Katamari Damacy - The Definitive Review

Let's roll up to be a single star in the sky

As part of my recent piece on the contents of my very illegal PlayStation 2, I mentioned that Keita Takahashi’s Katamari Damacy was a game of such profundity that I believed I lacked both the intellect and the talent to adequately critique it. And yet, here we are. The main reason being that the fucking game is twenty years old this week, a fact that has me spiralling into twin pits of superimposed dismay. A thoroughly predictable wallow in tiresome self-pity over the inevitability of ageing plays second fiddle to the pit of existential depression over the lack of amazing, giant, sublime ideas in mainstream videogaming. You see, the reason for my trepidation over tackling Katamari Damacy was in trying to isolate and condense Takahashi’s stunning concept into meaningful paragraphs of insight and opinion, for when I try to think about it, the idea of making a videogame out of a hybrid of tidying, collecting and predating the entire world is so singularly unique that it almost defies inspection. And yet, out of much the same ambition that saw me doggedly rolling up enough stuff that I could absorb a playing card, a toy, a watermelon, a person, a car, a house, a mountain, I will endeavour to examine the rich collision of wild idea and cultural playfulness that defines Katamari Damacy’s essential brilliance. I honestly believe it’s one of the few truly great ideas in videogaming - it’s that special.

Of course, when first told of what Katamari Damacy was, my first reaction was laughter. The idea is delightfully bonkers, something that seems stereotypically Japanese in its piquant singularity, in its beautifully naïve ambition. I couldn’t quite believe it was possible, but while it had that curious madness to its imagination, the technical challenge such a thing represents felt incredibly modern; a videogame concept right on the cutting edge of the technology required to run it¹. Its presentation, a continuity of a retro-kindergarten aesthetic and 60s-70s kitsch², is unified across sound and vision, with the game having a soundtrack as quixotic and mental as the rest of the game’s design. Certainly, its low-poly representation of nearly everything in the fucking world is nicely drawn into the same aesthetic - a blocky, pre-Minecraft universe that stems from technical necessity, yet is expressed witch such consistency that it works as a reduced-code abstraction of the real world. A minimalist style that both charms and helps us with the challenges at hand; I can’t help but feel a photoreal Katamari Damacy would be a stiffer challenge as we try to seek out items we can absorb within the visual chaos of the gameworld.

Que Sera Sera, the one song from the soundtrack that lived on my MP3 player for many years, encapsulates the fundamental, root-note virtue at Katamari Damacy’s core - the simple fun of it all. Que Sera Sera is a jazzy, loungey croon about the fundamental romance between the prince’s ball, a world full of stuff and the mission to make the cosmic firmament. Charlie Kosei, the singer, plays it as totally straight as the musicians playing the backing track. There’s no winking irony here. Katamari Damacy is completely honest in its rifling and shuffling of popular culture and its light-hearted simulacra. The lack of posturing is a thing of beauty. Katamari has its own share of specifically Japanese cultural references, from Puroresu wrestlers to Kyodai heroes, Bosozoku vehicles and plenty more besides. While this is utterly charming to receptive westerners this all underlines the richness of imagination at play here, though by virtue of its expansive catalogue of objects, I personally found a more universal plane of reference that shoots huge bolts of nostalgic resonance through my soul.

Katamari’s dizzying classification and quantisation of the modern world, combined with that visual style, immediately and instinctively recalls the quasi-educational books of Richard Scarry. The first book I ever remember loving like a pet or family member was Scarry’s Storybook Dictionary, a wonderful thing that seeks to illustrate much of our modern world within Scarry’s anthropomorphised animal lens. It sweeps from the minutiae of the everyday with entries on food and clothes, showing the same range of items we’d find in the earlier stages of Katamari, though to sections on vehicles and transport, buildings. On one double-page spread, a classification of the world itself into clumpy forests, bumpy hills, boulders, mountains alongside roads and cities - all depicted as discrete, little, manageable, units. I find this homology so potent, I wonder if Keita was directly inspired by Scarry, and if Katamari Damacy could then function as an educational tool for first words, for building that bedrock of knowledge around which an infant could classify the world it lives in. Katamari certainly has the density and the grand journey of transition, a stunning leap of imagination to run from the smallest of manipulable things in our everyday lives through to the grandest objects in which we nestle. Thumbtacks to nation states. From the safe confines of the indoor, domestic world - that which is practically the entire visible universe for babies and toddlers, through to the wild profusion of things that make up the big, grown-up outdoors, that world where when you look up into the sky, you stare directly into the universe’s greatest distance, where pinpricks of light could be distant suns or familial planets. By directly linking the collection of things, by transcribing a kind of terran organisational cacophony into the singular celestial grace of the stars, Katamari Damacy invites you to consume and in some ways, understand everything in a kind of wild unity. To see all our earthly objects as linked, as part of a vast whole where our human categorisations and distinctions are as fleeting and transient as our existences. All things are born from the same, base stuff, after all. In a real sense, Katamari Damacy’s intellectual mission is one of reversal - if we are born of successive cycles of complexifying hydrogen and helium within the burning hearts of generations of stars, then to play a game where we roll up all our earthly things to make astronomical objects is surely about returning to the universal birthplace. To reverse entropy on such a scale takes quite a bit of serious rolling work, but this is at the behest of the King of all Cosmos, your Dad. And in the traditional patriarchal family unit, for an infant the literal king of all cosmos is your Dad, or whatever takes the place of the authoritative voice in more realistic family settings. That the King sets his son the task to go from the smallest objects to the entire world is flatly symbolic of childhood growth, just as we move from being mostly confined within one room, one home to knowing some streets, a small town or city district, then navigating an entire world, each step tied to successive stages from birth to adulthood. Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps, but Katamari Damacy is that magnificently rich an idea that it can easily support wild over-interpretation.

Katamari Damacy’s value doesn’t just lie in its concept. I can think of few moments of pure videogaming glee that can match Katamari’s crossing of scale thresholds, where you can finally start absorbing the next level of object within a stage. Those towering giants that terrified you with their ability to halt your momentum or ricochet you off-course³ become mere fodder for your irresistibly expanding Katamari, a delicious inversion of the game's (sometimes unfair) power balance, where it fuels a supremely satisfying kind of unique hero fantasy - the power to supernaturally consume. When those thresholds are from individual buildings to city blocks, mountains, hexagonal bits of land in the final stages, the journey takes on an epic quality. It’s a hugely pleasing climax, a fabulous idea taken to its almost perfect limit and then perfectly beyond for the credit sequence. I suspect there’s hardware limitations at play, as later sequels go much, much further but they aren’t Takahashi’s games. They are, however, tributes to him and Katamari Damacy’s magnificence. And yet, the basic interactive device never needed to change, even if the sequels petered out over the next generation. Arguably, the crime was one of repetition and lack of a suitable sense of expansion, though perhaps only Keita can know what the correct expansion would be for an idea so fundamentally personal to him.

Most of all, Katamari Damacy had that lasting trait of all the truly, truly great games - I didn’t want it to end. When the original’s credits rolled, despite the glittering joy and sheer goodness of the ending sequence, I wanted more. Takahashi’s next game, Noby Noby Boy was another Lynch-like leap of spectacular surreality, yet it maintained that same Katamari connection between the earth and the heavens, representing a collaborative journey in extending one’s magical body in order to cumulate enough steps to unify all the planets. The collaboration being across the entire connected player base, which again felt like an idea happily utilising the cutting edge of connected devices. That it was, somehow, more whimsical and delightfully bonkers than Katamari Damacy was a surprise, though its comparative lack of content, traditional progression, idealised power fantasy and so on meant I didn’t engage with it with the same profound sense of love and admiration. Yet Noby Noby Boy feels like some advancement of concept, of Takahashi’s idea of what a videogame could be. Noby Noby Boy is a conceptual videogame as art, or rather art as a conceptual videogame. Something I repeat often on Affectionate Discourse is the notion of the horizon of possibility, and where I see it may lie for videogames. You can probably guess that Keita Takahashi is one of the heroic few who I think pushes that horizon further, who opens up the possibility space into fresh, exciting realms for us to explore. And most importantly, he does this with the simple value of ideas. Of the daring concept, of the original thought. Of something so far beyond the consensus, the median product, that it fills the world with a unique spectrum of novel colours. Such is the vibrancy of its presence, such would be the hollowness of the culture without ideas like Katamari Damacy.⁴

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1. Arguably, one of the more impressive feats is the seeming realtime conjoining of disparate object models into your Katamari ball, where the geometry seems to be blended procedurally to create assemblages unique to each specific run, which also take on unique physical properties in terms of movement dynamics. That, good reader, must need some real motherfuckin' mathematics to pull off. I believe there's even a patent for this?

2. This deliberately retro aesthetic was perhaps first exploited for fun and delight in videogames by Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Space Channel 5. While it rests on nostalgia and retro-cool, the real purpose is the pursuit of satisfying, carefree fun. Which I love.

3. Ah yes, the controls! I’d say they’re the only black mark against Katamari Damacy, but given prior series’ obsessive use of tank controls, it’s hardly a sole offender. I remember the PSP instalment being a lot easier to get around in.

4. Did I do it justice? Probably not, though I hope you can agree in the supremacy of Katamari Damacy’s idea. If only we had an industry that promoted and chased ideas as vibrantly playful and vivacious as Takahashi’s, for I fear far too many now wallow in the obscurity of indie titles desperately fighting for attention in the grim commercial battlefields of online retail. Though I suppose the point is that the games are still being made, even if for me, out of reach is out of touch.