Katamari Forever
If you’ve read my demo review (below) you’ll know that this game is re-sparked my interest in the series. I won’t recover what I went through below, so I’ll just jump right into my full game observations.
The games story is a hilarious as you’d expect of a Katamari game. The game begins with the King of the Cosmo’s losing all his memories and unable to perform his duties. The prince builds a robot version of the kings and upon completing it; robo-king goes crazy and destroys all the stars. Realizing his error, it’s up to you to roll up new stars and fill up the sky.
The game involves two sets of story missions, the first are for Robo-King in which you try to roll up new stars. The second is for the King of the Cosmos as you rollup items to restore his memories. You can jump back and fourth between the two at any time. The King of Cosmos missions take place in levels from the previous games and have a grayscale color scheme. As you collect objects in the level the color returns to it. It gives the game an interesting “de blob (wii)”, or “flower (psn)” kind of feel.
As for gameplay mechanics you’ve got the typical moving and dashing, but now you can use the prince hop using the sixaxis or shoulder buttons. The hop allows the prince to jump and get up to high places, but the sixaxis implementation is bad, it hardly ever registers, you’re better off just sticking with the shoulder button. Again why couldn’t they implement sixaxis control for the rolling mechanic? It just makes sense. There’s also a power up you can grab that will make your katamari magnetic for a short time. All nearby objects will be sucked into it. The camera can be quite annoying as well, while the game tries to fix this by making objects between you and the camera transparent, it doesn’t really do the best job and it can get quite annoying.
The game also features local co-op and competitive multiplayer modes. (I’m surprised there’s no online 4 player battle mode, you’d think that’d be an easy sell…). The offline co-op mode is a real pain; you’d both better be at communicating with each other because it’s basically 2 player pushing 1 katamari around. Think of how you roll in single player, and imagine you only controlling one stick, and another player controlling the other. The competitive mode is much better, since it’s basically just trying to roll up a bigger ball than the other player in the time limit. You can bash your opponent as well to take down their size a bit.
All in all, this is a really fun game, and a good one to get back into if you’ve missed the last couple Katamari games. There are a couple of missed opportunities but all in all, it’s still a fun game!
Original Demo Review from Sep 16, 2009
Katamari Damacy was a very unique, innovative, and deceptively simple looking title that came out for the PS2. It took the old school approach of gameplay with a simple concept and carried it far enough to provide an incredible memorable experience.
The game has already seen several sequels for PS2, PSP and Xbox 360. The problem with Katamari was that the game didn’t really have the legs to create a whole franchise based on it. I admit that while I absolutely loved the first Katamari I never bothered to even take a look at those sequels. They were coming out too fast and were just more of the same.
The premise of Katamari is that you play the Prince, son of the King of the Cosmo, and your job is to use your Katamari (rolling ball like object) to roll over and pick up items. As you grab items your ball gets bigger and you can grab larger object. The games typical move from you starting off the size of an insect and end up growing more comparable to the size of Godzilla (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you do get big). Along the way are obstacles that, if hit, will cause your Katamari to shrink in size. So it’s best to watch out for those. You typically have a time limit in which to grow your ball to a specified size. If you achieve that goal than you ball will become a star!
With a new game in the franchise now coming out on PS3, I feel enough time has passed to take a look and see if they’re attempting anything new with the series or if it’s still just the same old game.
I didn’t expect an answer to that from the recently released demo, but it did end up surprising me in several ways.
After starting the demo I was greeted by a new, clunky menu. In the menu you control the prince and move around to different options. There seemed to be quite a few options that were not available so I’m interested to see what those will end up being the full game. You could also select any of the other characters walking around and change to them.
The one open item takes you to the stage select screen which features 2 levels to try out.
The first level is a new mode where you soak the Katamari in water then run it over dry landscape to cause grass and flowers to grow. The goal is to water a specified size of land before time runs out. Watering certain flowers will also cause them to instantly grow beneath you and launch you into the air so you can hit other locations. Your Katamari only holds so much water, so you constantly have to return to the nearby pool to fill it back up.
The second level is your typical create a new star level. A nice touch I noticed is that now the prince can go into tight spaces and anything blocking your view will become transparent so you can see and control the prince as you move through. It’s an interesting touch, and may not be new to this game, but I don’t recall it from the original.
Overall the game still controls great with the dual sticks, though it may take new gamers some getting used to. Sixaxis was only implemented to perform the prince hop move, but it’s surprising that the whole game can’t be controlled by it. I’ve always been against tacked on motion controls, but it just makes sense here.
It also still has a wacky and interesting soundtrack, and the new visuals look great.
It’s still Katamari, and the new mode is fun and works well in the context of the game. If you’re burned out on the concept from the previous games, than this might not do anything for you, but if you’re like me and haven’t played a Katamari game since the first one, this may be the time to jump back in. If you haven’t played the series than this seems like a great place to start as well!
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