However, after much thought, what stands out as most impressive is the sense of logic behind the game. There are a couple of other moves that go some way to explaining this - jumping to the other side of the ball, and dashing a short way at high speed - but in general it just feels right for the sort of carefully thought out, physical world that Katamari Damacy holds dear.
Each 'level' generally tasks you with reaching a certain size within a certain time limit (apart from a few sub-levels which focus on crabs and things), and by the end of the game you've moved out of the dining room and tower above the streets themselves, tugging hot-air balloons out of the sky and yanking football stadiums clear of their foundations.Ĭontrolling the ball takes a little getting used to, but the game's seemingly bizarre decision to use both analogue sticks in a sort of tank-tracks configuration - rather than using the left stick exclusively to direct things - ultimately adds to its charm rather than throwing up an unnecessary obstacle.
As they do, the ball gradually increases in size - the current diameter indicated in the top-left of the screen - and as it reaches certain untold thresholds it becomes capable of gathering larger and larger objects, like rubbers, pencils, cutlery, and even plates. You start off by controlling a tiny little ball just a few centimetres across, and as you roll it around the top of a dining table clobbering things, small objects like pins, buttons and the like will cling onto it. As far as I can make out - aided somewhat by clever-clogs types elsewhere on the Net who've clearly cheated and done some actual research - the King of Space has gone out and got thoroughly rat-arsed and lost all the stars in the sky, and it's up to you, his son and heir, to build new stars to replace them - by rolling a ball around little 3D environments on earth gathering up the local flora and fauna. It also helps that deciphering the plot and understanding the motivations of the characters is probably something that eludes even the Japanese, let alone gawping gaijin such as myself. In the case of Katamari Damacy however, I had no trouble getting my head round things - mostly because the game's only real concern is getting other people's heads wrapped around me. You know, my biggest fear whenever I'm ploughing my Euro-dollar into new toys from Japan is that my frankly negligible grasp of the local dialect - very much summed up in that first sentence - will leave me floundering somewhere not so far beyond the title screen. 'No' is actually a longer word than 'Yes'.
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