Pure, Simple Fun
The scene opens on a nighttime field. Three cows graze peacefully, bright stars riding the black sky above them. Dawn breaks, and rising over the horizon is not the sun but the silhouette of an enormous man wearing a crown. Two Japanese symbols appear inside the man’s silhouette; a singing voice bellows, “KA-TA-MA-RI DA-MA-SHIIIIII!” Rainbows explode upward from the horizon on either side of the man in the crown, and we see his face for the first time: gray, stern, and bearded. The cows look upward interestedly. Clovers fall from the sky. There are singing ducks, dancing pandas, sparkling mushrooms, and rainbows, rainbows everywhere.
So begins one of the strangest, happiest, and most unapologetically Japanese games ever created. The literal translation of Katamari Damacy is “Clump Spirit,” and believe it or not that sums up the game perfectly. Katamari Damacy was developed by a team of only ten people for the paltry sum of one million dollars. Yet the game’s commercial success and sheer likeability have generated five sequels in the last five years for the Playstation 2, Playstation Portable, Xbox 360, the iPhone, and most recently the Playstation 3. It has won awards for its excellent design and soundtrack, the latter of which will keep you humming and tapping your toe long after you finish the game’s 5-7 hour story.
And what a story it is. The man we saw wearing the crown in the game’s introduction is the King of All Cosmos, a party animal and a flamboyant dresser. It turns out that last night the King of All Cosmos partied a little too hard and somehow erased all the stars from the sky, sparing only the earth from his drunken rampage. You play as his son, the Prince, and as the game opens he explains that you can fix his mistake by traveling to earth with a Katamari, which is a rolling, magnetic ball that attaches itself to anything it touches that is of a similar size to itself. If the Prince can roll up enough collections of objects from the earth, the King can ignite each one into a new star to repopulate the heavens.
As the Katamari picks up more and more stuff, it grows larger, allowing it to pick up even larger objects. So while you begin the game rolling up thumb tacks and dice, soon you are collecting dogs, cats, bicycles, lawn ornaments, and eventually people. By the end of the game you can roll up entire cities, storm clouds, and even the ubiquitous rainbows.
Sometimes, though, collecting just anything isn’t good enough. The King wants his Cosmos back exactly the way it was, meaning that some stars must also form constellations. When the King asks you to recreate the constellation Cancer, you must make your Katamari primarily of crabs scurrying around in some poor earthling’s back yard. And if that weren’t bizarre enough, each time you successfully create a constellation, a little cartoon girl in a yellow dress appears on the screen and declares, “Oh! I feel it. I feel the Cosmos.”
The only way to fail in Katamari Damacy is to miss the King’s desired target diameter for any given Katamari within the time limit he gives you. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but there are a few levels where the time limit is just barely enough to reach your goal, and if you dawdle at all you simply won’t get there. In these cases, the Prince appears on his knees before the King to be scolded and berated. These brief scenes are jarring and disturbing in the context of the rest of game, which is constantly colorful and happy.
The final piece of Katamari Damacy that I should mention is the competitive multiplayer. If you have a second controller, you and one other friend can roll around an arena full of objects to pick up. The person who picks up the most within the time limit wins. By far the best aspect of the multiplayer is the ability to roll your opponent into your own Katamari if you grow quickly enough.
In an age when video games are so concerned with being taken seriously as both art and entertainment, Katamari Damacy is a refreshing blast of pure, simple fun. I dare you to play it without smiling.
