02/07/2025
Katamari Damacy - Earth Really is Full of Things
Katamari Damacy is one of those YouTube games. You never played it but certainly saw one or two AVGN clones get a few easy laughs from showing it off, it’s a game that’s funny to see and hear. But if you give it some time you’ll find a surprisingly deep, tactile gameplay experience beneath the riot of colors and catchy melodies. In the same year that Half-Life 2 came out and games were going through their teenage “I’m grown up now” phase, Namco released Katamari Damacy, a welcome refutation of trends.
The King of All Cosmos has mistakenly destroyed the universe apart from Earth and now demands his son, the diminutive prince, to remake the stars for him from junk objects around the world. The King looms over you and sets timers based on how bored he’ll feel by the time it’s up. As the levels go on, the demands inflate until you no longer just roll up junk but move on to people or even islands.
The gameplay, like its visuals, is a bit messy and awkward. It’s a cascade of colour and otherworldly, but friendly, character designs that invite you to have fun. At first the katamari handles like a shopping trolley with two broken wheels that's been in a riverbed for fourteen years. Contorting your thumbs across both analogue sticks splayed in tank‑control repentance, you skid around a kitchen floor collecting drawing pins and 5 yen coins. Fifteen seconds later, a rat smells your recently obtained cheese and charges into you; half your haul pops off, and you groan out loud.
As you drift collecting household items, building speed, navigating inclines, and dodging pests, you gradually master control of your katamari. You learn to manoeuvre your ball in tight spaces, catching flying objects or avoiding animals or cars you’ll roll up soon enough. As the katamari fattens, the camera pulls backward, no UI prompt required. The Prince never levels up; you do.
The game’s levels are all timed, the aim to reach a certain size before your minutes are up. The levels are so meticulously designed as to give the player the feeling of rolling the ball up a hill to release it at the zenith. As you build your ball from the objects smaller than it, you find your enclosures begin to run out of new stuff to collect. You begin to panic as your centimetres aren’t rising quick enough to beat the clock. Relief comes as you add that one item that inflates your ball enough to have a hundred new items to find. The momentum and snowballing collection fuel an ever-building satisfaction of growth. You never quite have nothing to obtain, but a tension rises until it relieves you and you can watch your ball enlarge, old obstacles now fodder for the sphere, and those centimetres become metres.
The soundtrack, composed by Yuu Miyake and the Namco sound team, loops for the entire level length, which can be anywhere from six to twenty-five minutes. Normally, looped music of this attention-demanding variety can be torturous, but here the songs are dynamic journeys, weaving between upbeat chaos and chill grooves. The shifts in tempo and unexpected bursts of melody keep your ears hooked, making repetition feel like a hypnotic dance rather than a dull refrain. The one English song stands out like a sore thumb, being the only one in a language I fully understand. It did grate near the end of its levels.
One of the game’s most brilliant tricks appears near the end: the North Star level removes the diameter meter entirely. Instead of numbers, you’re asked to rely on your intuition to “feel” when your katamari hits ten metres. This clever inversion strips away the crutch of UI metrics and forces you to develop a true sense of scale and momentum. It’s like the game saying, “Trust yourself; you’ve learned enough.” This subtle shift transforms the gameplay loop into something almost meditative, quietly challenging your connection to the world you’re reshaping. It’s such a fresh, inventive moment that it leaves you craving more levels like this, more experiments with trust, perception, and the joy of just rolling without numbers. But, alas, it’s a one-off.
Besides that one grating song, the only other complaints for Katamari Damacy would be the limitations of the PS2 not allowing a wider view, so sometimes you can feel a bit lost when smaller and in tight spaces. There also comes a point in the back half of the game where the excitement of exploration wanes as you repeat environments. The game is so breezy, though, these gripes never seem to play on the mind longer than a moment.
Katamari Damacy is a game made by a man who didn’t really want to make video games, a sculptor trapped in a salaryman job. A man who thought the industry was too obsessed with winning, and so designed a game where joy doesn’t come from victory, but momentum. It wasn’t supposed to happen. He pitched it as a joke. Namco said yes. And so he made a miracle out of spite.
Katamari Damacy’s central mechanic is acquisition without appraisal. Mahjong tile or tortoise, an egg or a high school, value is mass, full stop. As we accumulate belongings in life, we enlarge our katamaris. That of which the ball consists is of little consequence as others' eyes widen at the pure magnitude of your mountain of mass. The game begins with you collecting the little things in life a person wouldn’t miss, crumbs from their plate, until it evolves into you subsuming people into your sphere. Katamari frames it as raw material for fireworks. The only difference between an orange peel and a person is how much it can add to your diameter or your bottom line. Somewhere between the bath toys and the freight trucks you begin to wonder if the stuff that surrounds you should be kept as is or if you could surrender it to a greater good.
Everything you hoard explodes into a star the moment your time is up. There’s no inventory, no museum. You can’t keep what you collect. The moment your job is done, it’s cooked into a new stellar object no matter what it was once before.
Katamari Damacy is the happiest apocalypse I’ve ever volunteered for. By the game’s final mission, the tiny prince has become a world-ending kaiju as all of creation is absorbed into our magnum opus, the moon. It takes our anxiety about clutter, about parental approval, about planetary resource collapse, and rolls it into a ball so radiant you can’t look away. More importantly, it’s proof a videogame can be aggressively weird without drowning in self‑awareness. No ironic smirk, just conviction. It’s fun, it knows it's fun, and it wants you to have fun.