Because I was mainly a Microsoft gamer last generation (other than a few select Playstation exclusives) I never got to experience the joy that was Katamari on the PS2. Thanks to Namco Bandai that experience will now be moving over to the Xbox 360, exclusively in the form of Beautiful Katamari. For a first time player I was very nervous as to how I would feel about rolling up junk and morphing it into a star; after playing for only a few short minutes I was dancing to the funky music and rolling my Katamari with the best of them. After checking the amazingly detailed leader boards my hopes and dreams of going pro were shot down but I had a good time nonetheless.
The storyline of Beautiful Katamari is just as silly as the rest of the game. Basically the king (large goofy looking character) totally screwed up the universe during a game of tennis and has called on you (the prince) to help create new planets and stars. How this happened during a game of tennis is a question only some anime aficionado could answer but anyhow that is the premise of the story. Once the initial training level is completed the game really starts to get fun. The main menu is not your traditional screen with words and options; it takes the face of a universe with a couple planets, each planet consisting of a few different houses/buildings that act as the levels in the game. The prince starts off with just a few different planets but as the game progresses the menu will start to look more like a universe of multiple places to visit. Other than the normal game levels you can also access the options menu, multiplayer aspects of Beautiful Katamari, and the extra features of the game such as your inventory, leader boards, etc.
Beautiful Katamari centers around creating planets/stars and to do that the prince must visit a number of different locales, each with their own theme and challenges. Each progressing level gets more difficult and by the end of the game things get so difficult that some gamers may get frustrated with the game. The individual levels represent different cities around the United States/World such as San Francisco and others. Although that is where the game tells you, it is difficult to differentiate one location from another. This is not a big deal as it doesn’t really matter what I was rolling up into my Katamari, it was all fun as hell. The single player portion of the game will take around 8-10 hours to complete depending on the player’s level of obsessive-compulsive disorder. To complete a certain level the only thing that needs to be done is to get your Katamari ball to a certain size (in centimeters/millimeters) measured by the diameter. The way the prince achieves this feat is by simply rolling the Katamari ball around the designated level, picking up objects one at a time until the specified size is reached.
The game gets interesting when it comes to what items are able to be rolled up and when the ball gets large enough to move onto other sections of the level, giving the player the option of rolling up even larger items. These items range from the very tiny, pieces of candy; to the very large, entire buildings. Beautiful Katamari is kind of hard to read at the beginning because the game has such a small scale to it, rolling up your ball in spots like candy shops and toy stores can only be so fun. The game really shines when you are allowed to move outside the store, city, and onto much larger locations. Everything in the game has a certain wacky look to it, which adds to joy of rolling over stuff. Considering the lack of family friendly games on the Xbox 360 it is nice to see Namco Bandai bring Beautiful Katamari to the console.
The controls are fairly simple but can get very frustrating at the same time, maybe the developers made them too simple. Because the game did so well on the Playstation 2 it was not a big surprise that the control scheme was copied over to the 360 controllers. Considering the 360 controllers are a lot different from the PS2 one there were a lot of worries about how the controls would pan out. Overall the developers did a pretty good job of re-mapping the controls onto the 360; there are just a few small quirks that keep them from perfection. Basically to move the Katamari ball players just need to push up on both of the analog sticks. To turn push one stick up and the other stick down, the same goes for basically every other move possible in the game. The ability to gain speed by building up a spin move is also possible by pushing down on both analog sticks until the move is charged. Where the trouble comes in is when you have to actually move the ball through tight spaces or hard to get to places. More than a few times I became overly frustrated with the controls, but at the end of the day the game was still fun to play. It would have been nice to see a few different control options but whatever; this is the way the Katamari games have always been played.
