If you've just rolled a giant pineapple, a Russian doll and a gorilla, you've either been playing Beautiful Katamari on the Xbox 360 or you've been involved in some shady shenanigans of which CVG could never possibly approve.
Beautiful Katamari, for those who are just now returning to Earth after a three-year space trip, is Namco's sequel to its globally popular Katamari Damacy PS2 games (there was a PSP game as well, but that one was a bit pants). You still have to roll stuff up, and you still do this by dragging a ball of random clutter around Jolly Rancher stages filled with colours and confectionery and other nice things beginning with the letter 'C'.
It would be easy to take a cynical view of Beautiful Katamari - especially when, considering dubious factors such as the non-involvement of Katamari Damacy's creator, Keita Takashi; there's an absence of significant expansion over the PS2 games; and the caught-between-this-generation-and-last graphics - but to play Beautiful Katamari is, as the saying goes, to love it.
The game has a joy that is missing from so many other Xbox 360 games, and it pushes a quirky brand of Japanese humour only matched by the likes of Super Paper Mario, Incredible Crisis and Bangai-o.
"Holy hornbeam!" exclaimeth the King of All Cosmos, before going off on a scathing diss of your performance in the previous stage (generally no matter how well you roll junk, the King will find something to complain about), suggesting that you might be better off working at a video shop. Or as a screenwriter.
The way the game is set up only emphasises its light-heartedness: the King of All Cosmos, who looks a bit like Freddie Mercury, is playing tennis on holiday and smashes a ball so hard (and inaccurately) that it puts a black hole in the middle of the Katamari universe. It's your job, as Prince (who looks nothing like Prince), to sort out this Universal Mess by building planets, satellites and stars from random crap. There isn't a space marine or ominous-looking monster boss in sight...
The controls here, which have been transplanted from the PS2 games, have you pulling and pushing both analogue sticks to direct your Katamari, with quick about-turns and dashes performed, respectively, by pressing the sticks down and waggling them alternately. It's possibly a bit like controlling a JCB.
Thanks to this simple and completely button-bashing-free calibration Beautiful Katamari is the kind of game that you'll play on repeat whenever the Heavy Stuff feels like a drag. It's accessible even for novices, which again puts it at odds with 90 percent of the Xbox 360's portfolio.
And the simple controls mask some interesting ideas. The main objective in Beautiful Katamari, as with previous Katamari games, is to roll up humungous clumps of tat. But you'll also have to roll Katamaris to specifications of temperature, for example, with one stage asking you to form a ball that glows at 10,000 degrees Celsius, which you can do by rolling up Tabasco, barbecues and sizzling fried eggs while avoiding chilly stuff such as ice cream, frozen foods and fire extinguishers. Mental.
Also, even within stages where your objective is to reach a certain diameter, there is always a secondary objective - you might be asked to collect Japanese things, for instance, or things related to the seaside - which, if you put on a good show, can result in special items (and achievements) as rewards. And once you've completed a stage, you can go back and play it in Time Attack mode. There are leaderboards on Xbox Live, too, which effectively unite the global Katamari community. There's even a screen which displays the combined size of all the Katamaris rolled by all the Beautiful Katamari players in the whole wide world.
But it's just as well that there are so many incentives to replay stages (the most obvious incentive being the simple thrill of rolling a Katamari), because Beautiful Katamari is not a long game. You can see most of the levels it has to offer within three or four hours - unless you get stuck on a stage, of course, as we did for about 30 minutes on the 10,000 degrees Celsius challenge. Namco has a back-up plan, admittedly, with an additional four levels already available on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and perhaps more downloadable stages will follow. How all that will work out over here, remains to be seen, as does an actual release date. There's been a bit of uproar already that extra levels have to be bought on Xbox Live when the game is quite short to begin with.
And then there's multiplayer, which just isn't very interesting. Over Xbox Live or locally, Versus mode is a competitive game of 'who can collect the most stuff?' You can lock-on to other players and then dash at them to dislodge their collected items, but the controls really weren't designed for high-speed pinging action. Super Monkey Ball's Monkey Fight game does a similar kind of thing, only much better. Still, Versus is at least there as an option along with a Co-op mode, which proves equally unnecessary.
Single-player is undoubtedly Beautiful Katamari's strength. And although it doesn't represent a proper generational leap from its predecessors on the PS2, Beautiful Katamari is - as far as we're aware - the only Xbox 360 game where you can spend an afternoon in the company of an absurdist King, rolling around inside a Japanese convenience store and listening to hyper-hi-fi J-pop sung by 16-year-old idols. For that, then, an 8.
Sebastian Kanda
// Overview
Verdict
Not a massive improvement on the PS2 games, but Beautiful retains all the humour and joy you'd expect. For 360 owners, especially, Beautiful Katamari is a refreshing change of pace.
Uppers
Charming humour Mesmerising style of play Joyous J-pop soundtrack
Downers
Online multiplayer can be dull The single-player game (not counting downloadable levels) is over in a few hours
it pushes a quirky brand of Japanese humour only matched by the likes of Super Paper Mario, Incredible Crisis and Bangai-o.[/quote
Incredible Crisis - yea that game was mental! I remember getting stuck on a level/game in which the dad was trying to cheat on his wife with a girl in a ferris wheel and you had to press left right up and down to ...ahem... push her buttons (pun fully intended)and love hearts would emit from the ferris wheel box...
When I first heard there was going to be another Katamari Game, I was just like "Wow! shame it's on the PS3 "
But anyway, when my friend told me the game and changed Platfroms to another Console, I was so Thrilled! I Was thinking I'll be Perfect for the Wii-Remote.
So my friend said go onto CVG snd find out more; and I Did, and I found out it was on XBox 360!!!!
I Guess it isn't that bad, at least people who have never heard of the game in there life will experenice somthing new.
Bought this at Game for 12.99, quality game but I would had been gutted shelling out full price on this, it is very short. Would had been an ideal XBLA game though. I'm considering the extra levels but I think they're overpriced, might try one or two just to see weather there worth it.
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Charming humour
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