Music, graphics and niggles
Seeing as the game itself is so simple, you have to ask yourself just what makes it appealing. Defining the appeal of We Love Katamari is as difficult as saying why popping bubble wrap is so much fun… Perhaps it’s the game’s easy to understand gameplay? Or maybe it’s the subtle way the whole ‘rolling small things to make a ball big enough to roll up big things’ works… Who knows? One thing is clear though, and that is that We Love Katamari, though only really being an extension of Katamari Damacy, is a bloody good game.
That’s not to say that it’s not without its faults. First off, and this is a purely a personal observation, I find the whole weird psychedelic King of All Cosmos thing slightly unsettling. I can’t quite say why, but in the same way that I find those mechanical clowns at old seaside arcades unnerving, the King of All Cosmos has the same effect.
But a niggle I think most players will agree with is the often annoying amount of dialogue in the game. Not spoken dialogue, there’s very little of that, but written dialogue. When you’re collecting a challenge the people dotted around give you a load of chat and when you fly up to the King you get even more… when you start the level you get some more and then when you’ve finished a level you get more again… oh, and did I mention the chat as extra bits of the level load while you’re playing? The guy just never shuts up! You can skip all the waffle by hitting the start button and you won’t actually miss out on any important details which goes to show how unnecessary all the dialogue is. Sure, it’s fine to read for the first couple of times but after that it becomes tiresome very quickly.
The music, on the other hand, is cracking stuff. Sure it’s mostly in Japanese but it’s all light pop or tongue in cheek capella stuff and suits the game very well indeed. I defy anyone who plays not to walk around singing at least a couple of the songs to themselves. Actually, speaking of the music being in Japanese, We Love Katamari is very Japanese. Don’t expect to see many, if any, Western influences here. The game’s surroundings are firmly Japanese with everything that entails. Not that it actually matters and in fact it contributes to part of the uniqueness of the whole package.
Graphically, We Love Katamari is nothing to write home about. Even fairly complex models such as a cat or a dog are more cubic representations of their real life counterparts. Likewise, animations on those models are basic at best. But you shouldn’t let this put you off. Considering that the PS2 has to render all of these and then some, it’s not surprising that detail and animation have been kept to a minimum.
The PS2 really has its work cut out for it as when your Katamari is quite small, the stuff you pick up affects how it rolls. The PS2 has to keep track of that and figure out what happens when you collide with various objects too, so although you’re not going to see any groundbreaking physics in effect here, there’s still a hell of a lot going on behind the scenes that limit how much eye candy you get to see. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that you shouldn’t judge the game purely on the screenshots, there’s a lot more to it under those blocky graphics.
