Mythinks #8

We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie - It Just Says it For Us

A kinda-weird hump in doing this "review games we just played" blog is that we had a spell of starting a lot of series we wanted to get off our bucket list already in recent years, which means we have a number of games we have slotted up to play next that are sequels to said games. And it just feels strange to review a sequel but not the game that came before it, y'know? Especially in Katamari's case, where we actually DID review Katamari Damacy in my brief little venture into video essays before I decided that just wasn't for me. No, I'd rather not show them, because they were not very good. Just if you've seen them, you've seen them.

At any rate, Katamari Damacy is definitely up there with Chibi Robo as a game that feels like a darling gem in a generation of gaming I already had a ton of nostalgia for. And if we were to summarize our feelings on the first Katamari game, it was a delight start to finish. One of those games that stung to have turn out to be on the short side. And as much as we like to try and approach every game with as middling expectations as possible for the sake of fairness, it was hard to keep reigns on said expectations when we had heard so dang much about how much better the sequel, We Love Katamari is. So I suppose thankfully, we would say it does live up to that hype.

Not to get ahead of ourselves. It's a sequel that sort of echoes Mega Man 2's relationship with the first Mega Man, in that it's more of the same, but vastly expanded in just about any way you can imagine. More levels, a lot more of them are inventive, weird gimmick levels, and also something about this game just invited us to hunt down collectibles, more, in a way that's hard to pin down. Maybe simply in that they were a smidge easier to find on your own with no guide to help.

But to the like. Ten people uninitiated to what Katamari even is, it's probably one of the most unique games of all time, being an arcadey score-attack type game where the goal is to start small and roll up progressively larger objects to get as big as you possibly can before time runs out. That sounds simple enough on premise alone, but what makes it interesting is the twin-stick controls where you have to use both sticks to move, and other than a handful of exceptions, that's all the controls there are, with no use of face or shoulder buttons. You push forward on both sticks to move forward, hold left forward and right back to turn right, vice versa, hold back while moving forward to brake. It's definitely a control scheme that takes a bit to get used to, even after already playing a Katamari game before and only coming to this years afterward. But it slowly starts to feel like learning to ride a bike, slowly becoming more natural over time until it feels like second nature, which is definitely the genius of the control scheme.

VIXI:

The only real downside with the controls is if you're playing this with a non Playstation-styled controller. This control scheme was designed for the Playstation controller where the analogs were both on the chin of the controller. Not that it was unplayable on Switch, but it did feel just a smidge odd. Just enough to feel the need to point it out here.

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The conceit of the game rather comically sets up the fact that this is indeed just more of the Katamari you love. The plot of the first game was the King of all Cosmos broke all the stars in a drunk stupor, and in being chronically incapable of accepting accountability for his mistakes, he made his son and/or his son's cousins roll up Katamaris to fill the night sky with stars again. The plot of this game is that it turns out they only filled out the sky near earth, so they just got more work to do.

Not to say there is absolutely no narrative spice going on for this game. Also not that that's the important part of a Katamari. But regardless. This time around, the levels use the requests of fans of the original Katamari Damacy as a framing device for what each level has going on, rather than theming each level after a constellation. As it turns out, people love being rolled up into a giant ball and flung into space where they violently explode into a massive ball of gas and plasma in spite of all the shrieks of terror. Ludonarrative dissonance be damned.

And just like how the previous game had an ongoing cutscene-told story in a family trying to meet up with the astronaut dad as the chaos of the main game is happening just barely out of view, this game gives an origin story to The King of all Cosmos himself, detailing his adventures when he was a prince and dealing with HIS even more overbearing dad. So basically now you know where he gets not ever being all that impressed unless you're well and overachieving.

Speaking of intense expectations, this game almost in and of itself feels themed around the whole idea of a sequel to a great game having to bear the weight of that game. Just given that your average Johnathan Gamer expects nothing less than for media to get better and better in an endless upward trend. This game even starts by trying to hype you up for this new Katamari you're about to play, with such amusing phrases as "Katamari Damacy was lazy." Definitely meant to be read as one of The King's little non-sequiturs, but it does feel like an intentional layer given everything else around it.

As stated, the game's levels are given by fans of the original Katamari Damacy, or even just people that have heard about how great Katamari Damacy is, asking you to fulfill their weird little tasks, putting a whole lot of expectation on you, the sequel to Katamari Damacy, to solve all of their mundane woes.

And boy are their words comically mean, at times. Like, it's to be expected with the King of all Cosmos. He's notorious for complaining that your Katamari wasn't just a little bit bigger. But then his sycophantic little fans will also put you on blast, whining about how you only achieved a little bit over their expectation, often even rejecting your Katamari outright for not meeting their lofty standards all while voicing how disappointed they are in the "Sequel to Katamari Damacy", in essence.

As always with Katamari, this is definitely meant to be an extra kick in the tush to make you want to practice the levels more and more to finally impress these deadbeat critics. But I can't help but also feel like there is a layer of venting what it's like to try and please fans of your game series. Maybe hard to tell, given this game came out in 2005, and modern internet fandom discourse was in its infancy back then, but there are plenty of parallels between the way these fans will call the sequel to Katamari Damacy disappointing the same way, well, anyone calls any sequel disappointing. The casual layer of truth under the satirical jokey-joke.

The game's sense of humor, in general, is on point, if not funnier than the previous game was, back when the only character with a substantial amount of dialogue was The King himself. And plenty can and has already been said about the way the game puts on the the goofy, quirky clown makeup before said clown calls anything you've ever achieved barely above mediocrity. But naturally, the game is home to many a sight gag. Like. SOOO many sight gags. Too many to ever put in a list. I say before trying anyway.

Such as a giant chain of stag beetles all trying to throw each other, or one of the cousins playing jump-rope with a pair of muscular clouds, using a cold front line as the jump rope. Or the simple fact that the level where you roll up clouds has cold front lines as an item you can pick up in the first place. The racing level featuring formula-one cars, sports cars, jockeys on horseback, food carts, RC cars, and frogs hopping really really fast. It is an infinite cacophony of weird shit happening all around you all at once in a way that almost kind of primes you to surrender to this game's anarchy.

Also the premises of the levels and some of the writing is just good. Every time you start a level by talking to a Katamari fan, The King has a stick up his ass about helping anyone out until they butter him up with a compliment, at which point he's overjoyous to get his son (or son's cousins) to help. Which is already a funny running gag, but then they subvert it when you start the candy-themed level, where instead of having any resistance, he just says "Hell yeah, let's eat some sweets." Plus it's also just objectively funny that Katamari, one of the most unique games in all of existence, is willing to have an NPC that calls this game "just a ripoff" of "rolling a snowball."

Oh and maybe it goes without saying but. Katamari music, as you probably hear, is just as good as it ever is. Maybe even better, as DiscoxPrince, Everlasting Love, and Tsuyogari Katamari have failed to exit our regular brain-jukebox rotation despite starting this game quite a while ago.

And of course, we've gotten this far without realizing we've barely talked about the game itself. When we get into a flow, we just go, man. But like we said, this game is in many ways just like the first one, but expanded in about any way you can think of. There's way more cousins, quite often being more than one per level, there's more levels overall, and a bigger density of them are the strange little gimmick levels. Some of them still definitely akin to Cancer or Sagittarius from the first game, where the goal is to just roll up x amount of this one particular type of object. But a lot of levels this time around are a bit more involved than that.

Some still use old gimmicks, the level type where you have to get as close to a target size as possible while not being able to see what size you currently are is there, the cow and bear levels are combined into one cowbear level, but there's now a level themed around cleaning up a kid's room, and you have to find the best route to roll up every single object in the room. A favorite of mine just for the chaos it induces is the race level, which still plays like a get-as-big-as-possible level, but with the catch that your Katamari will now roll uncontrollably fast.

JINX:

one level type i find particularly interesting is the baby's level, where you have to get as big as possible while only being allowed to roll up 50 objects in total. it forcing you to have to figure out what's the biggest objects you can roll up at which points, being careful to not pick up the tinier objects that litter the ground. it's a real interesting take on katamari rules that forces you to be a bit more thoughtful with how you move, in perhaps an environment a little less chaotic than the cow-bear family of levels. it's also just an interesting way to approach playing Katamari.

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IONO:

A favorite of mine is the candy level. Just because rolling up the candy house piece of candy by piece of candy is really satisfying, hehe.

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CHIAKI:

Ohh, ohh, my turn. One of my favorites is the sumo level, where you gotta roll around a small man who wants to compete in sumo wrestling, so you roll him into food to make him bigger and bigger until you think you're big enough to try and run into the wrestler he's challenging. It's not too different from the "Collect these specific things" levels, but it's just enough flavor to make it fun. That, and I like how it has a little bit clearer of a goal in mind, since you can knock the opponent out of the ring, as sumo wrestling usually plays out. But you'll also get a bit more praise if you get so big you just absorb them into the Katamari.

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There's also the charity level, where you roll up objects and you're tallied on how much the monetary value of each item is. And naturally, there's some very teeny tiny objects hidden around that are worth a lot, like jewelry and such.

And that is, of course, the weird relationship this game can have with, well, being a video game. Sequels often have an expectation to refine the controls and formula, streamlining things more and more until you wind up with a perfect, frictionless sphere. But this is Katamari we're playing! There's no frictionless spheres, here! If you're weird and DON'T like the first Katamari, this one probably won't change your mind, since it is largely the same. The same except it's an even better ragebaiter. That's right, this sphere has MORE friction! And it's better for it!

A series like Katamari does kind of feel like it lives and dies by how well it can reinvent itself in short bursts. To refine on the game itself would be to take away what makes it so unique. So naturally, it relies on these level gimmicks of odd little distractions to do the heavy lifting of being good sequel material. And as such, yeah, this game, overall, has far more variety than the first game does. The first game definitely feels a bit like it's spinning its wheels at times, what with having a number of levels that are simply doing what you're normally doing, but you're tallied on how many crabs or matching pairs you roll up instead of sheer size.

Not that this game doesn't have a couple of stinkers. One level definitely sticks out as feeling a little pointless, that being the snowman level. You're given a relatively small space to roll around in, no time limit, and with a goal of rolling up a head for a giant snowman, getting as close to a "normal" head size proportional to the body as you can get, using your better judgement. It's the "just right" levels but a lot more meandering, with how I spent at least a couple minutes doing nothing but rolling up snow, since I straight up ran out of objects to roll up. It's a nice and chill distraction, I suppose, but it doesn't really play to Katamari's strengths, I feel.

CHIAKI:

The campfire level is a level with a neat idea that I wish was executed a little better. The idea of the level is that your Katamari is on fire, and you gotta keep rolling into stuff to keep it aflame. Go too long without rolling anything up, and the fire will start to fizzle out. It's just also one of those levels that ends when you roll up one final object, so you gotta route around, leaving enough stuff behind so that there aren't huge dead zones with nothing left to roll up. But the big campfire you roll into to end the level is at the top of a hill with only one path to get up there, so if you go up there too early, you might have screwed yourself, since you could easily roll everything up on the path that goes up the hill.

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And a perhaps intended side-effect of this bigger focus on gimmick levels is that the simple, basic, played straight, no strings, no bells, no whistles "get as big as possible" levels almost feel like a bigger event. There's only five of them this time, and none of them feel too much like filler, each one almost feeling like you're ending an act within the game itself, like it uses the more traditional levels to climax. And also the fact that this game has more levels than the previous game while less of them are the normal, no-gimmicks levels feels like a testament to this game's creativity.

And on top of all that, this game also has small variations on the same stage. You have to play each level more than once to get those variations, which is a little inconvenient when what you had in mind was going back into a level to grab the cousins or presents you missed. But The main, normal levels have "as fast as possible" variations, where the goal is to reach the target size as quickly as possible rather than getting as big as you can within a time limit. Which are fine enough distractions, but we didn't feel as compelled to practice these. The "just right" level has three variations for three sizes. What almost feels like the true intention of the school level, but is an optional second run, is a level where you have to roll up every single student as fast as you can in some sick, twisted way to get them all out of school. As if kids wouldn't be hurrying out of class normally. Unrealistic.

Some variations are simple ramp-ups in difficulty. The campfire level is an example of that, where its second variant just has a bigger campfire at the end. And the sumo level has three progressively larger opponents to roll up. But it's still welcome variety, which is nice. Some of even these minor variations even have differences in level design, mainly minor ones, but sometimes they'll add a new cousin to the mix somewhere in the level, or change the level completely. Though definitely the version that sticks out the most for how much worse it is compared to the normal version of the level is the candy level, which just covers the floor in wafers in place of the whole candy house. Which is just nowhere near as satisfying to pick up.

And like we've said a couple times by now, the levels this time around feel like they lend themselves better to the art of finding collectibles. If the first game, I almost didn't bother, and to an extent I seriously don't remember if it even kept track of which levels you got the collectibles in or not. Beyond maybe an overall percentage. But here, it's plenty clear which levels still have a gift and cousins hidden inside them, and they're hidden a little less obtusely. Again, in the previous game, it feels like I only ever got anything by accident, but here, stuff was hidden, but not weirdly inaccessible. The worst that could happen is getting so big you miss your chance to get something on a smaller rendition of the stage. And the only present that felt like all that much of a guide-dangit was having to use the rolling charge off a car positioned like a ramp to try and get an out-of-view gift in the water-themed stage.

The only obtuse thing is that if a level features more than one cousin to find, there's a possibility you'll have to into a level more than once just to find them all. Not because they're that hard to find, but because the next cousin in the list just won't show up until you have the previous one unlocked. Which I guess in and of itself encourages practice, running through these levels over and over again, but sometimes I'm just trying to find the cousin independent of actually practicing the level.

CHIAKI:

But if it does come down to that, as well. This game really rewards practicing the levels and getting better and better at routing through each of them. On the fourth "as big as possible" level, there's an entire city section off to the side that you'd miss out on if you just didn't get so ridiculously huge that you start to outside the previous sections of the map. And of course, it's nice to squeeze a compliment out of these guys calling you a loser all the time.

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Oh yeah, and there's also stickers. To my understanding, they're a Reroll addition, and it shows, because I didn't really notice what they heck was their deal until a while in. They're random hidden in places on the walls somewhere, and you have to have the camera item equipped to take pictures of them. Which is a little too obtuse an action for a Katamari game to be all that natural, so we can't say we bothered with that one. Oopsie.

This is also a Katamari with a couple levels that could be outright described as postgame, since they're just not available until you complete a task set up near the beginning of the game where a dog wants you to roll up the sun. Oh yeah, that's a thing, too. Don't worry about it. A bonus level that imitates the continent-rolling credits sequence of the first game where you meet with the astronaut from the first game and you have to roll up a meteor before it crashes into a destroys Earth. Oh yeah, that's a thing, too. Don't worry about it.

Plus one more bonus level that only unlocks after you collect every single cousin in the game where you then have to fetch-quest them all as fast as possible. A cute distraction. But another... hard to call it a full-blown level, since it has the very unrealistic goal of rolling up 1 million roses. There's no real obstacles to stop you or make progress harder, nor a time limit. It's just collecting 1 million roses. A task so gargantuan it's the one level you can actually save your progress on and come back to later. And while it is feasible after many hours of play, there's hardly any real reward for it.

A level that's not really ragebaiting in the way that Katamari usually does it, so much as it feels like it's there as a funny ha-ha, with the King commenting that "Huh? Katamari Damacy's not over yet?" before dumping this dangerously close to literal Sisyphusian task on your lap. You want more Katamari? Here, now you can Katamari forever.

But of course, all this, at least for our playthrough, was taking place on the Reroll edition of the game, which also includes "Royal Reverie", a small splatter of bonus content that wasn't in the original release where you specifically get to play as The King of all Cosmos when he was still a prince, and you deal with his even more overbearing, even harder to impress dad. Which almost feels like it wasn't needed, I feel like the cutscenes paint the picture of their relationship as is. But I don't think it hurts things to be here, as is.

The levels are also somewhat decently experimental, spinning off of existing levels in the main game. Though from what I can tell, they are on the more collect-a-thon end of things where it's not really worth practicing the levels, since they feel a bit more like one-and-done deals. Like a spin on the zoo level where you have to find and roll up four swan ballerinas and that's kinda it. A school level where you have to find and roll up 5 instruments while avoiding ghosts and that's kinda it. There is a lightning round version of the room-cleaning level, where you have 60 seconds to try and pick everything up. But that one is still a level with a very feasible ceiling.

LUNA:

And I think having more practice-able levels could hit a emotional beat harder with The Grandpa of all Cosmos, since from what I can tell, no matter how well you do, he'll call your work "barely passing." Which would be a nice poignant point to make if you practiced your heart out with these levels, but simply nothing you could do would ever earn this old man's approval. Which makes the King of all Cosmos feel modest by comparison if this is the man he had to grow up under.

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Katamari Damacy was already a delight of a game. And this somehow topped that in our hearts. And while we're definitely reserving definitive judgement for when we get around to playing future games ourself, it isn't hard to see why this could perhaps be a bit of a hard ceiling on Katamari as a concept. Like, how do you go bigger and bolder from here without just starting to break some rules that make Katamari no longer Katamari? Well, I guess we'll just have to see ourself eventually, one day. We know most of the future games aren't regarded as "bad", but I do gather a fandom agreement that the series, at least until the new one that came out recently, is just on a downwards trend. But hey? Was this game not in itself also about dealing with the lofting expectations of being a sequel to a beloved game? Mayhaps they swung too early on that one and the point got lost there.

How did we do? 4545 words? Bah, could've been bigger. We'll have to be more verbose, the next Katamari game we talk about.

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VIXI SCORE: 10/10

It's almost unhinged how they took an already amazing game and just. Topped it so handily and casually. How did you do that. That's scary.

LUNA SCORE: 10/10

I might be lazy in repeating that very same sentiment, but I did very much adore the first game to a point where I was genuinely disappointed to be done with it. But there's still more Katamari to play! Like this one! Wow!

JINX SCORE: 10/10

it's hard to come up with more individual thoughts when so many of us just kinda agree on this one. it's just one of the golden example of what a truly great video game even is to me now.

IONO SCORE: 9.5/10

I feel like the odd one out cause I'm not one for practicing the same game over n over n over. Probably more a product of our spare time getting eaten by holiday season fatigue but I have been antsy to move onto the next game we're playing. Still though, fantastic! Loved it!

CELESTE SCORE: 9.5/10

Similar boat to Iono, actually. It feels a little due to move onto our new schedule of playing one or two games rather than trying to juggle three or four at a time. Hopefully that way the turnout of these reviews will be a little quicker. But either way, adored this game! I just like substance in ways more than just practicing the same thing over and over.

CHIAKI SCORE: 10/10

I've only been conscious of my own existence for a few months now but I'm declaring this as my definitive all-time fave. I don't care.

OVERALL SCORE: 59/60

Coming up next on Mythinks: doing what we should do more often and delving into the realm of fangames