We ♥ Katamari: REROLL (Review)

We ♥ Katamari: REROLL
aka We Love Katamari: REROLL
First Released June 2, 2023
We ♥ Katamari First Released July 6, 2005
Developed by Namco & Now Production
Published by Namco
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam
Version Played: Xbox Series X

I needed a break from pinball, saw this was on sale, and bought it. I didn’t expect to do this review, but I have a lot to say.

I think everyone said “I have to play that!” the first time they saw a picture or a video of Katamari Damacy. It wasn’t even originally going to come out in America. Too weird. Too Japanese. But, it got a lot of attention at a workshop at Game Developers Conference and the press was swooning over it, so Namco rolled the dice. The next thing you know, it’s a global hit that has spawned multiple sequels. Granted, sequels that have almost none of the charm of the first one, but as long as you avoided the handheld spin-offs, the sequels all played better and had more to do. So when I played Katamari Damacy REROLL a while back, I remember thinking it wasn’t very good as far as remasters go. I was also perplexed as to why they went with the original game when an HD remastering of Katamari Forever, an all-encompassing tribute to the franchise, would have made a LOT more sense. The first game felt like a proof of concept that was short and limited, while the series started to really get good with We ♥ Katamari. Yes, there’s more than just a graphic overhaul, but as a “remastering” that doesn’t remaster gameplay, whatever annoyances were left intact are now especially annoying because gaming has come a long way. It took a while, but the second Katamari game finally got its REROLL, and this one is much better, but only because it feels a tiny bit less lazy. Only a tiny bit, as the problems are still amplified by virtue of age.

We ♥ Katamari: REROLL is the first collectathon in forever that I 100%ed. I suppose that says more about its quality than any review I could write. Just make sure to put bandages on your thumbs BEFORE playing instead of waiting for after. Also, 100% doesn’t mean I collected a million roses or got 100% of the items, but rather I found all the cousins and the hidden Namco stickers.

If you’ve somehow never played a Katamari game, the concept is simple: you control a tiny prince who rolls a ball that everything sticks to.. eventually. The catch is that the ball can only roll-up things smaller than it, but as the ball grows, so does the range of stuff you can roll-up. In preset-benchmarks, the ball “levels-up” and the world becomes smaller, giving you all new junk to collect. You start by rolling up things like paperclips and eventually reach the point where you’re pulling up skyscrapers and landmasses (though that really only happens in the final basic level). Using dual stick tank controls, you have to cause the end of the world, more or less. Oh, the world will be fine, as the ball seems pain free. In the first game, the framing device was the King of All Cosmos got drunk and blew up all the stars in the sky, and every ball you rolled up became a replacement star or constellation. The King of All Cosmos is an overbearing asshole who mentally abuses the prince, but it ultimately gave the prince a sense of pluckiness that had a charm to it. That charm is completely gone in the sequels, because they’re far too meta and self-congratulatory, to the point that even staunch fans began to find it obnoxious.

The first game had this “we had to come up with SOME reason for this bananas concept to make sense” vibe that felt authentically kooky. This sequel, and in fact all Katamari sequels, feel like they’re trying too hard.

In this game, fans of the first game and the concept of Katamari Damacy in general essentially pray to the King of All Cosmos to make their Katamari dream scenarios come true. Much like how I’ve never found a person who brags about having a high IQ to be impressive, I’ve never once found a person or entity that fancies itself as charming to be the least bit charming at all. That’s especially true with all the Katamari sequels, where the characters are just annoying. Actually, the King might be the most annoying character in the history of video games. He never shuts up, ever. When you’re in the zone and trying to focus on beating your best times or your best scores, having the King’s dialog block the screen is ridiculous. You have to press A (or X on PlayStation) to make it quick scroll. If you don’t and just let it scroll on its own it could be quite a while before you have a clear screen again. It might be a funny gag if it happened once per a save file, but every time? Blech. There’s no method of turning it off, either. If you find one of the 39 cousins of the prince for the first time in a specific stage, the King will say the same lines every replay about finding that cousin.

My personal idea of Gaming Hell is a Katamari with only the Cowbear level where the King’s dialog can’t be removed from the screen and the catchy soundtracks are replaced with Baby Mario’s crying from Yoshi’s Island. I’d like to believe that’s what OJ Simpson is playing right now. Satan couldn’t give him a football based-hell since he already played for Buffalo.

We ♥ Katamari has only five basic stages, each of which has two variants based on making as big a ball as possible within a time limit, or reaching a target size as quickly as possible. Those stages are easily the best parts of the game, as each starts you small and in a confined space, but eventually you work your way up to the point that you’re struggling to find new things to grab onto. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors involved, as set pieces constantly repeat, only redressed with new materials to roll up. This becomes especially true if you play the three “Eternal” modes of the game, which are a new addition to We Love Katamari REROLL that didn’t start until later games. Each of the Eternal stages has a hard cap in how big you can get and how much stuff there is to gather. By the time you reach the point where you’re rolling up both clouds and the ground underneath you, the game itself is no longer taking into account all the stuff on the ground. You can even get achievements, presents, cousins, and collectables you’ve missed in the Eternal modes. However, you can’t make new planets, so when you quit, your ball will be turned into stardust for the space level. I wish there were a LOT more themes and areas, but what’s here is fine. The themes are mostly fun locations. If I had to complain, I’d say I wish there were a lot more things specific to each stage.

The racing level is probably my favorite of the special modes. It controls like operating a rocket-powered shopping cart after you’ve slammed all the hard liquor in the world, but it’s crazy fun.

The special stages are what differentiate the Katamari games, and most are fun. In the racing mode, you can’t stop the ball, which has one speed: too fast. It crashes into everything and goes flying off even the slightest hill, but the out-of-control rocket vibe works for a game like this (though I can’t stress enough: I would NOT want a whole game like that). You’d also have to be trying to lose deliberately to actually fail at it. There’s three stages where you have to guess how big your ball is and try to get it as close to the target size as possible. Thankfully We ♥ Katamari isn’t operating under Price is Right rules, so going over is okay. The most memorable stage is probably the one where you have to roll around an oblong sumo wrestler, where the only items that count are food. It’s a shame rolling up people doesn’t count as edible, as a little implied cannibalism is the type of thing that can put a game on the map. The sumo is really tough to roll since he’s not fully round and has a bad wobble. That is, unless you can maneuver yourself so the sumo is completely horizontal. If you can do that, it’s so satisfying to get a long straightaway. Also, that last sumo level is tough. Easily the stage I lost the most on.

God, how I hated these levels. Also taking the extra 24 seconds here got me a whole mm bigger. Did I mention I hated these levels?

On the flip side, when the special stages are bad, they’re really bad. One of them has you collecting fireflies that just sort of linger without any real rhyme or reason besides a few sections where more than an average amount swarm. One has you build a snowman and it’s SO tedious. The above one has a fire that goes out if you don’t collect items fast enough. And there’s a big river right in the center of the stage with a sloped edge, and if the ball falls into the river, you get punished by the vengeful king, who REALLY never shuts up when you fail a stage. There’s a stage where the items have a numeric price placed on them which is really just the same thing you’ve been doing for several hours, only with items having often arbitrary values. Then there’s the end-game special levels where you have to roll up all the planets you’ve created over the course of the game, and one where you have to roll-up countries and then catch a comet that’s about to hit the earth. They both sound more fun than they are, which is not at all. But, by far the worst stage is the Cowbear stage, which has to be a contender for the worst level in a good game ever. So, of course THAT stage got brought back for Katamari Forever (the finale of the console franchise as of this writing).

You can’t see it, but I’m about to run over a teeny tiny statue of a bear. Trust me, that’s not a good thing.

In the Cowbear stage, the level ends as soon as you roll up your first bear or cow. You don’t get the option to keep rolling with your current ball. And also the game has a very odd definition of what is a cow or a bear. A road cone that has the marking of a dairy cow? That counts and the level is over. A vending machine with the markings of a dairy cow? That counts and the level is over. Teeny tiny little toy bears? Those count, and the level is over. It turns Katamari; one of the most fast paced, frantic, exciting game concepts, into a slow paced, unfriendly bore. You have to literally inch your way around a stage where things that are painted in a way vaguely resembling the patterns of hair on cows are scattered everywhere. Your starting positions in most stages are semi-randomized, and in the Bearcow stages, the designers usually surround your starting ball with the smallest (thus lowest-scoring) bear or cow objects. And mind you, it’s not like you have perfect visibility. Most of the time, the ending of the stage took me by surprise. I usually spent a minute or so staring at the screen while trying to figure out what exactly I touched that counted as a bear or a cow. Since your goal is to create a massive ball that blocks most of the visibility in front of you, this was a VERY dumb idea. So dumb that it should have been killed on the drawing board before development even began, and the person who proposed it should have been fired. By that, I mean they should have been loaded into a cannon and fired out of it, preferably into a brick wall. This is an example of taking the quirk too far.

What did my parents get me? MALIBU KAT-A-MARI!! I’m a ballerina! GRACEFUL!

Along for the ride in this REROLL are five “new” stages, or rather five new challenges that recycle We ♥ Katamari’s existing settings, that literally have no consequence: the Royal Reverie stages. While they keep high scores, you’re not creating new planets to roll-up or anything. In terms of quality, I’d rank all these new stages a couple Everests above the Cowbear level but several Matterhorns below the levels that are actually fun. All five, at best, feel like ideas that never made it past spitballing at the initial planning meeting. Besides hiding stickers in them (more on those next), the crappy reward for completing them is costumes for the Prince not good enough to be costumes in the original release. In the screenshot above, you have to find four ballerinas in the zoo. In another, you have to find five hidden musical instruments in the school, with the catch being that the school is full of ghosts that end your round if you touch them. One is a car stage that actually allows you to stop, where the only item that counts towards your score are any tires. One is a quick one minute sprint in the bedroom and HOLY CRAP were they ever stretching for ideas there. The final one recreates the firefly stage that’s already second-to-last in the terrible idea department, only the fireflies are replaced by actual fire that represents your FIGHTING SPIRIT to quickly drain an opponent’s health bar. These levels are AWFUL and not worth a new purchase if you still have your PS2 copy.

I chose to use this pic to show the sticker challenge because it can’t spoil the locations of them for you. Seriously, this was what kept me playing for four straight days.

Easily the coolest addition to We ♥ Katamari: REROLL is that nearly every level has between one to three stickers of classic Namco characters. They’re divided into one for each “challenge” in the game for a lack of a better term. Like how each of the five basic stages have a How Large challenge and a How Fast challenge? Well, each of THOSE has a sticker in a different location somewhere on the map. You don’t roll them up. Instead, you have to equip the camera present (it should be the first present you get) and, when you find one, you have to snap a photo of it, which removes it from the stage and adds it to your collection. This is a “just for funsies” thing that has no achievements or practical usage, but holy cowbear, did I ever have a good time finding them! The stickers turn the world of Katamari into a 3D version of a Where’s Waldo book, and I mean that in the most complementary way possible.

This totally makes up for the fact that they took the second worst level in the game, changed it from night to day and pretended it was a new level. The “Fighting Spirit” stage is even worse than the firefly original.

It’s such a thrill to find the stickers, especially in the bigger levels. They’re almost never in an arbitrary spot. By time I got to the bigger levels, I had an understanding for the “logic” of the type of the places they’d be hidden, so it wasn’t like a needle in a haystack. Actually, the difficulty was nearly perfectly balanced, to the point you’d think they were pros at it. Mind you, you have to operate within the rules of each stage while snapping the pictures, which is why the tutorial, car stage, and space levels have no stickers to find. Thankfully, unlike presents and cousins, you keep the stickers you snap pictures of win, lose, or quit. But, like with the fire stages, you have to keep your Katmari fire burning while you search. If there’s a time limit, you have to work with it. Cowbear? You still have to avoid touching cows and bears, which is probably good life advice in general. There is a problem with the sticker search: it seems to have inconsistent stability. I’m going to spoil ONE sticker location for you because it’s one a lot of people are having problems with. Not so much the “finding” part as the “getting credit for finding it” part. It’s this one:

This was the second-to-last sticker I found, in one of the “pick up a million roses” bonus stage that doesn’t actually expect you to pick up a million roses in a single setting. I’m only spoiling this because of how crappy it is to get it.

And yes, that’s the hockey mask from Splatterhouse. You’ll also note I took a picture and didn’t get the sticker. I have no idea why. Several times, I collected stickers from quite a distance away, partially obscured, off-center, and not completely in frame. I still got them. But, in this specific instance, the camera simply didn’t register that I had taken a pic of it and thus collected it. So, how did I get it? I honestly don’t know! The house was out-of-bounds, so I couldn’t get as close as I wanted to. No matter where I stood, it wouldn’t register. This had happened once before with a previous sticker, but then I quit the stage and restarted it and, the next time, the camera worked on the first try and the sticker was collected. Not this time. I was really worried that the game was glitched, and if it didn’t work a year after release, it was likely to never work at all. I know the camera is sensitive enough because on the cowbear level, I collected the sticker by accident when photographing something that turned out to be wrong, but the real sticker was in the frame and I got it anyway even though it wasn’t REALLY visible. Meanwhile, the Jason mask wouldn’t register even though I took several unobstructed photos. I kept bumping up and down against the fence over and over and over and even tried a selfie with it. Finally I found a gap between the fences and, after several attempts to bump myself as close to the invisible barrier as possible, the stupid thing actually registered and I collected it.

This is the tallest you get in this Katamari, or maybe one click higher. But future editions of the series had you transition from the Earth to rolling up continents to rolling up space. This one has the Earth stuff and space in separate levels, and the space one doesn’t tell you how big your Katamari ball is. Instead, it just tells you how many objects you’ve rolled up. Fun fact: in the EU versions of We Love Katamari, and ONLY the EU versions, each of the cousins you found got their own planet for the space section. REROLL is the first time the cousin planets get a global release.

My biggest complaint about the sticker concept besides mechanical issues is that there isn’t more of it. I would love for the photography to be a major part of the Katamari series. In keeping with the Where’s Waldo-like feel of the Namco sticker hunt, they could use the photography feature in the same way the checklists at the end of Waldo books add replay value. “Take a picture of a flying elephant! Of a bear playing the piano! Of a swordfish poking out of a life ring!” That type of stuff. I’d still be playing it, and having the time of my life. Seriously, I kind of want a 3D Waldo game now because of Katamari. It just works, and it’s such a tease that there’s not more of that in the game. Just the cousins and presents, of which there’s nothing new hidden in the stages. No new cousins, and all the new costumes are tied directly to completing the five Reverie stages. They’re not presents hidden inside them. If nothing else, it’d been nice if they changed all the locations of the cousins and presents, or just added more. I say that because they’re so fun to find. If I had just played the levels until they were beat, there’s only a couple hours of content in the game. With the cousins, presents, and especially the stickers, there’s several multiples more.

I came two milliseconds short of having the clock read all 2s and I was so proud I took a picture, even though it means nothing. I think I need help.

For all my whining, I have to admit that I couldn’t put We ♥ Katamari down, and I’ll regret it for days to come as the blisters all over my hands heal. Katamari is a fill-in-the-blanks game. Whatever you want out of it, be it a relaxing game to chill out with or a white knuckle high score challenge, this will do. When I wasn’t treating it like a 3D Waldo game, I was challenging my own best times and highest scores, and the only time I ever got bored was on the Cowbear level and the firefly level (and its Reverie rehash), both of which are glaring blemishes on an otherwise pretty dang addictive game. It even has a lame as f*ck versus mode if that’s your thing, but there’s something for everyone here. I didn’t like the remaster of the original game at all, but the additions of the stickers (there’s also two in each of the five new levels), significantly faster load times (at least on Xbox Series X) and less technical hiccups make this a solid $29.99 investment, or in my case, under $10 investment. At the same time, it’s still the same game from 2005.

My favorite of the “mop everything up” type of levels is the Hansel & Gretel level.

The thing about Katamari as a franchise is there’s really only been three console games and one all-star compilation. The handheld games were REALLY bad, which is probably to be expected since those had to make all kinds of concessions based on the hardware. The last console release, Katamari Forever from 2009, was made up almost entirely of older levels and challenges. Touch My Katamari, a game ruined by the rear touch panel on the Vita, was the last non-mobile game, and it was another game made up of older levels. And that was it! This blog is younger than the latest new console Katamari game, and this blog is thirteen years old this year.

The cloud stage is one of the stages that didn’t make the cut for Katamari Forever.

While the existing Katamari games are a ton of fun, this is a frustrating series because it feels like it hasn’t peaked yet. Fans of the franchise, I ask you this: doesn’t it feel like the perfect Katamari video game is still waiting to be released? What I think happened is Keita Takahashi and his team burned out after releasing three Katamari games in a three year span, the last of which had massive production issues. Beautiful Katamari, aka the one where critics started turning on the series, only released on Xbox 360 (it’s still for sale on the Xbox Store), but it was originally going to be on Wii and PS3 too. The PS3 version ran into “porting problems” and, because the PS3 had lower sales, they canned it and focused on a Wii version that also never saw the light of day. Also, the Xbox 360 version was SLAMMED for having DLC levels coded into the disc itself, where the DLC fee was really just to unlock content already on the disc. It felt cheap, because it was. That’s why the PS3 got Katamari Forever, which was mostly a retread of Beautiful Katamari with some content from the first two games sprinkled in.

2024 and I’m still playing new releases (or in this case, remasters) where the camera gets stuck behind a solid object that drowns out your entire field of view. This is a VERY common occurrence in We Love Katamari.

That’s why these re-releases really frustrate me. Games are just better now than they were in 2005. 3D games especially. Do you think a game like Katamari could benefit from, say, a better camera? How about better fluid simulations? Handling more moving objects at once? Being able to give moving objects more elaborate moving parameters? Well, that game doesn’t exist. Even with the visuals now having less jaggyness and real time shadows, this is a 2005 game, and it feels like it. Everything that moves does so using shallow, preset parameters. Objects are CONSTANTLY clipping through surfaces, and the camera is just plain bad at what it does, to the point that you often can’t see what you’re doing. Hey, I had a ton of fun with We ♥ Katamari, even if I can’t eat salty foods without searing pain in my fingertips for the next couple days. Needless to say, I’m happy with my purchase, especially since I got it on sale. I’m also happy the first two Katamari games got a modern re-release. I’m all about preservation and legal access to older games, and I have no objection to those older games getting quality of life mods and bonus content. BUT, I really hope they have something better planned for Katamari Damacy. I hope the next Katamari isn’t a REROLL, but a completely modern Katamari that feels modern. I say that because I can’t say I’ve played a game that maximizes the Katamari concept’s potential. I don’t think it exists yet.
Verdict: YES!
$9.89 (normally $29.99) got rolled up in the making of this review.