Beautiful Katamari Review

So I happened upon another game that could be beaten and washed away within 5-6 hours, it being Beautiful Katamari. My brief time with the game was very love/hate the whole way which is unfortunate. I'll start with the positives.

The intro/outro videos for this game are 110% pure unadulterated zany Japanese meets LSD. I loved every second of it, watching the King of All Cosmos and his wife playing tennis in space, where he does the ultimate power serve and rips a black hole in the galaxy that swallows everything up but Earth. So what's the guy to do? Send you off, the Prince, for the 3rd and final time to Earth, to once again pillage with your katamari to rebuild all the planets consumed and then finally create a Supergiant the size of which comes out at about 1,000,000 km. I also enjoyed the simplified hi-def graphics, in most of the stages it seems nice to look at but not much more, but the last two stages you'll put that simplified graphical engine to the test as you're rolling up entire countries on the Earth and then entering space to continue your rampage. The last stage was easily my favorite because of that, in 10 minutes time you go from rolling small candies and thumbtacks to rolling cars and groups of people, then onto buildings and pieces of land, then entire countries and clouds and tornadoes, until finally you've consumed Earth whole. Finally, I feel I must mention the soundtrack as a positive, you're either going to really dig the quirky Japanese tunes or loathe them. I found them amusing and they kept me rolling on into the night.

So what are the negatives? Well the game works somewhat like the first two but with a twist, that being a request system. Wherein the King will need you to meet some requirement depending on the planet you're rebuilding. For instance Mars you must raise the katamari to a temperature of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. While Saturn you must pick up as many circular/ring objects as you possibly can, you are also given a time limit and a particular size the katamari must be before time runs out. I didn't really care for the request portion of the gameplay. Most of the time you're worrying about just making it the right size in the time limit, but then to throw on top of that particular items in a world that's strewn with thousands of random things. It just made things more complicated than they needed to be, this game was always about the simplistic fun and pleasure of rolling up everything in sight with no regard for anything. I also found camera issues when rolling my katamari underneath objects in the game world which pissed me off as I would lose about 30 seconds trying to figure out how the hell to get out of where I was. 30 seconds might not seem like much but most of the stages have a time limit of anywhere from 3-5 minutes. As much as I loved the last stage it also pissed me off to no end, you're given 10 minutes and the first time through the stage I couldn't meet the size requirement so I failed and had to restart, the second time I made it to the part where you're rolling in space and trying to get it big enough to plug up the black hole, I thought I had the entire time to do that, turns out that the last minute you're supposed to go roll your katamari into the black hole. So once again I failed the mission and had to restart completely and start from scratch picking up thumbtacks and the like again. So the final level clocked in at half an hour because of these stupid mistakes and misunderstandings.

The other main complaint is that they charged $40 for this game and put the other $20 of the game on XBL, so there are a bunch of achievements that I can't get unless I buy the last 1/3 of the game. Worst of all is that these points you're spending don't even net you actual content off the Marketplace ,they're small 300kb unlock files that will unlock things that are already on the disc. I think that's really weak, I know they were trying to sell it for $40 so that more people would give the game a chance, but they should have just went gung-ho and charged $60 or given the entire game for $40. Right from the get go this game was going to have a very slim niche market and they knew that, so why not just grab all the cash from the fans of this stuff and screw the naysayers? They really were on some kind of drugs if they thought they were going to tap into the market of people that play Gears/Halo/CoD4. So yeah, there's 1/3 of content on the disc that I can't play unless I fork cash over and I'm not going to be doing that.

Unfortunately I went into this game expecting more Katamari greatness as I loved the PS2 ones, but I feel like this series has worn its welcome out, if this group of people could conceive these trippy visuals and the awesome idea in the first place, I really think they could have brought some new innovations to the gameplay. But because they've been milking the same old since the beginning and the gameplay being brought is much too thin for what you're paying I'm going to have to give the game a Thumbs Down. Back then paying $20 for this on the PS2 was a no-brainer, but being in the next generation, they really should have used all this new technology and thought up some new ideas to keep the game fresh for those of us who have played this twice before. If you've never played a Katamari game before you might dig it more than I did, try the demo I suppose.

Final Verdict: Thumbs Down

Goodnight, sweet Prince. May you continue rolling that katamari in the gaming heavens.