This is a $40 game that can be beaten in a day and offers next to nothing over its $20 predecessor. Personally, I find the gameplay more irritating than enjoyable, but even the people who have chugged the Katamari Kool-Aid won't find their money's worth here. Series fans looking for more should maybe rent this game and get it out of their systems, and people who want their first taste should get Katamari Damacy on the PS2 for half the price.



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This iteration (that word was chosen carefully) of the Katamari series is my first. I somehow managed to avoid "Katamari Fever" as most of the gaming hipsters I knew were logging hours into the bargain-bin-priced PlayStation 2 game, then its sequel, then the PSP port. I always thought it seemed a bit simple, but I didn't avoid it by design or spite, I just never got around to it.

I thought Beautiful Katamari on the Xbox 360 would be a good place to start. With between two and two million times the processing power of the PS2, the 360 should allow for so much more compelling, dynamic, and... well, beautiful gameplay. That's what I thought, anyway.

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The core gameplay element of Katamari games (roll stuff up into a ball) has breached our social zeitgeist and therefore is no surprise to me. What did surprise me is how indifferent I was to it. I've heard people unravel all kinds of charming prose about the Zen nature of the games, the calming, subtly addictive qualities of rolling crap up into a ball, so I was trying really hard to see what they saw.

To me, it's just a repetitive game with tedious controls where you push a ball around that picks up items smaller than the ball until the ball grows larger and larger objects may be collected. Lost on me was any kind of charm or endearing elements. After an hour or so of staring at the pale, bland, near-nauseating graphics on my HDTV I felt like I was missing something. I felt like the sort of people who saw the finale of The Sopranos and said, "So, wait, what happened?" or the people who can't figure out the point of Candy's dog in Of Mice and Men. I wondered if there was a hidden camera somewhere or perhaps some kind of two-way mirror where scientists were studying and annotating my frustration.

Is the charming little ball-rolling game a giant, black monolith and am I a Neanderthal-monkey-man mindlessly waving my arms at it?

Or maybe this game just isn't that great. Maybe having to click through page after page of unintelligible gibberish from the King of Whatever character before I can play a damn level isn't that cute. Maybe having words appear all over my screen, blocking my view as I'm trying to play isn't so Zen. Maybe the primitive save/load system and tedious menu system isn't the greatest thing since sliced garbage balls. Maybe spending the first 6 or 7 levels in the same bland, complicated environments isn't a quirky design element. Maybe this is just a game that I don't like.

When I played through Halo 3 without having played any previous Halo games, sure I was (very) lost with the single-player campaign -- that's just poor story design -- but I was at least able to play the game without knowing the full backstory. In Beautiful Katamari, the backstory is meaningless but the gameplay is what I don't understand.

Even if I really dug the gameplay, I couldn't pretend that this felt like a full game. It feels like a minigame, the sort of thing a better game might display during a loading screen while a real game is loading. There's very little variance in modes; it's either "you've got this much time to roll up this much stuff" or "lets see how long it takes you to roll up this much stuff." The mere insinuation that I'm supposed to be choosy about the specific items I collect when the control scheme and camera seem to be actually working against me is laughable.

I'm told that Beautiful Katamari offers very few additions from previous games. New here is an added element where you're also scored based on what types of items you collect with your magic ball o' junk and not just size, and an online multiplayer mode that is the definition of tacked-on. At $40, this game may be discounted but it's twice the price the original PS2 game and offers next to nothing in exchange for the extra twenty bucks.

If you love Katamari games, you may absolutely love this game as well. However, I'm supposed to review games based on how they stand on their own. For failing to bring anything new to the table for established fans and for failing to provide any value for the price, I cannot recommend this game.

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