultimately delivers on. Though you certainly get to go from tiny to literally rolling up islands on the same stage, and that's a bloody impressive trick.

It's a really distinctive game, even outside of its unique gameplay. It relies a lot on its visual design and soundtrack, which is great if they work for you. Personally I thought the music danced along the line between fun and quirky, and just unbearable, but your mileage may vary. A lot of people would call it one of the best soundtracks in video games... personally I'm grateful that only the catchy songs I like have gotten lodged into my brain on a loop. The controls are distinctive as well, though I clicked with them right away. I don't know whether that's due to intuitive design or muscle memory, but I don't get the impression anyone was meant to struggle to get the ball where they wanted it to go. Well, except for when you're navigating actual obstacles or getting across narrow bridges, or you've collected a bunch of flagpoles and the katamari's off-balance. I just wish the game did a better job of indicating what's safe to pick up and what's going to bounce you back, or any job at all really. The fact you've got a huge-ass ball filling the screen doesn't make it any easier to see what's blocking you sometimes.

I keep talking about the original game, because really that's what Katamari Damacy REROLL is. It looks the same, it plays the same, it has the same content, it's basically the same. They've included the ability to see through obstacles from We Love Katamari, but if the sequels had any other improvements, they didn't get carried over to this. But that's fine, as the original game really holds up, and the higher resolution doesn't hurt. Honestly, this is an amazing game and I love it. It's arguably not the very best title in the genre it's invented, but that's only because it has a pretty good sequel, and I'm hoping that gets ported too.

Oh, I almost forgot! I got the game a present and unlike the King I'm just going to hand it over without any messing around:
Alright, I'm done for now. Don't forget to leave a comment!

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"Hang on," you might be thinking, "This is the same 'next game' clue you gave us last time!" This is actually true and there's a good reason for that: I forgot I'd given you a clue and changed my mind on what game I wanted to get to next.

But if you go back to the last post and check it actually says "BACK JUNE" underneath the picture, so I never actually said it'd be the next game. Plus this gives you a second chance to guess what it is.