We Love Katamari, the follow-up to the bizarre and addictively fun
Katamari Damacy, follows the further exploits of the King of All Cosmos
and his pint-sized protoge, the Prince of All Cosmos. The King is
basically a hero to the people of Earth now, and they ask him for all
manners of favors. In a set of funny cutscenes, He declines all of
their requests at first. But then they flatter him with compliments, so
he tells the Prince to grant them their wish. You get shot down to
Earth with your trusty sticky ball, the katamari. Once there, you roll,
roll, roll your way to success. The game keeps the strange sense of
humor, totally nonsensical story, and wacky visual style of the first.
While there is some changes to the missions, WLK feels more like an
expansion pack than a whole new game.
Rolling around is all there is in WLK. You control your katamari using
the dual-shock's analog sticks and roll over any object small enough to
be picked up. As your ball grows, you can pick up bigger and bigger
things. Once your ball is big enough, you win the stage and move on to
a more difficult challenge. While this sounds very simplistic and easy,
it's still surprisingly fun. WLK does make a few changes to the
formula. For instance, one katamari is a fireball that you have to keep
lit by grabbing objects. If you go too long between picking something
up, it'll go out and you'll lose the stage. In another stage, you roll
a giant snowball and try to make it big enough to make the head for a
giant snowman. Yet another stage has you rolling up a tiny sumo
wrestler. As you roll over objects, he gets fatter and fatter. Once
he's big enough, you take him into the ring and knock over his
opponent. These missions do mix things up a bit, but they always follow
the "roll up a ball, make it bigger, win the stage" formula.
Maybe that's why I liked this game, but didn't really love it. There
just wasn't enough variety to make me want to play through it more than
once. Since the game is so short, the only value you get is through
replaying it. But, once I rolled up the solar system, I just wasn't
interested in going back through. WLK is a fun game that's certainly
worth a rental. However, I wouldn't buy it.
