My latest distraction in the Corona times has been the acquisition of a used PlayStation 2 gaming system. I haven't had access to a real gaming system since the mid-90s, so this was a considerable novelty for me. It came with a motley collection of games, but there was one specific title I took the trouble to acquire separately - Namco's "Katamari Damacy." Despite not having actually played the game, I already counted myself as a fan.
Timelines are a little fuzzy here, but way back around 2006, I was a post-grad with way too much time on my hands, and "Katamari Damacy" and its sequel were seeing healthy sales, and carving out their own little niche in the popular culture. I saw a few commercials, and read a few articles about the game, which was enough to get me intrigued. However, I wasn't about to go and drop a couple hundred on a PS2, plus more for the actual games. There was, however, the newly emergent Youtube platform for video sharing, where gamers were starting to upload playthroughs of every game you could imagine. I spent hours and hours watching playthroughs of the "Katamari Damacy" games.
The gameplay of "Katamari Damacy" scratched some sort of psychological itch I didn't know I had. This was significant, because I didn't like the gameplay of most of the games of that era. The low polygon graphics of the mid-2000s struck me as ugly and awkward. Navigating a virtual environment was disorienting - sometimes watching someone play through certain games will still make me nauseous. However, there is something fascinating about "Katamari," where you don't have to fight or shoot anything. Instead, the whole game is built around the act of rolling up random objects by getting them stuck to a "katamari" ball, gradually increasing its diameter until everything - including wiggling animals, people, and chunks of the landscape - are massed into one, giant, spherical, blob. A real life version of this would be potent nightmare fuel, but in the highly abstracted world of the "Katamari," where everything looks like it's been constructed out of Lego blocks, there's something fascinating about seeing a cluttered world get tidied up in such a fashion.
I think it's the simplicity of the game that appeals to me the most. The different levels ask you to increase the size of your katamari to a particular diameter in a certain amount of time, collect up certain special objects, or just as many objects as possible from a particular setting. However, the gameplay never really changes, and it's always the same gag - wouldn't it be funny to roll up a bunch of crabs, with all those flailing legs? Or furiously flapping and honking swans? Or people? Part of the fun is finding out that you can roll up just about anything you can see, from a blazing campfire to a chalk drawing off a sidewalk. The laws of physics don't matter in this universe. In the end credits, you even get to roll up all the different countries of the world. United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama...
There's an absurd story to follow in "Katamari Damacy," involving the buffoonish King of the Cosmos accidentally destroying all the stars, and needing the protagonist, his puny offspring, to go to Earth and roll up some new replacements. There's also a side-plot involving a hapless family of Earthlings who become aware of the alien activity. I have no interest in these parts of the game whatsoever, especially since they're all told through a series of still pictures and dialogue boxes. It's very Japanese. I haven't tried any of the multiplayer options yet either, where you can swap out the lead character with one of several "cousins."
I'm finding "Katamari Damacy" a little frustrating to play because I'm really only starting to get a handle on the controls. It can be very awkward to steer the katamari, and it took me several sessions to get the hang of changing direction. I have a tendency to get myself stuck in places I don't want to be, including becoming totally blocked into a closet toward the end of the crab collecting level. I can't play for more than an hour or so without my thumbs feeling sore. However, I get such a thrill every time the katamari hits another diameter benchmark, and suddenly the scale of everything in the environment changes, letting me roll up a different set of objects or explore a new part of the terrain.
And in 2020, the game only cost me eight bucks.
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