The Prince is back! That’s right, it’s time for an all new Katamari Damacy game – Once Upon a Katamari from developer Rengame and publisher Bandai Namco! It’s been a long time since the last release and it’s time to once again please the King of the Cosmos. The Katamari series has been a weirdly popular niche title ever since the original game was released on the PS2 and loyal followers have been waiting quite some time for a new game! This time around there are a few changes that make things a bit more interesting, but it’s still the same overall key formula that makes the series so great!
Naturally there’s a mess. And naturally the King has tasked you with cleaning it all up! The King was so busy having fun with a scroll he found that he accidentally tossed it into the cosmos and kind of accidentally destroyed the Earth. Fortunately, he’s got a handy time machine for you to use to go back in time to recover memories of the Earth in order to rebuild it and the cosmos around it.
Right away, you’re off in the machine and travelling back to the Edo period of Japan, rolling up tea houses and tidying up rooms. In Once Upon a Katamari, you can use standard Katamari dual stick controls or narrow things down to a single stick with camera control on the right stick, simplifying the controls a bit. Once you get the new controls down, rolling things up is the goal and growing that katamari is as important to the King as it is to you. You’ll choose levels from a Mario 3D World style overworld and you can replay them at will to get higher scores. Finishing enough levels provides fuel for the time machine, the SS Prince, and then you’ll be able to jet to other time periods to continue saving the Earth.
There are a few fundamental changes to gameplay while you’re rolling though. The biggest is the addition of freebies, which include a magnet, rocket boosters, sonar, and a stopwatch. The magnet sucks up nearby objects onto your katamari, the rockets shoot you forward rapidly to pick up items faster, the stopwatch stops the countdown clock temporarily, and the sonar helps you to locate specific items to help you in the levels. The magnet was particularly useful to build katamari size quickly, but they’re all great additions to the game that add a bit of additional fun to the levels.
Level design is excellent in Once Upon a Katamari as we’ve come to expect from the series and once you’ve spent a bit of time in the levels, there are intentional pathways that can be clearly followed to maximize your time and katamari size. They’re not always recognizable at first however, so you might end up failing a level or two or ending up with a low ranking until you figure out how to negotiate a given level effectively. There are also additional expectations in some levels to complete specific tasks. You might be gathering up gold to help miners or picking specific types of food to roll up in your Katamari while avoiding others. You’ll end up in Greece, the American West, the Ice Age, the Jurassic Period and plenty of other places over the 10 stages of the game and over 50 different levels and as you might assume, some of your tasks will be keyed to specific eras and stages.
The King is ever-present and lazy as always (though immaculately dressed in rather form-fitting attire) and if you fail to roll up a decently sized katamari he gets spectacularly angry. It’s honestly a bit intimidating how furious he becomes so try not to piss him off too often. If you do well, he tosses your katamari into the cosmos to become a planet or other celestial object. His expectations are high though so only repeating levels or an abundance of skill will get you the best accolades for your katamaris. You can also collect crowns in the levels. There are 3 different crowns in every level and they unlock new levels and additional content. Sure you can play the game without them, but do you really want to? When you finish a stage you get a coin from the King as well. These coins can be spent to unlock emotes and skins at the King statue in each stage. While you’re rolling around, you’ll pick up cousins as well. Once you have one of the 68 cousins, you can swap to them if you feel like using a different character. In Once Upon a Katamari, you can also modify the Prince and the cousins with skins and items you find strewn throughout the game. If changing the look of your characters is your thing, this is a fantastic addition to the Katamari series and having some additional variety is quite refreshing.
There’s even a multiplayer component in Once Upon a Katamari called KatamariBall. You’re competing against other princes of different colors and the King tracks how well you do, giving Olympic-style points at the end to declare a winner. Dash enough, get the biggest Katamari, and roll up your opponents to come out on top. It’s surprisingly fun to play Katamari competitively but compared to the main game, this is just a small diversion, though if online play is your thing KatamariBall is available both online and offline.
Of course, the visuals are crisp and colorful in Once Upon a Katamari, but as unique and interesting as it looks, the basic style of the game hasn’t changed. Instead, there are nifty cut scenes strewn throughout the levels, and artistic fade ins introduce you to each stage as you start, giving the game a slightly more cultured vibe if such a thing is even possible. The cartoonish innocence of the series is in full force however and whether you’re rolling over dinosaurs or changing the clothes and accessories your cousin is wearing, the clean visuals are delightful and fun.
Sound is also key in Once Upon a Katamari with terrific tracks and a host of vintage Katamari song options as well in the King of All Sounds Edition of the game which comes with the additional Katamari Damacy Series Songs: Side A and Side B. The music is unique and vibrant in a way that matches with the game and sucks you into its silly, mindless world effectively. It’s great to be able to swap tracks out and enjoy new ones but the sound effects are also excellent here and you’ll enjoy the noises items make as they stick onto your Katamari as much as you do an artfully created rocket blast propelling you across a level. Between the new sounds, the new tracks, and the classic earworms you’ve come to love, there’s nothing but perfection in the soundtrack for Once Upon a Katamari, and you can even play in the in-game player!
Not everything is perfect here, partly because the Katamari series is such a niche one. Just rolling stuff around can be soothing for some people but is intensely stressful for others, especially as the countdown clock starts to tick down and you’re nowhere near picking up enough items, growing large enough, or can’t find the last few elusive items you need. All of the sudden at that point, the game shifts from a fun cleaning-up game to high stress panic hunting where you’re rushing around and running into things trying to find the items you need to finish off the stage without angering the King or facing his disappointment. Hey, parental disappointment is definitely someone’s trigger, right? The controls can also be particularly frustrating in Katamari and the new single stick movement grinds you to a screeching halt at random intervals depending on the way you try to move, not that fighting the controls in Katamari games is anything new. Either way, while this is definitely an amazing game, it also won’t be the game for everyone and you should definitely have some idea what you’re getting into.
Once Upon a Katamari is an excellent game, one that we’ve been waiting for for a long time. The last new game in the series that wasn’t a modified remake was the Vita game released wayyyyyy back in 2012 so it’s beyond time to have a new entry in the series. Sure, the Reroll games were great, but they were fancied up older games while Once Upon a Katamari is entirely new and fun to boot! At $40 ($60 for the King of All Sounds Edition), it’s a relatively reasonably priced game as well, and there’s plenty of gameplay here, especially if you’re a completist and your friends want to play KatamariBall online (they might!). Regardless, it’s time to get rolling and no one wants to disappoint the King of the Cosmos, so pack up your spaceship/time machine and get to saving the Earth!
This review is based on a digital copy of Once Upon a Katamari provided by the publisher. It was played on a Playstation 5 using a 1080p Sony 55” TV and on the Playstation Portal where it played equally well. Once Upon a Katamari is also available for Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.