REROLL presents Katamari Damacy with all of the strange power and dazed prestige it originally showcased in 2004. This no-frills reissue is adapted from its 2018 trip to the Switch, favoring preservation over amplification, but such is the curse of being born perfect. Katamari Damacy is on another modern platform and all is right with the cosmos.
Sixteen years ago, the defiant will and blissed presentation of Katamari Damacy redrafted the thesis of an effective console game. In a fall outlined with generation-defining games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Halo 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3, Keita Takahashi’s absurdist opus snuck in at $20 and, in the intervening decade, slotted itself among the most respected and influential works of its time. Katamari Damacy, a game ostensibly about rolling infinite shit into a ball to apologize for your dad’s destruction of the cosmos, is as material to its medium as any of its megalithic contemporaries. REROLL is the same Katamari Damacy on a current platform.
Katamari Damacy’s premise is inseparable from its charm. Your father, the garishly attired King of all Cosmos, got top five drunk and obliterated everything in the galaxy except for the planet earth. He tells you this in spoken dialogue but he speaks in record scratches. To correct this grievous error, the player, as the diminutive Prince, is charged with collecting items from Earth by rolling them all up into a sticky ball. A katamari, if you will. The King of All Cosmos can then conduct space magic and rebuild ultra-dense stars out of crabs, hot sauce, and your grandparents.
To clean up the universe you have to repeatedly destroy the same slice of the planet. This is performed by pushing your very tiny ball with your very tiny Prince and rolling it around concentrated collections of artifacts masquerading inside of familiar human spaces. At first your katamari will only pick up things that are only slightly smaller than it is, like children’s blocks, matches, and nails. As the katamari grows in size, so does the scale of the objects it can collect. The shoes and pencils that used to compose the barriers of the environment are now absorbed by your omnibus of hilarious rolling bullshit. The King demands a desired size of the katamari and imposes a strict time limit, thus composing the challenge of every level.
It isn’t quite as simple as puzzling out things you can gather from things you definitely can’t. Katamari Damacy operates with tank controls, where each analog stick is used in tandem to create movement relative to the position of the character. It’s a product of early 3D interfaces where developers had to come to terms with moving Chris Redfield around a 3D environment with only a d-pad to work with. In any case, learning to move the Prince around and trying to articulate locomotion across a physical cacophony of disparate objects can be a process. Katamari Damacy is very much designed with that struggle in mind—if I were to do this in real life I imagine it would create an identical sensation—but it may frustrate players unfamiliar with forgotten controls from a bygone era. I can’t imagine controlling Katamari Damacy any other way (although Reroll does offer one simplified control scheme).
Katamari Damacy isn’t an especially difficult game, but there is a certain cadence to playing it efficiently. Some items and objects in the level move and interact under set patterns while almost everything else remains static. It’s not impossible to haphazardly roll around and impulsively collect everything you see and be fine, but it’s also possible to inadvertently memorize the entire level and eventually process a method of ruthlessly logical acquisition. The concept of an Ideal Route can bring Katamari Damacy closer to Jet Set Radio’s subtle brilliance than the panicked spontaneity inherent to a frenzied run through Pac-Man.
Completing constellations serves as Katamari Damacy’s venue for one-off challenges. Cancer asks the Prince to collect as many crabs—Small crabs! Big crabs! HUGE crabs!—as they can find in five minutes. Corona Borealis gives eight minutes to collect up to 107 crowns, many of which are on the heads of live human beings. Taurus is hysterical because it asks the player to snatch the biggest cow in the level, but it will literally accept any cow and you can end the level in two seconds if you’re not careful. Katamari Damacy includes nine of these challenges. Few demand the task and time crunch commitment of creating stars, but it’s a worthwhile diversion.
There is an implicit tactile sensation to the act of rolling everything up in a ball. Running over an object and collecting it produces a pleasing suction sound effect, not unlike vacuuming the basement and hearing and knowing grains of cat litter are no longer embedded in the carpet. When you approach a target that is slightly too big—sunflowers, traffic poles, basically anything that offsets the circular nature of the ball and turns it into a Cronenbergian nightmare machine—hearing a response that tells you it worked is immensely satisfying. Growing to over 20m and becoming the destroyer of worlds, when everything everywhere bends to your will, is a reward not unlike wrecking shop with the gravity gun at the end of Half Life 2. You are now the merciless god of this land and its doomed populace.
A significant amount of Katamari Damacy’s power is drawn from its soundtrack. Composed by diverse group of artists, it glides in on electric pulses of dance music but ultimately settles on jazzy centerpieces. Every single track punches above the weight one would have expected from a budget game out of the depths of Namco, but its quality has been validated by time and the extraordinary quality of a vinyl set. Inexplicably, Katamaritaino (Roll Me In) and the entire C side is something I have routinely used to play in the background at Christmas parties. Katamari Damacy has an OST for all seasons.
It is difficult to understate the surreal weirdness that Katamari Damacy carried when it crashed into my living room in the fall of 2004. A friend came over with a brand new $20 game (a launch price that cheap, with some exceptions, was generally seen as a negative in the world of physical-only console media) and insisted we play it immediately. We set it up on a living room projector and like ten of us bore witness to the eccentric wonderland of Katamari Damacy. The pre-social media but post-broadband era was within the range of Peak Weirdness, where reality had no verifiable barometer and anything unbelievable could have simultaneously been easy to believe. Katamari Damacy was a game where absurd people were doing outlandish things and it’s your job to abduct all of them under the pretense of restoring the world. Even without the drugs everyone was already on, this would have been a remarkable application of electronic entertainment.
A deeper read into Katamari Damacy explores than nature between chaos and creation. The Prince has to clean up the universe, because of a sin he didn’t commit, by applying a wrecking ball to the last vestige of existence. On the player’s end, there is a certain comfort in dropping into a space, making an absolute mess, and then tidying it all up before time runs out. Like Death Stranding created a surreal sense of peace from an act as simple as delivering a pizza, Katamari Damacy revels in the satisfying task of cleaning up your room. The objective of shooting people in the head with a gun isn’t the only emotional fantasy available for a videogame to resolve.
The PlayStation 4 release of Reroll is, as best as I can tell, identical to what debuted on Switch two years ago. It’s Katamari Damacy, fit to widescreen and adjusted to 1080p, for $30. It’s true that Katamari Damacy’s sequel, We ♥ Katamari, eases some physics-focused-frustrations and improves upon the original’s strengths in every conceivable measure. It also true that Takahashi’s work on Noby Noby Boy and Wattam would fit snugly alongside both of Katamari Damacy’s PlayStation 2 entries to form the ultimate life affirming quadrilogy. But that isn’t reality. Instead, Bandai Namco and Monkeycraft have left Katamari Damacy mostly untouched. This could either be read as a cynical move from a publisher to resell Katamari Damacy, as if it were new, every half decade or a genuine attempt to ensure Katamari Damacy lives forever. I prefer the latter.
Reroll presents Katamari Damacy with all of the strange power and dazed prestige it originally showcased in 2004. This no-frills reissue is adapted from its 2018 trip to the Switch, favoring preservation over amplification, but such is the curse of being born perfect. Katamari Damacy is on another modern platform and all is right with the cosmos.
