Once Upon a Katamari (2025)

Ever since the release of 2004's Katamari Damacy, I've been a huge fan of this weird, wonderful franchise. What drew me in early on was the absurdly simple premise: start small, and roll up anything you can with an increasingly large ball until you're basically rolling up entire continents and galaxies. The aesthetic was silly and charming, and the concept worked level after level.

But with every further installment, the Katamari franchise has grown more and more convoluted. There have been two-player katamaris, online versions, handheld versions, levels that ask you to look for a specific item, or pick up only a specific type of thing. Make a ball a certain size or have it be a ball that's a certain percentage of sweet or expensive. It's still fun, but the variations on the core concept just aren't as enjoyable as the more direct origins this series started at. Once Upon a Katamari marks the first new console game in the Katamari universe since 2009's Katamari Forever on the PlayStation 3, and the franchise's return attempts to give the player more options in terms of how they want to play this action puzzle game.

Once Upon a Katamari takes players through different eras, where they can choose the levels they want to play, each with different mechanics for how to play. There are levels where you can just collect everything or try to make a ball of a specific size in a certain amount of time, or there are more specialized levels with more specific goals in mind. I also appreciate how there's an option to just keep rolling up things even after the level is done, which hits on essentially what I want these games to be in the first place.

However, despite this, you still have to search through levels to find crowns in order to progress, so you're still stuck hunting for items amongst all the mayhem. Again, it's not a damning aspect of the game, and the option for a new power-up in levels makes finding these items relatively easy. But it does feel like you have to prioritize finding these things during a game that's supposed to be relatively quick-paced and allowing you to do whatever you want.

I also found that everything took slightly longer than I would've hoped. The King of the Cosmos' dialogue has always been fun, but there's so much of it here, and I would argue too many cutscenes as well. Plus, with all the different options available throughout the game, there's a lot of time spent just explaining all the different options.

I think Once Upon a Katamari offers enough options to make the replayability of this game extremely high, and allows the player to experience this world the way they want to experience it. Yet I also wouldn't mind at all if this series returned to the basics and created just a simple, direct way of playing this game, as that's what made me fall in love with Katamari Damacy in the first place. This formula still works well, but I long for the simplicity of the early days.