Roll It Up
For anyone that has ever played a Katamari game, you know that the creators have made a very, very strange universe. Trying to wrap your head around any of it is likely to induce headaches, so just take it as it was meant to be — a light-hearted, goofy environment with a simple goal. That said, Katamari Forever does have an overall story that is explained to you at the outset of the campaign, right before the opening tutorial mission which teaches you new Prince Hop move and get a handle on the gameplay.
As the story goes, one day, The Prince (the little green character that you control), was practicing his jumping ability with the King of the Cosmos sees this and decides he’s not to be outdone. The King of the Cosmos jumps, propelling himself far into space when he’s suddenly struck by an asteroid, rendering him unconscious and with amnesia. The citizens decide to build a Roboking in the meantime while the King recuperates his consciousness and memory. The very first mission of the game plays out like a tutorial and concludes by having the player push their katamari into the Roboking’s main reactor (his chest). This awakens the Roboking who proceeds to fly into space and destroy the cosmos, something he regrets immediately after and needs your help to restore.
All of this is explained through some nicely rendered cutscenes with some funny dialogue. The dialogue is all subtitled and isn’t actually verbalized in any language, just little noises. I find the dialogue in Katamari Forever to actually be quite humorous; I mean you won’t be slapping your knee in laughter, but it definitely earns a lot of smirks and a few chuckles, so kudos to Namco Bandai for some good writing that fits the atmosphere and zany mood of the game perfectly.
With this opening mission over and the premise of the overall story in place, the player is taken to a hub screen known as the Village Square. From the Square, you can do one of several things. The Village Square acts as your menu for navigation, so the ability to Save and quit to the Title Screen are here, too. The most important part of the Square is the option to choose between the King and Roboking campaigns. When you enter either, you are taken to a mission select screen. In between missions, you can switch to the other campaign, so you don’t have to complete all of one to get open up the other. However, you do have to keep the missions balanced. In other words, you can get to a point where you have to complete a Roboking mission, for example, before any other missions are available.
Gameplay And Controls
To this point, I’ve mainly discussed Forever as though you have played it or one of its predecessors. That may very well not be the case though, so let me give you a quick rundown of the gameplay and controls. The idea is simple, and missions generally last under ten minutes. The point is to collect objects, usually with some kind of common theme, but sometimes the goal it to simple collect as many objects as you can. Players do this by rolling their katamari, this special ball that as the ability to pick up objects as it rolls over them. Control is easy enough, with left stick moving the player the right stick controlling the katamari movement. It’s actually rather hard to turn around manually, but players can press L3 and R3 simultaneously to execute a quick, 180 degree turn. You can also do a dash — great for avoiding moving obstacles, catching moving objects, or just quickly rolling over an area — by moving the left and right sticks up and down quickly for a couple of seconds. New with Forever is the Prince Hop, which allows you to hop straight up, good for reaching new heights. The Prince Hop is executed best with R2, but you can move the controller quickly upward too if you want to struggle with the motion control. In practice, the SIXAXIS gesture just doesn’t work all that reliably, and given that most modes and missions require efficient clock usage, it’s best to just use R2 to Hop.
Getting good with the controls doesn’t really take all that long, but it’s a very important skill to have. Being able to move your katamari quickly and efficiently about the game world will help you beat the clock which is your biggest enemy during the campaign. Generally, mission goals require that you build up the size of your katamari to at least a certain width in a certain amount of time, like two or five minutes. Of course, you can’t just pick up every object you come into contact with; you have to build up the size of your katamari by rolling up the objects that you can pick up. As the size of the katamari increases, so too does the amount of objects you can collect. Players can also collect heart icons located randomly, and fairly rarely, in the game world that give The Prince a short-lived but very useful power of telekinesis, where nearby objects come to your katamari automatically.
Besides the ticking clock, which again is generally the antagonist of your mission, you also have to keep an eye out for your environment. Nothing in the game can flat out kill your character, but there are a variety of moving objects that can bump you off course. Other challenges include navigating the environment which includes everything from a kid’s room to a crowded market place to the bottom of a pond, where a fisherman’s hook can put you out of action for a few seconds. The mission locales are varied, clever, and fun. Some of these areas did look familiar, and as it turns out after reading up, several missions were actually re-used from previous Katamari releases. This isn’t something you would notice as a newcomer to the series and frankly it had been so long since I played that I had forgotten about them.
Gameplay in each mission is fairly similar, and the overall point for completing missions is to either help the King remember things or build a big enough katamari for the Roboking to transform into an object of the cosmos, like a star or planet. So, ultimately, your goal is to rebuild the cosmos that Roboking accidentally destroyed. Most missions are easy enough to complete on a play through or two, but I rarely scored high enough to earn the praise of the King or Roboking. A lower score for the Roboking also meant a humorous name for whatever star or planet he just created with the “tiny” katamari I had just rolled up, which was somewhat amusing.
Issues And Other Features
Less amusing would be the nags with the gameplay, which truthfully are few in number, but nonetheless significant. Sometimes just knowing what, exactly, you need to do is the problem whereas other times it’s just a matter of being able to do it. By that I mean the camera will get in your way from time to time, leaving you to steer blindly for brief periods of time while some object blocks your field of view. These moments don’t happen often enough to be a huge deal, but you’ll notice them. As far as not knowing what to do, well, most missions give you specific goals and success is fairly straight-forward, but others are a little more open and leave you uncertain of success. Fortunately, even if you fail a mission, you can restart it right away with little delay.
Katamari Forever has a handful of other notable features I have yet to discuss. First, there are over fifty playable “Cousins” that you can find and unlock. The game informs you that these other Cousins — which are really just different characters — are for appearance only and they do not have different skill levels or anything like that. You can find these Cousins hidden around the different missions. From the Village Square, you can switch between any of the Cousins you have unlocked. There are also Presents to be found that are basically different skins or textures for your Cousins. Honestly, once you are in a mission and starting to roll up your katamari, your character gets tiny quickly so you don’t really get to see them all that much anyway, but it’s a nice gesture.
When you roll up, and therefore unlock, your first Cousin, the VS Battle & Co-Op mode opens up in the Village Square. From here, players can do split screen battles to out katamari the other player. The dash mechanic can be used to ram your opponent, and if your katamari is big enough, you can roll up your opponent, although they can shake free with rapid movement of the sticks. Co-op mode is like single player, but players have to work together to roll a single katamari around to clear a stage.
Two other playable modes are also included: Katamari Drive and Eternal Katamari. Tired of the clock? Try your hand at Eternal Katamari which essentially turns the game into a free-roaming, roll-up-all-you-like affair, which may be amusing but also somewhat unrewarding. The Drive mode speeds up gameplay, making it possible to quickly build up massive katamari.
Trophy and Leaderboard support is also included with Forever. You can view the high scores on each mission and compare your rank against the PSN’s best which can be rather humbling if nothing else. Trophies are, in my experience, pretty tough to come by.
And now, let’s roll this text up into a Summary…