Beautiful Katamari

October 23,2007 - Microsoft has managed to dip its hands into Namco Bandai’s Katamari honey pot with its Xbox 360 exclusive Beautiful Katamari. Preserving the strangely addictive gameplay model of the first two entries in the franchise, Beautiful Katamari is guaranteed to attract a following on the 360 composed of people new to the series. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with the franchise will realize that Beautiful Katamari is really a cheap clone of its older siblings and does nothing to push the series in a new direction.

The King of All Cosmos has again managed to accidentally destroy the galaxy and her planets, this time through a tennis serve so powerful that it rips a Black Hole into existence. Focusing all his power, The King manages to temporarily stall the Black Hole, but it’s only a matter of time before it re-activates and consumes everything. He proposes that his son, The Prince, join him in saving the galaxy. The Prince must travel to earth and roll up large katamari ("clumps" in Japanese) composed of any object he can find, which the King will then turn into replacement stars and planets for the galaxy. Eventually, The Prince must roll a Katamari so large that he can plug the Black Hole. The story is delivered solely through The King’s dialogue, which is unfailingly quirky and downright humorous, although any sort of real character or plot development is absent in favor of the simple and addictive gameplay that has made Katamari popular.

Katamari’s gameplay model is simple—you are given a small ball that can only roll up objects smaller than it. As the ball accumulates other items in the world around it, it grows and can consequentially consume larger and larger things. The Prince may very well start rolling individual candies until the ball grows larg enough to consume cats, watermelons, bicycles, people, buildings, and eventually entire continents and planets. To control the ball, all one needs to do is push both analog sticks in the direction they want it to go, or hold just one forward and the other back to turn it. Clicking the joysticks does a quick 180-degree turn while alternately pumping them to and fro will cause The Prince to dash, and that’s all the depth there really is. Every object in the game, no matter what size, shape, or color, can eventually be rolled into the katamari if it grows large enough, which is impressive because there are thousands of objects in the game. To rebuild each planet, The King will dictate what size the katamari needs to be and how much time you’ll have to roll it that large. He’ll also suggest certain categories of item like luxury, water, cold, or food, but these recommendations don’t have any impact on whether you beat the stage or not. Even if you do manage to make your katamari composed primarily of objects The King wants, he doesn’t seem any more thrilled than if you hadn’t. Variation in Beautiful Katamari’s gameplay is a farce; the only variation comes on the Mars stage. To accomplish the mission, you need to roll up hot items and try to get the katamari’s temperature up to 10,000 degrees centigrade. There is no timer on this level, and cold items like drinks and fire extinguishers will cool down the katamari until you fail when it reaches 0 degrees.

There are other things a player may do in a vain attempt of finding fresh gameplay. There are presents scattered along stages that unlock different accessories for The Prince to wear, but these accessories are moot despite their eccentric nature because the player will never see them during stages rather than looking at the gigantic katamari they are amassing compared to the 5cm Prince. The Prince’s many cousins are also hidden in the levels: some will be rolling their own katamari while others are lounging about, and The Prince can capture them into his own katamari. Afterwards, players can choose to play as one of the cousins, and each stage will track which character the player used to clear it. Unfortunately each cousin controls exactly the same despite their minor physical differences, and once again the uniqueness of the character is lost next to the colossal katamari you are rolling.

The music in Beautiful Katamari would be its redeeming property had there been more than a couple tracks. At first you’ll be entranced by the techno beats and synthesized voicing until you realize that the soundtrack swaps between maybe three tracks during stages. The sound effects are also problematic as well. It’s not that there aren’t many, because Namco has included sounds for almost all the objects and actions in the game, but when an object is rolled into your katamari, a generic “schloop” sound drowns out the item’s personal sound. The generic sound isn’t bad in and of itself, and in fact is a very satisfying cue that you’re acquiring more and more girth but the fact that it conflicts with another event-based sound shows a design flaw.

Beautiful Katamari’s graphics appear taken directly out of the original Playstation 2 title, on which they were barely passable even then. While Namco has every right to preserve the simplistic and colorful art style of Katamari, they haven’t realized that they can smooth edges or add dynamic animations to objects. As a result, Beautiful Katamari’s graphics look less next-generation and more like an elementary school student’s art class assignment. However, object models and the camera scale well from the miniscule to the macro, with larger objects appearing smaller and smaller as the katamari grows until they vanish among the landscape.

Despite the admittedly addicting gameplay, Beautiful Katamari falls short on every other front. From sub-par graphics, mediocre sound, lack of story, and few stages supported by a lack of fresh new gameplay mechanics, the title fails to justify its $40 price tag. Newcomers to the franchise should definitely see what all the hype is about, but err on the side of rental rather than purchase Beautiful Katamari. If Namco and Microsoft really wanted to sell the title, Beautiful Katamari would have been released as a  downloadable game via the Xbox Live Arcade.

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