Karamari Damacy US cover

I'm not much of a video gamer. Never have been. My dad bought a Pong game back in the '70s. I played it, but it was my friends who always won. It's been that way for 35 years. Still, there are some games I get addicted to. Games so simple yet involving that I keep coming back to them over and over again. About 5 years ago, Voltaire Stax introduced me to one of those games: Katamari Damacy.

In the game, you are the Prince of All Cosmos, which would be pretty sweet if not the for the fact that your father is the King of All Cosmos. One night he swept all the stars out of the sky, and now it's your job to roll up enough loose stuff on Earth to replace all the stars. Your tool? A katamari, a very sticky ball. You roll it around and it picks up stuff. As you collect stuff, your katamari gets bigger, and you can pick up even larger stuff. You can go from picking up stuff from tacks and dice to shoes, cats, people, cars, building, islands, and even whole counties.

The Prince, 10 cm tall

This quirky, simple, and charming game is the brainchild of Keita Takahashi who wasn't looking to do anything more bold than simply bring fun back to gaming. He succeeded. While there are different levels and different challenges, the concept is always the same. Roll stuff up. The artwork is bright and fun, with little gags galore. The real success of the game is that you want to go back and play the levels, because you always feel like you can roll up more, or roll faster. Fortunately, you can play any level you want at any time.

The other great joy of the game is the music. It's composed by Yuu Miyake, a sound engineer for Namco, the company that makes the game. He music is every bit as quirky and fun as the game itself. I've been told that the memorable opening came from him humming the theme for Takahashi, who told him not only was that exactly what he was looking for, but to do it exactly like that. Of course there are variations on that theme, including a samba and the theme performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic. I have the soundtrack for both Katamari Damacy and its sequal We ♥ Karamari, and they are a joy to listen to. A highlight on the first is "Lonely Rolling Star" and on the second is "Baby Universe" sung by Maki Nomiya, best known as the lead singer of the sadly defunct Pizzicato Five. 

Roll faster! Roll bigger! Roll harder!

There is one more element of the game which is great fun, and that's the side stories. In the original game, it's the story of the Hoshino family. Father is an astronaut, and mother, son and daughter are traveling to visit him at the spaceport. Only the son seems aware of what's happening in the sky, or notices the Prince in the background rolling up entire cities and mountains. Eventually, the entire family is rolled up and has a little picnic on the newly recreated moon. In We ♥ Katamari, the side story is a look as the life of the King of All Cosmos, from his disapproving father to his rebellious phase, to falling in love and marrying, making peace with his father and finally, the prince's birth. In both games, the King is rather distracted by his own awesomeness, and, much like his own father before, is never satisfied with the Prince's efforts. The original game only concerned itself with rolling things up to recreate the heavens. In the second game, the King realizes that people loved being rolled up, and now he's a big superstar on Earth. So the Prince is sent back to Earth so everyone can keep playing the game and continue to fill up the sky with stars and planets. The King's conversations with his son are hilariously droll, as well as the ease with which the people of Earth are able to talk the easily bored King into playing one more time.

There are other versions of the game, but only Karamari Damacy and We ♥ Karamari were produced by Takahashi. I could say that's the reason I've only played those two games in the franchise and pretend I'm a real Katamari purist, but I'm not that hardcore. The truth is that those two are the only two that were made for the Playstation 2. I don't have the game systems necessary to play the rest of them. And besides, I'm still having too much fun with these two games. I know I can get all 1000 of those paper cranes the next time if I'm just a little bit faster in the beginning.