we love katamari
(aka minna daisuki katamari damashii)
(aka katamari damashii 2)
a game by namco
a review by tim rogers


The first Katamari Damashii game featured a song sung by a girl whose name I didn't know at the time, whose name I learned a little later by way of something inconsequential and later forgot completely. She has the charming voice of a petite Japanese girl with two beers in her stomach, singing an anime theme song at karaoke. Yet the song she's singing, called "Lonely Rolling Star," is no cheesy anime song. When you break down the lyrics, it's kind of sad, given its poppiness. The girl sings away, like grinning and gripping a microphone with two hands. You can almost see her flashy, white, uneven teeth. The same girl sings the theme song for Namco's Japanese-only word puzzle game Mojipittan, and her voice, more than anything else, has become the first thing I think of when I hear the name of that game. "Lonely Rolling Star" was the highlight of Katamari Damashii's soundtrack, and I didn't understand this until toward the end of my playing session, when the lonely depression that game was trying to make the player aware of finally settled in, and I realized that, as this girl singing is young, so is our protagonist, now faced with the task of standing back and looking at the giant ball of chaos he has created and left for dead wallowing in the middle of an unsympathetic ocean. The first time I heard the song, I was rolling up paperclips and getting annoyed at mice; I was struck by this girl's immature, nasal singing voice, and how it reminded me of Nomiya Maki's early solo song "Usagi to watashi" ("The rabbit and I"). Nomiya Maki later grew up into a striking woman, and both professionally, legally, and artistically married up-and-coming Shibuya-bound freakout DJ Yasuharu "Readymade" Konishi, who would later remix the opening march from the film "Son of Godzilla" into what I considered then and consider now "The music people will be listening to in fifty years." The two of them became known as the Pizzicato Five, and changed the landscape of Shibuya-kei music for the gorgeouser. In the decade and some years she spent with Yasuharu Konishi, Nomiya Maki grew up, and her voice grew a rich range, laying down a theorem that, kind of, any young Japanese girl who sings enough will start to sound like a diva. (This theorem would later be disproven by pop star Ayumi Hamasaki, who can't perform live without the help of a very, very large computer.) The first time I heard "Lonely Rolling Star," I was struck by its musical solidity, yet irked by the voice. I had heard Nomiya Maki mature into a diva; I didn't have time this late in my life to hear this nameless Namco Girl mature as well. So I proclaimed, to a friend, "Why didn't they just get Nomiya Maki to sing this song?" The Pizzicato Five broke up in a rather ugly fashion just a few years back; Nomiya Maki has been floating around like a pop-wraith, not really doing anything, yet haunting all kinds of people's perceptions, like mine. It seemed like a good idea to me -- get Nomiya Maki to sing this song. Get her to sing every song in the game that requires a female vocal. Hers is the voice I and many others associate with the kind of music Katamari Damashii is so proudly treating like it never died, anyway.

Well, someone else must have thought the same thing, because We Love Katamari has plenty of honest-to-gorgeous real, live Nomiya Maki. This is the perfect example of how it, as a game, has scientifically matured: the executive producer's checklist must have included an entry that read "Get a female vocalist who sounds more like Nomiya Maki," and it is a testament to the producer's ingenuity, an ingenuity which transcends ingenuity to the point where it's more like common sense, that he saw fit to get Nomiya Maki herself and be done with it. Only it's not quite as good a fit as I thought it would be. I mean, something feels wrong. It feels too hi-fi. Not that the original was low-fi or anything. It just feels precarious. It's hard to explain why. It makes me vaguely afraid that, in the next installment, they'll fire their musical producer, who is maturing at a wonderful rate, and just replace him with Tomoyuki "Fantastic Plastic Machine" Tanaka, who would no doubt bring Yasuharu Konishi and Japanese girly hip-hop duo Halcali into the mix; the ball would, from that point on, get too hot to handle.

The music has been produced amazingly this time around. Note that coming from a person who thinks they know music, to say something is "produced amazingly" is to imply "even though it's not my thing in the slightest." The first Katamari was a little loose on music. Hundreds of thousands of people loved it anyway, Americans imported the soundtrack, and people hummed its melodies in their cars when their radios weren't working. We Love Katamari sees the producers bold enough to, in addition to hiring Nomiya Maki, experiment with a slow-paced, purely orchestral piece of music, one that the final level of the original sure could have used. In the two years since the first game's soundtrack was composed, recorded, and compiled, hip-hop has become quite the rage in Japan, so much so as to pollute the popstream with its funky beats and many god-forsaken awful songs that overstep the line and use Famicom music samples (don't ever say the words "Tongari Kids" in front of me, please). So naturally, We Love Katamari is full of such hip-hopping, only its of the self-effacing Japanese "abstract" brand, where the sound samples are wacky and the beats are, though big, not huge. The MCs intone wacky things in utterly serious voices, and they have voices that would look a perfect fit on the body of a man with a checked button-down shirt tucked into a pair of khakis. Japanese hip-hop tends to come from men who hear hip-hop and like it, whereas the mythic origins of real, American hip-hop is that it was born from the very historical anger directed toward The Man. There is no anger in Japanese hip-hop, and consequently there is no anger in Katamari, which this time around is clearly all about love, anyway, so it's a perfect fit. Japanese hip-hop tends to be thematically about best methods for compiling a list of good places to take a girl out for a date, or else how much it'd be cool if the world reached a state of peaceful bliss, or else how wonderful it is to have a big dream, and how sweet it would be if your dream got bigger. Katamari is about rolling a ball around using two analog sticks on a Sony PlayStation2 Dual Shock 2 controller; pick up objects, and the ball gets bigger.

We've done this before. That's not to say it isn't still fun now. Because it is. Still fun. In fact, it's even more fun this time. Those of you acquainted with my review of the original game know that I reached its ending and felt so horribly lonely about having just swallowed up an entire continent that I never played the game again. I did, however, urge everyone I knew to play it. You start out with a ball five centimeters in diameter, and in earlier stages you pick up objects until the ball reaches a target size, usually a size between twenty centimeters and five meters. Five meters seemed to be the threshhold for chaos in the original Katamari; once you reached the size of five meters, it was all downhill from there. The final level is about reaching a size of a hundred meters, which is huge. Skilled players (or players using the free mode) can get the katamari up to 900-some meters, and the effect of doing so, sucking up rainbows and clouds (which recent studies as of a year ago show to weigh, individually, more than all the elephants that have ever existed on the planet) and eventually bobbling around, fat and useless, in the middle of the ocean, is a big eye-opener. It teaches us a lesson, only we're not so sure what the lesson is. We walk away from the game feeling as though we are changed people, only we can't pinpoint what change, exactly, has taken place. Suffice it to say, then, that the original Katamari was an experience. The little pops of golf balls and paperclips sticking to our rolling ball are elements of the experience. The squealing of rats, the meowing of cats, are elements of an experience.

The sequel could very well have been called Katamari Damashii: The Videogame. That's what it is: a videogame. In it the little pops of golf balls and paperclips sticking to our rolling ball are elements of a videogame. The squealing of rats, the meowing of cats, are elements of a videogame. I had wondered what the producer could do to one-up his original. At that time, I didn't even know the producer's name. Now, without looking for it, his name has reached my ears: he is Keita Takahashi. That I now know his name whereas a year ago I did not is the very indication that he has graduated from a man who created an emotion-evoking experience to a man who produces videogames. There were two ways I could see, last year, that Katamari Damashii could be one-upped. One of them was that it could be one-upped swiftly and violently, were the producer to pull some ace out of his sleeve and baffle the world with his truly brilliant concept. The other possibility was that he could slowly and painstakingly trim away the excess, plot out more ingenious paths for the ball to roll through stages, pump up the musical production, sharpen up the graphics, and add some superfluous bonus features. Well, it turns out that Mr. Takahashi has done the latter, which is either the harder path or the easier path (depending on your way of thinking). Had he unveiled a hypothetical concept that he'd been hiding since before making Katamari Damashii, he would have seemed like another effortless genius. However, had such a concept not existed, this would have been literally impossible. No, the path Mr. Takahashi chose amounted to a task as unthinkable, yet not impossible, as obliterating every molecule of plaque in a reasonably healthy mouth using only a tube of toothpaste and a single chopstick, with the only catch being that you're not allowed to draw blood.

We Love Katamari is sharp as a tack. Whereas the first Katamari sometimes saw a circle of telephones situated around the base of a tree, which could be picked up either when you were just large enough to pick up a telephone or when you were so astronomically large as to pick up the tree itself, making the presence of telephones a moot point, We Love Katamari taps the wealth of the heavy concept of stages where everything must be picked up. These stages do not have time limits, yet, as the late stages might (frustratingly) demonstrate, can be lost. These stages have been plotted out with such care and ingenuity that they are, though mundane (the first one involves you cleaning up a little boy's room at the request of his mother), among the most accomplished level designs in videogames since Super Mario 64. This linearity is carried over somewhat into the larger stages. In the first Katamari it was mostly the same way -- just not as tight. The sequel seems to address every complaint and reinforce every compliment of every player who played the first game. Multi-set stages, for example: in order to exit the bedroom portion of an early stage and begin rolling down the hill into the backyard, you have to first reach a certain size, and then roll over the step leading up to the door. Lucky for you, the size you have to reach is written plainly on the door. This is so wonderfully helpful that only seeing it for yourself can do it justice. Other small fluorishes, dealing with the objects themselves, treat the player like a prince: when your katamari is yet tiny and you roll over an opened matchbook, it bends and shuts. Roll off the matchbook, and it snaps back open. Roll into a soccer ball at high speed, and it rolls off with the right physics. This is lovely -- the first game felt like, especially in its endless, world-swallowing mode, your on-screen avatar was the world itself, and your movements merely resulted in that world pulling itself into the most compact shape possible. Now, we feel like an element of this world. The prince, and the katamari he rolls, have been assured by some unseen force (known as a room full of diligent programmers) as real, breathing, living members of a larger whole. This is twice as evident in the two-player battle mode, where we can pick up our opponent's katamari with much morbid pleasure, in an action stage as big as the entire world. (Aside: the vertical split is a little annoying, as skill in Katamari relies heavily on peripheral vision. They need to get this online, already, for me to make a better assessment.)

I said of the original that the concept of the game -- rolling a ball of a set size over objects, collecting them and making your ball bigger -- was ingenious, yet would not be ingenious unless the objects themselves were interesting. If you were merely rolling a sphere through polygonal and labyrinthine backgrounds and collecting cubes of increasing size, would the game have sold so many hundreds of thousands of copies? Would Time magazine have cared? Most likely not. The biggest task Namco faced with the first Katamari was art direction. To give the engine personality. The approached this through character design and music. Though the music has been improved since the last game (I forgot to mention the frequent, subtle uses of folky-yet-distorted electric guitar), the characters are still the same rectangle-headed space people that occupied the first game. The instruction manual, which might be the best manual of the year for the second year running, features a wonderful center spread that involves an apple playing an acoustic guitar. Which is to say that We Love Katamari seems to understand, more than anything else, the importance of keeping the collectable objects interesting. The average player knows how large a telephone, a housecat, and a skyscraper are; in the same way, the katamari's size really sinks in when you see a Ferris wheel sticking out of it. It's a lot like what Ico producer Fumito Ueda told me of his new game Shadow of the Colossus during an interview last year: "Videogames are often about showing the player things that don't exist in the real world, yet allowing reality time to sink in." In his game, he explains, the colossus is so huge relative to the human hero and his horse that we instantly know how large he'd be in real life. Katamari, with its non-human characters and infinite-celestial theme, doesn't have this mechanical luxury, so it gives us telephones and Ferris wheels, in and of themselves interesting yet by no means touching on the totality of all objects that exist on earth. In the sequel, themed levels -- an underwater stage, a flower-collecting stage, and a mythology-themed stage are of early note -- pop up with the right frequency, and constantly feel like they're injecting some levity into something. Not that the rest of the game is boring; it's just that when you've gone from rolling around some suburban neighborhood to rolling up centaurs and fairies, you can't help letting loose with a sick grin. The game feels different, though only because it looks different -- this is a videogame, after all. The original had levels that required you to do things like roll up bears or crabs; this one has the flower level, which lets you roll up flowers. Though someone on the design team of the original must have thought it'd be hilarious to have a hundred snapping crabs stuck to your katamari, someone on the team of the second game (maybe the same someone) assumed correctly that it's more visually appealing to have a ball coated with hundreds of flowers. The sky is pink, the grass is green and purple, the flowers are of every color of the rainbow. It's a pleasant experience. This is to say nothing of the snowman level, which may be the most genius of all: no time limit, no agressive obstacles, just you, rolling a snowball for to make the head of a giant snowman. The King has already provided the body. You can make the head bigger than the body if you want. It's very gentle, like the first stage of Ecco the Dolphin; you're rolling a ball in snow. You can pick up shrubs and small objects to pack the snow tighter, and when you finish, the game records the size of your snowball and the time it took you to make it. I got 18.8 meters in four minutes and fifty-two seconds. Maybe that's not as good as it could have been, who knows? Still, it's fun to let your friends playy this level. And don't get me started on the insane Hansel and Gretel level, where you have to demolish the witch's candy house with your katamari, before absorbing Hansel and Gretel themselves. I still haven't figured out how to get the witch. While we're at listing special stages here, let me say that for me, personally, the car-race level was the high point of the game. In it, you have a turbo-speed katamari that can only move forward, and you need to grab all the cars on a race track. You have literally hundreds of options for how to do this, and most of them are bitching fun.

Usually the themed levels involve a conceptual hook that might take you some time to get your head around. Remember the bear level in the first Katamari? You could only roll up one bear, and were urged to make it the biggest bear you could. The level began with your already-pretty-huge katamari rolling quickly down a steep hill toward a crowd of bear cubs. The level was an exercise in not picking anything up, until you had found one large enough for your tastes. Well, the sequel takes this kind of thinking and fleshes it out. For example: one early stage is about building a bonfire. You're given a flaming katamari and told to roll to the top of a hill, where you will set a pile of firewood ablaze. The problem is, your fire will go out unless you feed it. The way to feed it is to pick up objects that would, in a real world, feed a fire. Straw hats as opposed to tin cans. It makes the trek up the mountain all the more intriguing -- your fire dies easily, you see, so dawdling around at the base of the mountain is not recommended. However, should you dawdle with a bit of cleverness, you can be rolling a giant ball up the hill, with which to make a huger bonfire. Little player-pleasing concepts like this litter the ground of We Love Katamari, forcing us to keep looking down at what we're picking up. It's a refreshing change, and at its best it feels a lot like looking at the "next" window in Tetris, only there is no window, there is only the ground in front of us. It's an exercise in integration. In such stages, where we think about things before picking them up, it feels like a totally different game.

Don't confuse thinking about what you're picking up for conscience, however. Soon, you will grow large, and you will absorb entire continents, cats, dogs, buses, schoolgirls, skyscrapers and all. You will laugh to hear children scream as they become stuck to your ball of chaos. The first game was punctuated by gorgeous little computer-animated cut-scenes in which two young kids saw a news broadcast about the stars in the sky disappearing. When the boy tried to tell his mother, she said, "Hey, don't make stuff up." He then looked at his sister, and said, "If all the stars in the sky really disappeared, that'd be so cool." And the girl nods. Why would this be cool? I don't know. It made me remember my brother, who'd hear news broadcasts of murder and shout "ROCK!" like an asshole. Whoever scripted these cut-scenes knew the maliciousness of children, and seeing as those kids eventually get what they deserve, I'm guessing he fantastically understood it at least as well as I do. The game carries this latently malicious attitude like a spy carries a gun. When you absorb schoolgirls, in the world of this game, you don't feel sorry for them, because the only humans given the right to speak, in the world of this game, are asshole schoolchildren who think the disappearance of all the stars in the sky would be "cool."

We Love Katamari knows of its predecessor's latent maliciousness, because it was made by the same people. Yet, rather than try to create new characters or new situations that endear to us as the first game did, its story is merely a sequence of gropings toward the concept of comedy, one falling flat right after another. In We Love Katamari's story, the citizens of the planet earth have fallen in love with the game Katamari Damashii, and have come to revere the colossal King of All Cosmos as a kind of pop star. They line up in the streets and gaze up into the sky and make requests of the king. Note that, in the first game, it was the King who, in a drunken binge, destroyed all of the stars in the sky. His affection for alcohol and alcohol-related violence was not mentioned outside the story's prologue, which existed just to set up the premise of rolling a ball around, anyway. Now, as the second game begins, the drunken binge is mentioned again as the cause for the death of all the stars in the sky, and some players who feel emotional attachment to the first game might cringe, and whisper in their minds, "I thought we weren't going to talk about that again." No matter -- the game begins without drilling in the dangers of drinking and driving. We are told that the sky is still quite empty of stars, and that the Prince must keep rolling up junk on earth to finish the task. Then the curious element is brought into play -- the people of earth start making requests for stars. The irony that the stars sometimes contain other humans is not lost on the game, which beats you over the head with irony after irony until, toward the end, you imagine the final stage might abruptly end with a title card, in giant, red, English letters screaming "THESE PEOPLE LIVE ON THIS PLANET AND THEY WANT YOU TO MAKE THEM A STAR EVEN THOUGH THAT INVOLVES, LIKE, ABSORBING THEIR WHOLE PLANET, PEOPLE AND ALL -- ISN'T THAT FUCKED UP?!?!?!" The game's ultimate goal, for crying out loud, consists of, essentially, blowing up the sun at the request of a cartoon dog.

The star-requesting process begins with an artistically blocky-looking citizen of earth raising his or her hand and then relating his story to the prince. To wit: "I'm a young mother and a big fan of Katamari Damashii. My son loves the game as well. He loves pushing that ball, and rolling it around. His room is really messy. Can you do something about cleaning it up -- in a fun way?" The Prince then leaps into the sky to relate the request to the King, who sits in his throne, hands crossed. He begins every assessment with "Oh god, that sounds so boring. I don't want to [clean up some kid's room]." Then a word balloon appears in the lower-right corner of the screen, representing the words of the earthling making the humble request. It always, always consists of a compliment: "King, you're so COOOOOL!" "King, you're so HUGE!!" "King, you're the BEST!!" The King's next word balloon consists of dots, which unfold slowly. He then repeats the compliment. ". . . . . . . . . cool?" "Well, I suppose I am kind of . . ." And then says to the prince, "Well, let's do this. Go [clean up that kid's room]." Only he uses far more words in the introduction phase. He tells anecdotes and goes on tangents. When the quest is complete, he remarks on the beauty of the art of flower-arrangement, or whatever the stage's theme has been. Early in the game, when the Prince brings the news that the King is now the biggest sensation on earth, he wonders, in a series of several dozen text balloons, what it is the people of earth like about him. "Is it my nose? Or my beard? Is it my fashion sense? Or my chin? I think it might be my chin. I have quite a statuesque chin." Et cetera. Is any of this, actually, funny? Is there anyone sitting at home shaking like a Trance Vibrator with uncontrollable laughter? Do they pause between epileptic snorting sessions to giggle "Oh my god, in the world of this game, rolling up the stars is totally the quest for the prince to complete, and though the people on the earth are fans of the star-rolling as the concept for a videogame they're totally requesting stars in real life, which means the destructions of their cities et al, which are, in fact, only cities in a videogame being played by me! Oh my god, that's rich!" I'm sure they don't. I mean, do you know anyone who speaks sentences like that?

I know it is the popular trend to make self-referencing animation and comic books in Japan. It saddens me to see this kind of self-referencing game. It comes across feeling dumb. Metal Gear Solid 2 did a good job of referencing itself, and heavily, though only at a few poignant moments at the end. Players, for the most part, hated it for that, though I wager those same players won't hate We Love Katamari in the slightest for the same reasons, because Metal Gear Solid 2 is a miserable pile of Hollywood-blockbuster secrets starring a pair of superspies, a few military-issue giant robots, the fate of the world, and a swordfight in New York City, whereas Katamari wears its wackiness on its sleeve. The original was created as one of those games destined to sell more in the West than in Japan: it was big enough, weird enough, wacky enough, and overtly "Japanese" enough to sell as the moment's pinnacle of what "those crazy Japanese" are doing. A twenty-dollar price tag ensured hit sales. A cleverly Romanized title (which leads the singer in the We Love Katamari opening to mispronounce the word "Damashii" in a clever way) ensured people would remember its name. Now that it has us all standing at attention, raising our hands, asking the King of All Cosmos to make us stars, what story does it tell? It tells us nothing. It drops its responsibility like a catcher might drop a baseball on the third strike. The inter-stage cut-scenes are no longer about humans we can associate with on even angry levels -- they are about the immortal, (boozing) King of All Cosmos, detailing his boyhood as a cloaked, tiny prince, and how he rose to super-stardom despite his stern father's . . . sternness. When the fully-grown King of All Cosmos reaches the conclusion that we love him because of his chin, and asks his son several times, "So you think it's the chin, right? Right?" I was scowling at the screen. If he was my dad, I'd slap him and tell him to shut the hell up. His clever little witticisms keep popping up even during stages, where he can no longer tell you "try to get through that barrier over there to reach the next part of the level" without inserting a joke about his chin and a subtle reference to his Cosmic Penis. Normally, I like this kind of humor. It's just that, while I'm zoned into rolling this ball toward that cluster of paperclips, I don't want to be subjected to it.



I said of the first Katamari Damashii that "It is not a cult hit. It is a superstar. It is coming to your town for one night only, to rock you, and love you, and love you, and leave you for dead an hour later." We Love Katamari represents that rock star's second one-night-only show in your town. You trembled with excitement the first time because it was all so unexpected. This time, you've listened to the albums for a year and learned every nuance of every song it might sing, inside and outside, forward and backward, and the rock star knows that, so it sings all the songs you want it to sing, and it talks all it wants between songs because it knows you're going to cheer on its every mundane word. The next, third step of rock-stardom, if I'm not mistaken, is becoming like Thom Yorke and refusing to ever, ever sing "Creep" live again, because it represents that one instance where the fans know exactly as much as you do with regard to your own music: this is the best song you will ever sing, the most finely-honed, the most classic in theme, the most edge-of-the-moment, the most important with regards to performance and production. I dare not imagine what a third Katamari game will feel like if it continues its logical slide into rock-stardom. Maybe it'll be about rolling the ball to America, and star the US Military as the bad guys, and they'll shoot things off your katamari as you're rolling around. Maybe the King's alcohol habit will rear its ugly head and he'll sit there drunk and complaining about politics for hundreds of word balloons between stages?

"We Love Katamari," the title, is supposed to represent what we, the players, are saying about the game, and arriving at the end of a playing session of it, I can't help agreeing. At the core of its gameplay, it is something I realize I love. The original game burned brightly and quickly, and left the emotionally-prone player stupefied and horribly lonely. The sequel is slower in its burning, and more prudent in the revelations of its structural secrets, and wiser in the progression of its play. Yet its title might also represent what the game's makers are saying of it -- they, too, must love the game. Such a game as this could not be made unless the people responsible loved it very much. Yet the question that many lovers have asked many lovers is this: why do you love who you love? The producers of We Love Katamari love Katamari for . . . what? Because it brought them much money? The Beatles said money can't buy me love, yet can love buy money? Namco loves Katamari as a new gaming franchise. Keita Takahashi loves Katamari because it made people like me know his name. (One can't help imagining that the King's narcissism is transferred directly from the producer; if one can write a character like this, one must know of his tendencies on a first-person basis.) Yet Keita Takahashi is different from other boozing, womanizing, leather-clad so-called "rock-star" game producers -- he is, in fact, an actual genius at producing videogames. Shigeru Miyamoto is hailed as a genius producer for his ingenuity in realizing the most obvious and tedious-to-imagine engines for pulling his games forward. Super Mario 64's 3D perspective itself is not genius -- any man who's ever had a cup of coffee at a second-story Starbucks and watched a busy intersection, perhaps following individual pedestrians with his eyes, can understand the advantages of such a perspective -- the genius comes in his willingness to execute the perspective as painstakingly as possible, taking as much time as it has to take to get it perfect. Keita Takahashi proved with Katamari Damashii that he possesses the same genius for revising three-dimensional videogames that Kurt Cobain possessed for revising rock music. In We Love Katamari, he digs in up to his elbows in revising the structure and the objectivitiy of the game; he did some hard, hands-on work, and it shows. It's just that the game's personality keeps behaving like such a jackass.

My sincere wish is that Mr. Takahashi will fully realize the good he's done in the quest toward revitalizing the art of the videogame. Once realizing this, he will set out making a new game, one pure in concept and straightforward in play. We've gotten to the point now where a movie like "The Island" can premier in Japan with the disclaimer on the poster saying "From the director of 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Armageddon'", two movies that suck ass, and still make big money; why not make a videogame that looks nothing like Katamari Damashii, yet says "From the producer of Katamari Damashii" on the box? The game doesn't have to be a dark, fantastic action RPG about dinosaurs and bloodthirsty cavemen or anything; just make it different. Make it a change of pace from Katamari, just as Katamari was a change of pace from everything else. Maybe get Halcali tastefully involved -- maybe make it kind of an adventure story about two cute Japanese girls on a quest to become the strongest hip-hoppers in the world, with some catchy gameplay hook. Or, uh, ignore that last part if you want to.

Katamari's innovations toward the nature of dual-analog stick videogame play are remarkable (let's forget their origins in Sony's Ape Escape, and, earlier than that, Namco's own arcade tank battlers, Cybersled and Tokyo Wars), and are currently being put through their paces in as unlikely places as Irem's barn-burning action-adventure-role-playing-game Ponkotsu Roman Daikatsugeki Bumpy Trot, which allows players to pilot giant robots (with car-like faces) around huge, Grand-Theft-Auto-like three-dimensional environments using a revised Katamari control scheme that also allows for a jump and a rocket boost. Bumpy Trot's story deals with love, and a ragtag traveling blues-rock band and the giant-robot-related trouble they can't help getting into. It is, so far, because of its combinations, its revisions, and its prudences, the game of the year. We Love Katamari is a pleasant experience. It plays well. It means well. It knows you love it, and it tells you this on its box, and though it never explicitly tells you it loves you, it really does. It just feels the need to talk your ear off sometimes, the way a lover sometimes does. And at other times, it starts singing, and it sounds like Nomiya Maki, because it is Nomiya Maki, whose voice is so silky and perfect that you imagine she's lying about every word she's singing. I remember her singing "Adult-Oriented Cha-Cha" years and years back, singing "Give me more wine, give me more love, give me more and more, and then DANCE WITH ME!!" She sounds like such a seductress, like such a villain, like such a god damned sexy woman. My, Katamari has grown up. To think just a year ago it sounded like a little girl at karaoke. I'd like to hear her sing again sometime, I think, having finished with We Love Katamari with a nagging desire to go back and actually try some of its more intriguing missions another day. What was her name again?

--tim rogers, 07132005

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tim rogers will return to review ape escape 3, starring hideo kojima!