Once Upon a Katamari (Review)

Once Upon a Katamari
Available on All Major Platforms
Played on an Xbox Series X
Released October 24, 2025
Developed by RENGAME
Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
$39.99 smacked into a wall in the making of this review.
This Review was played ONLY on an Xbox Series X.

IMPORTANT: As I was finishing this review, it was announced that UPDATES AND DLC ARE COMING, but unless they add more original, fresh level concepts, it won’t flip my verdict. The DLC is just more music and accessories. Nope, that won’t be enough. But, I try to be fair so I will play post-patchwork and write an update in the near future. This is why you stopped reviewing new games, Cathy, ya dummy.

SPOILER WARNING
THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES LEVEL THEMES,
THE END GAME, AND SPOILS THE PLOT
SHORT SUMMARY: AN UNSATISFYING REHASH
MY VERDICT IS A FIRM NO!

“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.“

That’s what I said in my review for We ♥ Katamari: REROLL. Cue the sad trombone noise, because THAT game still doesn’t exist. Once Upon A Katamari, the first brand new Katamari game on a console since 2009, still looks and feels like a game from twenty years ago. It’s not like Katamari Damacy ever felt cutting edge to begin with (even if it actually was), but it could get away with it because it was such a novel concept of a game. Now it’s 2025, and Katamari as a gameplay mechanic is established and even part of pop culture. So my demoralizing disappointment in Once Upon a Katamari mostly confirmed my suspicion that I would not be nostalgic for the way games looked in the PS1/PS2 era. But it’s not just the outdated graphics that deflated my experience. I was enjoying the new game when I first started playing it. The idea that I would be writing such a largely negative review never entered my mind, but as the game went along, I realized I wasn’t having as much fun as I thought I would be. Finally I had to admit that this is too much of a rehash and I’m kind of over the same old thing.

Now, I really, really love the core gameplay of the Katamari Damacy franchise. I was VERY excited when it was announced. I want you to keep that in mind because I didn’t expect to be as unhappy with Once Upon a Katamari as I am. I’m so frustrated that, rather than rebooting the franchise with a much-needed graphics overhaul and a greater emphasis on high-score chasing and speed running, they just made a glorified level pack. One that, frankly, doesn’t care all that much about scores or times and is still as self-congratulatory about its characters as every other game in the series after the first one. What used to be a charming and addictive experience is now shackled by a publisher and developers that dig their heels in and refuse to evolve Katamari past its original style.

The time travel theme had me hyped, and while it proves that it can work at times to freshen up the concept in a “whole new settings” kind of way, the gameplay is firmly stuck in 2004-2009. The different eras rarely feel utilized to their fullest effect, with levels that often don’t play up to their strengths and instead just recycle the same old gimmicks. Rolling up dinosaurs? Sign me up! Using that setting for the dull-as-hell “collect only 50 objects” level? Not so much. Besides, after over two decades, the camera and the physics just are not getting better, which is going to override any sense of newness the time travel theme could have added. The action is constantly being obscured by walls, with many stages being worse about that than others. Too many indoor settings are based around closed-in spaces, which doesn’t really work in a game where you continually grow in size and are incentivized to grab everything in sight, including stuff stashed against walls.

Like, hey, there’s a level set in ancient Egypt where you have to roll up mummies? That sounds awesome! Crying shame about how they closed in the walls so tight that you’re constantly unable to see what you’re doing. Characters and moving objects are still set along tracks and have no complicated behavior and look as blocky and ugly as they last did in 2009, and all those problems ultimately work against the satisfaction of rolling mummies up. It’s weird that they didn’t comprehend that things that weren’t big problems from 2004 to 2009 are going to be big problems in 2025 because gaming has come so far.

There is no better feature a sequel can have than embracing innovation. We’ve already experienced Katamari with all these problems. You know what we haven’t experienced? Katamari WITHOUT these problems. That’s what they should’ve done to freshen up the gameplay. They could have recycled the same old gimmicks until the cowbears come home and it still would have felt new and modern if they had fixed all the problems that have been part of this franchise from the start. Give us the smoothest, most intuitive and hang-up-free Katamari of all-time. They didn’t. Don’t get me wrong: new levels and themes are great, but if all the bad parts come along for the ride and some of the levels are so similar to old ones that they feel more like remixes than outright new stages, well, then it’s just an expensive level pack, isn’t it?

I don’t know if the problems are genuinely worse than ever, or if it only seems like it. A good example of what I mean is the act of climbing. Climbing has always been hit or miss in Katamari. You won’t know until you reach the top of what you’re climbing if you’re going to be knocked-back off by an invisible wall or a tiny bump in your Katamari ball. This has been a part of the franchise since the beginning and it seems to be even worse now. I was constantly banging and recoiling off the top of all walls great and small, including ones I should have been big enough to climb. In the old west level, one of the crowns is hidden on a roof. I needed to replay the stage three times because I would bang off the top of the ladder and get knocked back down. Since the knock-back when you bang can be brutal, sorry but after twenty years, they needed to fix it. Even WHEN you need to climb feels inelegant or outright wrong. Topography that by all rights should be small hills, bumps, lips, or ramps aren’t, even late in the game. Like this:

What you’re seeing in that picture should be a bump or a slope, but it’s a wall that requires you to press up against the surface and slowly push up it. I mean, if you’re lucky. Sometimes the climbing mechanic just straight-up doesn’t activate. This is one of those situations where I thought maybe my controller was broken (I did end up wearing out an analog stick playing this game, but that controller was old). I had tons of moments where I attempted to climb a small hill or a ladder and the damn ball just idled without moving at all despite the fact that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I could excuse crap like that for twenty year old versions of this game, when the idea and gameplay was still new. Katamari ain’t new anymore. How could they not fix anything after twenty-one years? Arguably the only improvements are the draw distance is well done, at least on Xbox, and there’s now a single button you can press to dash. However, if you dash too many times in a row you lose it for a stretch.

I also don’t remember getting jammed as much in any Katamari game. It’s not just because of the items, the magnet and the rocket, either. The magnet has a similar effect to the King Shock from Katamari Forever, and it can absolutely trap you in areas, especially if you grow big enough to no longer be able to squeeze past any exits. It happened a few times, because the magnet has range and is able to pull things past gaps the ball already can’t fit past. While it’s still very fun to use and adds a lot of post-game high score chasing, it also is capable of ruining your run and has an undeniable inelegance to it. But again, at least that backfire effect feels kind of like a video game type of hazard. Getting stuck between two objects though? Not so much, but it happens enough to be notable. In Once Upon a Katamari, I got stuck in ways that I literally couldn’t believe I couldn’t wiggle out of, like this:

Yeah, I’m really stuck there on basically nothing, and remained stuck long after that clip ended. I have no clue how I did it. Oh sure, the one time it feels like my Katamari doesn’t bang off something I can’t roll up and I become ensnared by it. Maybe it’s just a product of poorly thought-out layouts. While wrapping up this review, I realized only two stages made me sit-up in my chair. In the biggest Katamari game ever. There’s like fifty stages, give or take, and two really stood out. Two. And I had a week to think about that, too. Sigh. The best parts of Once Upon a Katamari are undeniably addictive in that “just one more game” kind of way, but they’re also unmemorable. The best levels are, you know, fine. The magnet is fun and probably the highlight of the game because it added the most value to the experience. There’s also a time-freezing stopwatch that, yes, also stops the timer and adds some much needed strategic flexibility. Though I’m not entirely convinced that the locations of the items were precisely chosen to maximize player options and decision making, the game is better off for having them. The other two items are nowhere near as fun. The rocket just led to a whole lot of banging into things and the radar lasts too long.

Also, while the radar item remains valuable in levels where you’re searching for specific items (like “Tag You’re It” Cousins-search levels or Pharaoh’s Request), for other levels, it’s rendered useless once you’ve found the present, crowns, and cousins. The game could have rewarded players for 100%ing those stages by replacing the now useless radar with another magnet or rocket, or hell, player’s choice! That’d be cool! But nope, the radar remains and since it takes a while to wear off and you’re capped at one item at a time, it becomes another thing you actively want to avoid. It’s just another sign of how little thought was given to the big picture of the player’s experience. Hell, the level layouts feel like that in general. They might as well just make the stages randomly generated for how inelegant the object placement is. And while I’m whining about items, the camera pulls away when you grow enough to reach a checkpoint to show the physical location of it, and it doesn’t instantly teleport back to you. It moves through the playfield while the timer is going and the game is live. It only takes a split second, but if an item is active, you might lose some of the time you get with it.

Everything about Once Upon a Katamari reminds me that Namco is the same company that didn’t understand why Pac-Man was a hit and bet on the wrong aspects of it for the first couple sequels. The gameplay and the high score/fastest time chasing are why Katamari is a viable release for Namco in 2025, and they didn’t even know that. You can’t see what your high scores/best times are or even what your rankings on levels are from the quick travel menu. That really solidifies my theory that neither the developer nor the publisher understood what keeps players coming back to Katamari. I mean, to not even have the rankings listed? To have no quick access list of what levels you’ve S-tiered or gotten the three benchmark coins from? Here’s what the quick travel menus look like:

You have to manually go to the level, and not just the level, but then you have to click the level and do a “skip dialog thing” to load the “confirm you want to play this level” pop-up and THAT’S what lists your scores. You can also go view “the cosmos” but that’s several steps as well. What the hell? There’s also nothing that lists which levels you’ve earned meteors on, or if you even can earn a meteor at all on a level. I *love* getting those meteors. It always feels like an accomplishment. That they’re not even listed in the cosmos screen, a “bonus feature” in the hub world’s “S.S. Prince” spaceship is just mind blowing. There’s no leaderboards at all, local or online so you can only see your absolute #1 biggest size or fastest time, assuming you didn’t trade a best time for a lower score for whatever reason (you can do that). Hey Namco, you might not realize this, but you have the perfect old school arcade scoring game here. Twenty years later and you still don’t see that?

Once Upon a Katamari is the least concerned with your best and worst times of any game in the franchise so far. There’s not even an achievement for getting all S-rankings either, which, hey, I guess that means you don’t have to stress doing good on stages that aren’t fun, which is like half the stages anyway. The one thing they did add is three tiers of object-collecting benchmarks for most stages that earns you coins that you can spend to get new facial expressions or gestures for the create-a-cousin feature. The currency system is fine but benchmarks are just dumb and you can only earn the lowest available in each run, plus it only starts after you beat a level for the first time. I would have preferred hiding the coins in the stage. Oh and, once again, you can’t check and see what levels you have or haven’t got the coins from using the quick travel menu. It gets worse. The big climatic stage where you roll up the universe and all the stars? That has no recorded score attached to it at all. I’m not kidding! Oh, there’s a score. Look, it shows it and everything!

But it doesn’t record that score. It just lists the level. Who cares? It’s only the climax of the f*cking game, with a level populated by objects YOU created. Why would you want to keep track of how well you’ve done with that? Pssh, what are you, some nerd who actually cares about scores? AND IT GETS EVEN WORSE! Three eternal stages are included, like in past Katamari games. In older games, while they were “just for funsies” levels, they still kept track of your high scores. Once Upon a Katamari’s eternal stages don’t. Again, they tell you a score, but they don’t record it. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t complete the object catalog using eternal levels. I mean, unless I rolled up everything in Eternal 3 and somehow didn’t get a single new object for the catalog. So the eternal modes serve no purpose at all except to create stardust that will be inserted into a level that also doesn’t keep track of high scores. WHY EVEN INCLUDE THEM THEN?

The poor menus, lack of caring about the actual scores, and baffling DLC model that’s focused almost entirely on music instead of gameplay makes me think that Namco and RENGAME are operating under the mistaken belief that people play Katamari for anything but the gameplay. That the real appeal is limited only to the famous soundtracks or the “humorous” and/or “quirky” King of All Cosmos. The music of this Katamari is the least catchy in the series so far. Not a single earworm. Nothing like, say, Katamari on the Swing from We Love. As for the King? Holy f*ck. Okay, maybe he was cute and funny in the first game, but he’s since become the single worst character in the history of video games. He just ruins everything. His bullsh*t isn’t funny. It’s just obnoxious. It’s 2025 and the King of All Cosmos still has dialog blocking the screen. If you don’t move your hands from the dual stick tank controls (in a game where you usually don’t want to stop moving, mind you) to skip the dialog that blocks the screen during live gameplay, it might linger on the screen for quite a while. Here’s me beating As Fast As You Can 2 in sixteen seconds.

See how much of that sixteen seconds had text blocking the screen? It begs the question, ahem, WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU DEVELOPERS? Did you not get attention as children? This is about as charming as a clown honking a horn, spritzing water, and pieing people in the face at a mass casualty funeral for stillborn puppies! People have been complaining about this since 2004 and they just keep doubling down on it like it’s the thing that got the game to 2025 and not, you know, the ball and the rolling stuff up part! Like every other Katamari game, the same dialog repeats every single level. Whether you’re rolling up cousins or ninjas or bowling pins, you will see the same dialog block the screen every single goddamned replay, and this in a game that heavily encourages replaying levels. The only exception are the presents since, once you have found them, they don’t return in each replay. 

Speaking of doubling down, levels that completely go against the frantic nature of Katamari are still here and horrible as ever. Cowbear, the level that ends the very first time you roll up a cow or bear because ain’t that quirky is back. Just like previous games, the developer’s definition of what constitutes a cow or a bear is trollishly open to interpretation. Run over a single carton of milk that you couldn’t see because the camera is still one of the worst of any 3D action game? The level is over because a carton of milk counts as a cow, even though there isn’t a cow on the package. Well that’s just ridiculous. Saying a carton of milk counts as a cow is like saying a yeast infection is a baby. What’s really infuriating is that the king states the rules require you to catch a cow or a bear. Um, milk isn’t a creature. You don’t “catch” it, nor is it caught in the “catch!” sense. They’re sitting on the ground. YEAH, I’M BEING THAT PETTY! This gimmick f*cking sucks and they keep bringing it back! Petty disappointment is all I’ve ever gotten out of it.

Either way, the fast-paced, intense Katamari gameplay is dropped and you’re forced to inch your way through the level while trying to avoid signs that have pictures of cows or tiny little bear wind-up toys, because those count. It wasn’t fun the first time in 2005, and twenty years later it’s still a slog. The best thing I can say about it: at least the level layout isn’t as bad as it was in We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever. BUT, it’s still a pretty boring layout and it’s just not fun. It was never fun, and I don’t get how anyone could enjoy it. It feels like a completely different game. Other returning stinkers include several “only pick up 50” levels. Again, you have to heel-toe your way through the levels despite spotty physics and a terrible camera, trying desperately to avoid the tiny things. I don’t like them, but I could have tolerated having one in the game. There’s (checks notes) more than one, so now I hate the whole concept of 50-only because too many of them replace the type of levels I want to play, which were really just “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels.

Sadly, it’s not the only “high concept” stinker. New to this game (I think, at least, my brain seems to have deleted all the handheld games from memory) is a level where you have to roll up sweet, sugary food objects and avoid non-sweet foods. Instead of just trying to create a large ball, you’re trying to maximize the sweetness of the ball to 100%. The setting is a vast open air market and food court, and things like plates don’t count towards the objective.

That doesn’t sound like a terrible idea at all, but such a specific concept requires beefing-up the graphics, play control, and camera so that it’s easier to tell things apart and you’re not constantly getting screwed by a camera. Oh and maybe ditch the King of All Cosmos for levels like this since this requires closely paying attention to what’s in front of you instead of just rolling up everything tinier than you. And this is why doubling down on boxy retro graphics, the same 2004 “enemy” behavior patterns, and the screen-blocking text of the King of All Cosmos crosses the line from a bad idea to outright self-sabotage.

What could have been a highlight in a modern game is a terrible level when you’re a glorified expansion of a 2000s game. Telling sweet things apart from non-sweet things isn’t intuitive. You have to replay the level and brute force memorize a good portion of the items to know what column they count in. Telling a pepper apart from an apple would be easier if you used that space age technology to actually look good. Not only that, but the scoring system sucks, because most of the sweet things only cause an incremental bump in the sweetness of the ball (with exceptions, like the shaved ice), but the wrong foods come with a harsh penalty. So while building the sweetness is slow, losing it happens too quickly. You know, I wish I could play this layout without the gimmick. It would have been one of the more fun layouts.

Not every new concept is a dud, though most of the “new” gimmick stages are just reworked versions of old stages. Remember the snowman level? They took the same basic “cover as much of the ground as possible” concept and made it worthwhile by theming a stage around rolling a water ball around a desert. The hook is that you have to continuously dunk the ball in water sources to keep it moist. While it diverges from the core Katamari gameplay and that normally annoys me, it’s fine as a one-off side quest. The racing stage that I loved before returns, only this time it’s a boat race, and it’s just as fun and just as easy. Come to think of it, the whole game is crazy easy. I only failed on one level in my entire week-long play session, and it’s another returning stage: the fireball that you have to build up to light a central end-goal fire, which might be the single worst-designed layout in any Katamari game, and given how lazy that Koosh Ball level is, that’s saying something.

The “light the fire” stage takes place in Roman times and has a coliseum setting. But, they fashioned the layout like a maze, and I don’t mean like a Pac-Man style maze, but an actual “how do I get out of this thing?” maze, only while using the people in the audience as the walls. You have to build up the ball as big as you can and find your way to the center to light a fire. I’m almost certain you won’t ever be able to get big enough to roll people up and the object is to wiggle around the maze. It’s a really boring idea because there’s no room for spontaneity or to really even create your own strategy. It’s too narrow and too railed. It’s a f*cking maze, and Katamari is at its best when you’re in a big, open area where all the corridors are wide. The type of stages that are so vast that it’s overwhelming at first and you have to discover the best path to grow the ball. Also, the thing about mazes is they don’t usually offer replay value once you know the solution. This one is no different. Once you know the routes, the thing that made the stage “special” is over, but unlike other stages, the act of collecting isn’t fun. The pathways are too compact.

The things that would make up for what the game doesn’t do aren’t here. Again, no online leaderboards. No local leaderboards. The “take a picture of the Namco characters” thing from We Love Katamari REROLL that completely hooked me is gone. Each stage has three hidden crowns but they’re stupid easy to find. The cousins are too, while the presents offer a bit more of a challenge sometimes. For one, I had to look up the location, and it’s because it’s buried in an arbitrary spot on the snow level and only occasionally pops out like a prairie dog. We Love Katamari REROLL and 2009’s Katamari Forever’s hidden trinkets were so satisfying to find. The crowns aren’t, and I know they could have done a lot more. Like, why not hide record albums that unlock the legacy soundtrack? That would have kept everyone, including myself, playing after the credits rolled. Well, there is a legacy soundtrack, but sold separately as a fairly expensive DLC set that doesn’t even add new levels. Right before I published this, updates with new DLC were announced, but they don’t add new levels or new hidden items.

Let me be clear: Once Upon a Katamari isn’t some kind of face-palming disaster. If you’re incapable of getting bored playing this series, this is the biggest game in the franchise yet. There’s tons of levels and all the hamfisted quirkiness that’s been so awkward and exhausting since the second game was a love letter to itself is still here. If you just want a time travel-themed expansion pack of We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever, that’s basically what this is. And actually, I still think you’ll be disappointed. The main “As Big As You Can” or “As Fast As You Can” levels are limited to one setting, Japan, where it scales five times over the course of the game. Other themes might have “As Big As You Can” levels, but they usually don’t scale, and certainly don’t five times. Among the gimmick levels, I’m pretty sure only the returning “feed someone to make them fat but really it’s just an oblong starting ball” has three distinct tiers that open new areas. It really makes it clear that the theme is mostly skin deep, because the primary “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels are so similar that I couldn’t really tell a difference between the new one from Once Upon and the old ones from past games. The big climax is rolling up the King, Queen, and the King’s father. It’s been done.

Even the plot of the King of All Cosmos accidentally blowing up the Earth is here. “OMG he did it juggling a relic and being a show off! LOL, right?” Yea, I guess? I mean, that’s almost the exact same joke as the first game, ain’t it? I don’t get it. To me Katamari Damacy as a series is no different than one of those stand-up comedians who has used the same fifteen minute set for their entire careers. When your job is to literally make jokes, why are you telling the same jokes after twenty years? It gets old. And the joke of the Katamari games really isn’t funny when the characters and their “quirks” cost the actual gameplay so dearly.

Why does Katamari Damacy as a gameplay mechanic even need a plot? The Mario Kart games don’t have a plot. They didn’t come up with a reason for all the Mario universe characters to race. They just do it, and Katamari could be that way. Why not? You don’t have to drop the characters. Just drop the bullsh*t around the characters. Let the players play the game. Focus on high scores and fast times. That’s the fun, not the plot, and if after twenty years they don’t get that, they’ve lost the plot. Hell, they might as well have done this as DLC for We Love Katamari REROLL because, mechanically, the differences are so subtle that nothing really stood out to me, and I played the sh*t out of both. You’re also not appealing to anyone new to the franchise. This is made only for the fans, and that’s no way to grow a brand.

This release makes no sense at all. I was hyped for this, maybe too much. A big reason why this review took me forever to finish was I was genuinely stressing whether or not my disappointment was because I gave my hopes up for something better. My family didn’t help. The kids, the oldest of whom is 14, think Katamari looks fun, but not in a “drop what you’re doing and try it out” type of way. They actually thought I was weird for being so excited about Once Upon A Katamari during its introduction during the July 2025 Nintendo Direct. It’s just not a big deal to them. None of them needed to play it the way my generation did. I didn’t get a straight answer on why, either. They all agreed it looked fun, but not enough that any of them wanted to play it with me. That tells me the freshness is gone for good as long as THIS is Katamari. But, creatively dead doesn’t mean dead-dead. Katamari is still the PERFECT format for a raw, no-frills high score driven, fastest time franchise. If arcades could do games like this in 1980, Katamari’s gameplay would have been a Pac-Man level hit. Don’t be old school in body. Be old school in the soul. That’s where the good stuff comes from.
Verdict: NO!
*If you can get it for $14.99 or under, and you lower your expectations, and you have plenty of disposable income, meh, whatever, it’s fine for that. $40 for the same old game and very few bells & whistles like leaderboards or even proper menus and high score tracking is a slap in the face.