Keita Takahashi’s cosmic weirdness is back!
After becoming famous (through the Prince’s hard work) on Earth, the King of All Cosmos is flooded with requests from his fans who wish to see more and better katamaris in the sky. Not wanting to disappoint the fans, the King sends the Prince to Earth once again, to tend to their demands.
Strolling around Request Meadow, the little Prince will encounter several people asking for his help to create a katamari to their liking. Once you accept a request, the King will explain the rules.
Since a formula that works doesn’t need to be changed, the gameplay in this “sequel” is the same. If you have played Katamari Damacy, you will have no problem adjusting and will probably find yourself skipping all the text (like I did) just to start rolling stuff up. If you haven’t played the first title, you will learn how to in the first level.
What has been changed is the range of the missions, and the size and content of the different boards. Make a katamari this big, roll up to a certain size in this amount of time, grab as many as you can of this type of item… sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Some of the missions have quite the twist though. You will find yourself rolling up food items with a sumo wrestler, rolling a snowball to make a snowman’s head, rolling a katamari in flames to light up a bonfire or gathering fireflies to offer a light source to a student.
Some of the levels are really big and you can easily get lost and lose track of your goal. For example, in the fireflies level, don’t roll up the two lines that look like a runway, since that’s the only way you can tell where the student is located in the darkness.
Other levels have some added difficulty to them. In the Racetrack, you can only roll forward and always at a fast speed around the track (it’s great to make you dizzy!), and the Underwater level offers completely different game physics, and you lose precious time if you get hooked up.
There is one level in particular that I enjoyed. It was huge and there were historic landmarks from all over the world in it. There was the Eiffel Tower, Easter Island, the Colisseum, the Pyramids, the Statue of Liberty, and they are all there waiting to be rolled up into your katamari.
There are tons of presents to find and cousins to discover, and you bet they are weird. What’s even weirder and a bit freaky is the King’s hand retreating and coming back to show what you have found and rolled up in your katamari. Among the presents you will find a crown, a camera, a Pinocchio nose, a giraffe hat, a pochette and other cool things. You can equip two presents at a time, either on the chest, head or face.
The Prince’s cousins are strange creatures indeed. You will meet Macho the “buffness”, Miso the soup bowl, Ichigo the strawberry and many other colorful cousins. Watch for how the King describes them as you roll them up, some of them are pretty funny.
In between katamari rolling, you will watch some animated cutscenes telling the story of the King’s life, how he became King and how he met the Queen. Although it’s a tragic story, you can’t help but laugh even when his father dies. At least it’s much better than the story in Katamari Damacy, and there is no bad voice acting in it (you have to admit it, those kids were terrible…)
The ultimate challenge is to roll up the sun. This can only be achieved by completing all the requests (which means creating all the planets and satellites) and you can always import your Katamari Damacy constellation data (which will place all the constellations in the sky). Roll up every planet, satellite constellation and star dust, and you will get a katamari big enough to roll up the sun.
My hopes and dreams of an online mode have vanished, but at least the Battle Mode offers three different stages of small, medium and large proportions where you can roll up a friend. There is also a Co-op Mode where each player picks a character and both are shown pushing the katamari. Each player will represent one analog stick, so coordination and communication are necessary to move the katamari in the right direction. It can be a lot of fun or extremely frustrating.
What I really don’t care for in the game is the soundtrack, except for a couple of songs. I think the original music should have been kept in there somewhere, intact, as an alternative to the annoying, almost neurotic “this is your brain on drugs” type of music rearrangements. You will still recognize some of the themes from Katamari Damacy, although they have been remixed into a medley. It’s a shame, since the original soundtrack was really catchy and easy to sing or hum along to.
My other quirk with the game is the loading screen, it’s quite disorienting. The King’s head floating around spitting out letters that fly by in whatever direction he floats to made me dizzy nearly to the nauseous point. To quote the King in the first title, “How very disturbing.”
While We Love Katamari isn’t impressively different, there is a lot to do, different stages to visit, with the replay value being in collecting every present and cousin and beating your own scores. You can always go back and roll a bigger and better katamari in less time, and that’s probably what Takahashi intended us to do: keep on rolling!