Size Matters
You know, the King of All Cosmos is kind of a dick. He berates you, The Prince, for a few minutes before dropping you off without warning in the most cluttered Japanese restaurant you've ever seen in your life, forces you to roll up all of the knick-knacks scattered about on your "katamari", a roundish, spiky toy that can stick to most everything so long as it's not too big, and then doesn't give you nearly enough time to build up said katamari to his arbitrarily required size.
No wonder all of your other cousins ran away.
The game is bright with simple but effective graphics. Relentlessly cheery J-Pop music blasts as you frantically try to collect as much stuff lying around as you can. The more you roll up, the bigger your katamari gets, and the bigger your katamari gets, the bigger the objects you can successfully get to stick to it. Before long you're rolling up cats, then bowling pins, then mailmen, eventually Mt. Fuji and North America. At the end of each level The King of All Cosmos judges your collection, and turns it into a moon, planet, or star to replace the ones he carelessly destroyed during a royal game of badminten.
It's clearly surreal. It's often fun, particularly when your katamari size hits that magic level where you can suddenly plow through a big collection of objects that you used to bounce right off. As The King says in the game, it's surprisingly soothing. Who knew? The objects are often funny, and automatically categorized as you collect them. Living things like, say, mailmen, wiggle humorously on your katamari after you've picked them up. I guess they don't want to become part of the new Jupiter.
I recently went back to play more (it is surprisingly soothing) but was disappointed to be totally unable to get an online game going against anyone. Anywhere. In the world. As happens with most games that aren't Call of Duty 4, the vibrant online community seems to have faded away. Partially because the versus online mode isn't much fun, but even more so because I suspect a giant katamari rolled them up.
It's worth playing all the way through at least once, but I don't know that I'll go back to it again. Take that Dad.
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