Like anyone else with a soul, I have fond memories of the first time I saw Katamari Damacy. An ecstatic roommate literally kicked in my door and unleashed a horrendous unpunctuated verbal mess along the lines of, “dude you gotta see this game, it’s crazy with Japanese nonsense and you roll a ball and collect stuff and the music is awesome and you gotta impress the king of all cosmos who speaks in record scratches and you pick up houses and”- well, that went on for a while, and, sure enough the game was as crazy and, more importantly, as fun as it’s outrageous claims. A few sequels spilled out, but they failed to match the unbridled insanity of the initial offering. Lead developer Keita Takahashi needed to create something entirely new to evoke the same sense of wonder and awe from Katamari’s eager audience.
Fast forward to last October at the Tokyo Game Show. I heard about Takahashi’s official Katamari follow-up, Noby Noby Boy, debuting there. I found my way to a looping video providing the first official look at the game. It was only about a minute long and it made even less sense than anything else I saw in Japan that day (a remarkable accomplishment in itself). A journalist next to me turned and said, “the hell was that?” I didn’t respond (I assumed his question was rhetorical), but one thing was clear; Noby Noby Boy was primed and ready to challenge our notions of interactive entertainment (as well make a run for the WTF-is-this?! crown).
Stretch
You assume control over a pink hot dog thing with a face named BOY. Each analogue stick independently controls each half of BOY, meaning you can, among other things, easily make him walk in opposing directions. Moving him away from himself will result in BOY stretching into multicolored segments. Stretching BOY makes it quite a bit easier for him to eat everything in sight, which is performed via gently tapping the L2 button. Assuming his mouth gets large enough, BOY can freely swallow anything on the map; people, spaceships, cars, laser emitting robots – it doesn’t matter, all can be ingested. If BOY stars getting too full, a tap of the R2 button prompts a fart noise, and boy poops a previously consumed object out his rear at maximum velocity.
All of BOY’s actions are performed on a rather rudimentary looking map. Most maps are nothing but flat planes and all are populated with crude looking polygonal objects. There are windmills to wrap BOY around, dinosaurs to trip, moving cars to dodge,, and donut clouds floating in the sky. Furthermore, there doesn’t appear to be any consequence to any of your actions there. It doesn’t matter if you eat all of the map’s inhabitants, or simply let them be. If you fall off the map, you simply respawn out of a chimney with no penalty. If you accidently break yourself in half, just eat your own ass (!) and reform. Like Flower, the traditional interpretation of winning and losing has been erased in favor of a different paradigm, but more on that later.
The alleged reason for doing all of this is to help GIRL reach out to the cosmos. Every bit of BOY you stretch can be recorded and uploaded to a running total of GIRL’S length. The goal, presumably, is to continuously extend the length of GIRL so she can stretch out and reach the infinite abyss of the universe. Presently she’s made it as far as the moon, thus allowing a new series of maps on a lunar surface (and we can hope for Mars soon). Different pallets and objects don’t amount to much other than a change of aesthetic, but the communal sense of coming together and contributing toward a collective goal feels noticeably rewarding.
Wait, I Missed the Part Where That’s a Game
Yeah, for the first few hours, I did too. I would enter a level, eat a few things, and stretch BOY out as far as he could go, then report my totals into GIRL. It was boring and I didn’t understand the lack of any sort of identifiable obstacle on the way to my goal. Sure, I figured I could maybe eat a few more things and get bigger, maybe add a few more meters, but it seemed like a relatively inefficient way of making progress. Reaching for the stars was cool, but I couldn’t comprehend any point in playing Noby Noby boy for more than ten minutes.
The problem, as I would eventually discover, was rooted in my approach. For most of my conscious life, all the games I’ve played presented goals and built toward greater and greater challenges to meet those targets. Without a recognizable, previously established challenge, there could be no game, right? What would be the point? Katamari was almost complete nonsense, but it matched the relentless insanity with a vicious gameplay hook and easily found its audience. Noby Noby Boy, as it turns out, strives for something far greater than it’s simplistic look implies.
Que Hyperbolic Nonsense -OR- Free Your Mind
Remember the first time you played Grand Theft Auto? Be it the niche original in 1998 or GTA III in 2001, the collective gaming consciousness was taken aback by the sheer amount of freedom given to the player. The sandbox genre was emerging and, though preset missions existed, players could freely ignore set goals in favor of making their own fun in Liberty City. Noby Noby Boy takes a simlar approach, but it drops the goal oriented school of game design and throws “make your own fun” into overdrive. With GTA, the same city is going to be out there every time, but, in Noby, the sandbox is different every time a new map is loaded. Or, to metaphorically paraphrase a landmark action film from ten years ago, stop looking for a spoon, because there isn’t one.
In the hours I dumped into Noby Noby Boy I saw green men running around with ties on their head, a level where it was raining spinning tops, a place ripe with cops and robbers chasing each other around, a T-Rex causing havoc on an army of sumo wrestlers, and alien beings riding friendly octopi. I saw something new and hilarious literally every time I loaded a fresh map. Observation was fun enough, but soon I began to evolve my sense of perception into a quest to establish what I wanted to do in this world, so I began experimenting. I ate people and animals and shat out demi human hybrids, and then I made myself unimaginably large and intentionally slid off the map and swept everything away with me. I flew in the air, rotated my analogue sticks, and propelled myself like a helicopter. I casually spent a ridiculous amount of time wrapping as much of BOY as I could around every object in sight, and I loved every second of it.
At the end of the day I felt my finest moment came when I consumed a gladiator and a sheep, then hurled the Sheepadiator out my ass into a helicopter, which got stuck in the center of a cloud, which created a tornado of destruction that resulted in widespread panic, including a car made of bananas driving all of it’s Amish passengers off the edge of the map. Watching all of that happen was rewarding on a level few games have ever provided; you simply can’t find or do any like what transpired through any other gaming medium. It took me a long time to find Noby Noby Boy’s hook, but, once I saw my prize, I felt a complete sense of satisfaction. And the best part? It was only the beginning.
I was sure others would find even more crazy stuff within Noby Noby Boy’s world. And, after browsing a few forums looking for such, I became amazed at the way the game gripped the gaming community; people were playing the game without thinking about a carrot dangling on a pole, they were simply engaging in an unspoken contest to see who could come up with the weirdest possible sequence of events (and with the game’s built in direct-to-YouTube recording and utilization of the XMB’s snapshot feature, they’re all free to be shared). I never expected it, but Noby Noby Boy appears to be an instrumental force in evolving the sandbox genre. An overt lack of gameplay gave way to a self-discovery approach of playing the game. Had there been any sense of direction or hint toward what was possible, I don’t think it would have received its surprising embrace. Takahashi took a considerable risk in designing a game through this approach, but I’m happy to report that his gamble feels like a wild success.
Of course, that’s not to say Noby Noby Boy is for everyone. The learning curve to “find” the game might be too much to swallow, but other issues may also get in the way. Methods of input are completely ridiculous; various taps of the L2 and R2 buttons eat, fly, grip, and poop and can easily be performed accidentally in place of one another. A total nightmare, the camera is assigned to L1 and R1, but also makes use of hapless motion controls for zooming in an out. Seemingly unsatisfied with normalcy, the start button also comes into the mix, as it’s used in simultaneous pairing with the analogue stick to fiddle around with a few menu options. All of these complaints can easily be overcome with a few hours of practice, but they do represent a puzzling blockade into enjoying the world of Noby Noby Boy.
