I never thought I would say this but Katamari Forever is too damn hard.
What makes the new game so hard is some unfair time limits, bad item placement and new levels that demand use of the new jump feature.
Now the final level where you eventually roll up all of your planets is identical to the final stage in Beautiful Katamari (Schloss cosmos) IDENTICAL, every building, person, box, animal, present, cousin, seamonster is placed in exactly the same place. In BK they give you 17 , SEVENTEEN minutes to complete this level and that feel about right, its quite challenging to know the order to get some of the stuff in, but removing SIX of those minutes it demands almost perfection from you, 11 minutes is barely enough time to get the 10,000,000 size limit let alone scouting the area for cousins and presents. Now I get that its the same levels and they kind of expect you to know them off by heart by now but time limits like this are ridiculous and almost suck any fun out of playing the game, challenging is one thing but in a game where it's so easy to get stuck on the scenery or glitch into buildings it seems like someone on the staff is taking the piss.
The time limit thing happens on about four or five of the levels, but its much worse then a level starts you off always in a position where you have to waste a minute before you can find any items to collect, Item distrubution is completely bizarre on one of the new levels it took me over 20 attempts to finish the level and I only finished it due to some weird escalation of my katamari within the last 30 seconds its not as bad as the overly strict time limits on certain levels or even the jump....
The jump, It kind of removes some of the puzzley nature from katamari where in past games if you saw something up high you'd have to find the exact way around the room to get up to it but in KF you get a jump and it is innacurate, horrible to use and often the cause of level failure. there are two new levels in the game One where you use water to grow plants in a desert and another where you roll up the Robo king of the cosmos both require you to jump around a lot but jumping forwards is an absolute pain . I dont think I have ever sworn so much at a game because everytime I hopped up I would bounce off of the scenery and have to try, try, try again. This wouldn't be so bad if it didnt halt all momentum of your Katamari often losing you up to five seconds....
five seconds is a lifetime in Katamari!
finally the desaturation of certain levels make them unbearably hard, some levels are in Black and white to begin with and there are two levels from the past games that are almost broken due to this.One where you have to make a bear-cow planet where you have to roll up the biggest bear or cow item you can find. You can only do this by getting big enough using other objects whilst avoiding a barrage of cow and bear objects... hit one object that is a bear or a cow and the level ends.
With colour the level seems fine because you know to avoid the browns and the blacks and the whites but when everything is either black or white the level becomes completely frustrating because you didn't see a mini figurine of a bear that was 5 millimetres big on the screen. another level that does this is one where you have to keep the Katamari alight and avoid cold objects... easily the hardest level in any Katamari game already due to the volume of water and cold objects...remove all the colour and its a fucking nightmare.
I never thought I would be ranting about a game I actually love...or past iterations of, The new game does a pretty good job of giving you lots of levels and plenty of variants of them but the core KF levels are hard for the sake of them being hard and it makes Katmari really frustrating..The franchise has enough flaws that most overlook due to the humour and style. I would never complain about a lack of new objects or cousins (theres only four new ones) or the same old presents. And I am pretty accepting of the recycled levels due to the consistently funny writing and overall charm of the series but the issues i have come across have made me swear and get frustrated over more than I would really like when it comes to a game of this kind.
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