YMMV / Katamari Damacy

• Accidental Innuendo: Johnson and Odeko's distinctive shapes have spawned many a cheap joke at their expense. The fact that they're explicitly proud of their long heads, and are prone to exaggerating their lengths, doesn't help.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Papa's motivation for chucking the King's second place trophy in the river but then retrieving it later could be read two ways, in part because the cutscenes have no dialogue: he is secretly proud of his son but puts on a tough act as part of the King's training and always planned to recover the trophy, or he had a Heel Realization after the King punched him and ran away and retrieved the trophy as penance.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: When rolling up rainbows in the games, they stick to the katamari as open-hole donut shape. While this seems like a case of Artistic License to fit graphical limitations, rainbows in real life are indeed circular shaped◊, with it only appearing in an arc shape from ground level.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Most of the 2010s was this for the series. Touch My Katamari was released in 2011 and was panned by fans for the short length, problematic plot, and bizzare decision to fuse several of the cousins together. Being released on a commercial failure of a handheld certainly didn't help. After that, there was little activity from the franchise outside of the occasional crossover and the short run of the ShiftyLook comics. Following a few years of inactivity, Namco released two mobile games in 2016, Tap my Katamari and Amazing Katamari Damacy. While the latter was shut down due to low success, fans were happy to see Namco giving the franchise some attention again. The era would finally end in 2018 with the release of Katamari Damacy REROLL, along with a healthy amount of Fangamer merchandise and even a commemorative Loot Crate to celebrate the series' 15th Anniversary. With the release of We ♥ Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie, the series is firmly out of the era and back on track.
• Awesome Ego: The King of All Cosmos. Normally, he'd go down as one of the worst fathers in history, but he gets a free pass for sheer Refuge in Audacity alone. He wears outlandishly garish clothing, he always uses the Royal "We", he constantly makes bizarre non sequiturs, and he always makes spectacular presentations. He may be a pompous, self-entitled asshole, but it's impossible to hate him.
• Bizarro Episode: Touch My Katamari is considered bizarre, even by Katamari standards. The art direction (outside of the stages themselves) is a big reason for this, as it incorporates both Keita Takahashi's newer artstyle^note which doesn't really resemble Katamari's established art style and animation work from the art group AC-bu.^note who are well known for their over-the-top style, their work including the famous pop music video Gal-O Sengen and contributions to Pop Team Epic. To show off the power of the Playstation Vita, Namco also had the character models remade, with the King himself being made into 3D◊ (which was widely seen as uncanny). This also came with some consequences, as the game was a launch title, and Namco didn't have time to make high-quality models for every cousin, resulting in the bizarre decision to merge several cousin designs together (such as June and Kuro, Velvet and Drooby, Foomin and Daisy, etc.). The game's music, while having some more standard Katamari fare, even includes some very off-the-wall tracks, with Alien being a notable example.
• Breather Level: The Snowman level in We ♥ Katamari, which comes directly after the campfire level. It's one of the few levels in the game to not have a timer and there's no real requirement to beat the level. It's just roll around until you're good.
• Broken Base:
  • "Cherry Tree Times" is by far the most polarizing song in the series. Fans of the song consider it to be one of the best-composed songs from the first game with incredibly relaxing instrumentals, but detractors of the song say that they can't stand the singing children, either because they find them annoying or unintentionally creepy.
  • Fans of the series who wish to see more new titles have occasionally argued over whether the game's graphics need to improve or not. On the one side are people who enjoy the quirky charm of the blocky designs. On the other are those who point out that the design was a caveat of hardware limitations that no longer apply. The former will say the look is unique and distinct, and that Real Is Brown does not fit with the atmosphere of the series. The latter believe the game can only improve by moving into a more modern design aesthetic, which could still be stylized and cartoony but doesn't need to stick to cubist minimalism.
  • The new designs of the cousins introduced REROLL are very hit or miss with fans. Some praise them for giving the Prince and his cousins much more expressiveness, and for it being a loving homage to series creator Keita Takahashi's art style. Detractors see the designs as a downgrade, believing them as being way too emoji-like. They find their constant smiles to be uncanny, and believe that Keita's more modern artstyle doesn't gel well with the established Katamari aesthetic^note his artstyle being much more reminiscent of his recent works like Noby Noby Boy and Wattam. There's also the fact that these redesigns left the cousins without some of their unique features, such as Ichigo's strawberry-shaped body. The following We ♥ Katamari REROLL would alleviate this slightly, giving the Queen^note Who was also given this design change due to her sharing a face type with her son. her old design back and letting the young King keep his classic design, but for the Prince and his cousins it still remains divisive.
  • The Katamari Damacy Series Music Pack from We ♥ Katamari REROLL has proven to be rather divisive. While most fans are in agreement that getting to listen to songs from the entire series in a single installment is a fantastic idea, the execution has fans split. One group likes the overall pack, happy that it includes several fan-favorite songs such as "Katamari on the Rocks", "Lonely Rolling Star", "Guru Guru Gravity", and "Everlasting Love + You". A second group, while acknowledging the good song choices, also considers many of the song choices to be questionable at best, as songs such as "Alien" and the aforementioned "Cherry Tree Times" ended up making it in over other fan-favorites such as "Que Sera Sera", "Angel Gifts", and "Katamari Dancing" (the last one being a particularly odd omission, as it's the only theme song from the series not to be featured in the pack). And finally, a third group hates the pack, as they would've preferred having every game's soundtrack included rather than only having 5 songs selected from each game. Steam users were even less kind to the pack, as they were hoping that the DLC would also include MP3s of the songs instead of only being able to listen to them in-game.
• Catharsis Factor: When one particular obstacle or trap causes massive headaches early on in a level that constantly cause you to bounce around and lose objects, it's very satisfying when you're finally big enough to roll that object up, or even sometimes entire troops worth of them.
• Contested Sequel:
  • Beautiful Katamari is really short unless you shell out for the various DLC stages. This rubbed some the wrong way for obvious reasons. It has also been accused of feeling less inspired, with simple layouts and relatively few new items. However, it has also garnered praise for its quality of life improvements, addition of online play, and seamless loading between maps as the Katamari gets larger^note As opposed to the first three entries, which have to pause and let the King talk whenever the game loads a new size map, which is often seen as a jarring interruption of gameplay. Even the REROLL versions of the first two games retain this issue despite being on much stronger hardware, though this is likely due to them using their original versions' source code.. At the time it was also contested as to whether the series should be pushing past its low-poly roots due to greater hardware capabilities. See Broken Base.
  • Katamari Forever receives similar criticism for a lack of original content compared to its predecessors. It features only two new cousins and three original stages, with the rest of the stages being recycled from previous games. The game's soundtrack, consisting of remixes of previous games' tracks, is also divisive, given how different and bizarre some of them are. Finally, in some stages, all objects start out as black and white until the player rolls them up (to simulate the King's amnesia in-universe), inadvertently making them harder than they should be (though this can be turned off by choosing another filter). However, others love the game despite these flaws, praising the retention of Beautiful Katamari's quality of life improvements, the sheer stage and map variety, the Roboking's lovable personality, and the multiple ways to roll in each stage. Those who love the game cite replayability as one of the game's biggest strengths, and appreciate it as a celebration of how far the series had come.
• Difficulty Spike: The first few levels of Katamari Damacy are simple enough to familiarize yourself with the controls and the basic concept of what you're supposed to be doing. But then you hit Make a Star 4, and unless you've learned how to prioritize what you pick up and what you can pick up and when, that level will hand your ass to you repeatedly, and it doesn't let up from there.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Out of all the cousins, Marny gets a lot of appearances in official art, wallpapers and the like. This is probably due in no small part to his simple, yet very distinctive shape; the obvious implications of which in this universe have been acknowledged, as seen here◊.
  • Other cousins, such as Daisy, Dipp, Ichigo, June, Jungle, Kuro, Mag, Miso, and Velvet are very popular. Many of these popular cousins appeared in the cut-down roster of Touch My Katamari, while others got references in the altered costumes some of them wore — such as Juno, June wearing a version of Kuro's Sentai garb.
  • Even to fans of the older installments, one cousin who has remained consistently popular is the Princess from Beautiful Katamari, largely owing to her pleasant-looking design and her ambiguous relationship with the Prince.
• Fan Nickname: In some circles, the King's crotch — yes, really — has been nicknamed "The Bulge of All Cosmos".
• First Installment Wins: The original Katamari Damacy is by far the most well-known in the series. For the longest time, it was the only game in the series to be sold on the PlayStation Store, and it was originally the only game planned to get a modern-day remake. It was only after said remake sold so well that its immediate sequel was finally given a proper chance to shine with a remake of its own.
• Friendly Fandoms: There is some overlap between Katamari and Pikmin fans. Both feature tiny space-antenna-wearing protagonists with a world of bizarre designs and unconventional gameplay for their genres (Action and Real Time Strategy respectively). The two also have a major focus on space theming, and have a decent amount of crossover art together. The two are even both examples of smaller franchises from their respective companies that spent long periods of time without much attention from them, only to gain a resurgence within the Ninth Console generation.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In one of the most unusual examples of this occurring, the first game was only a modest success in its native Japan and failed to meet expectations. Those who worked on the game and the executives at Namco were positive that Americans would find the premise and presentation way too weird to enjoy. The exact opposite happened: it won the hearts of Americans everywhere and it found a lot more success there, and the series is far better known among that audience.
• Goddamn Bats: Cars. It requires a Katamari several times their size just to hit them without them smacking you around, and they can only be encountered in city areas, where your Katamari is likely big enough to make it tough to dodge one if it comes barreling towards you.
  • The ghosts during Night School in Royal Reverie. Simply touching one ends your run. You don't even have to absorb it into the katamari, just running into it ends the level.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The magazine Anime Insider had a section on Japanese video games, rating them on the basis that Japan should either "Export It" or "Keep It". One of the games reviewed as Katamari Damacy. It was given a "Keep It" rating, the reviewer considering the premise too strange for Western audiences, and doubted it would be well-received. Although, while it got an American release to positive critical and commercial reception for its premise and uniqueness alone, enough that it was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, it never got released in Europe for that exact reason.
  • We ♥ Katamari contains a stage where Dr. Katamari asks the player to roll up animals for him, which he wants to have as friends. This wouldn't be the last time that animals in a Zoo-like environment would specifically be called "friends".
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Beautiful Katamari was hated by the critics for this reason. There was also a lack of variety in the tasks you got with few Special Rules levels, and 100% completion is impossible unless you buy the DLC. In fairness though, the actual game is the same goofy fun as ever so it's perfectly fine for anyone who's never experienced the madness before, or for longtime fans who simply want more stages to play and explore.
  • The Cowbear Planet. It's essentially Make Taurus and Make Ursa Major all over again, with the same sorts of traps and small items that become impossible to see once you're over a certain size. And now two kinds of objects that aren't actually animals will count as goal items, making a good score that much harder. Being the two most reviled levels of the first game, a remix of the idea didn't fare much better with popularity. The only improvements are the lower overall size required for the largest creature that qualifies (a half-cow, half-bear) and the ability to quickly restart if you should mess up.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Even if it's accidental, the King is directly responsible for everything bad that happens in the series, yet the fans adore him for how delightfully bizarre a character he is. The King's father, on the other hand, is widely unpopular due to his neglectful treatment of the King and never giving him any respect, whereas the King is willing to give the Prince at least a modicum of respect.
• Nightmare Fuel: The King's punishments get progressively worse with each new game. In the original game, he just simply talks down to the prince, saying that he's disappointed in them while rain and thunder are surrounding them. In We ♥ Katamari, his silhouette looms over you, completely black on a blackened screen, with the disappointed fan sitting on his shoulder, and he rapidly fires lasers from his eyes, which fill the screen and can't be dodged. In Me & My Katamari, he ties the Prince up like a punching bag and begins beating him senseless. In Beautiful Katamari, he puts the Prince onto his pool table, and begins firing billiards at him. Finally, in Katamari Forever, he rains meteors down from the sky while he sits upon his throne.
• Nightmare Retardant: Possibly invoked in the above Game Over screens, as they have as many silly moments as they do nightmarish ones. In the first game over screen, for example, the King delivers an utterly scathing speech to the Prince... whilst practicing shadow puppetry.
• Polished Port: As with any Switch port worth its salt, the REROLL Switch ports are the same game as the other versions, but portable. It also fixes some of the more frustrating aspects of the games they port, mainly by giving you more time in levels that gave you too little.
• Quirky Work: One of the premier examples of Japanese weirdness out there. A game where you roll up everything you can in a giant ball is weird enough already, but the bizarre characters (especially the King of All Cosmos) and trippy imagery will probably make you go "WTF?!" at least once.
• The Scrappy: When Me & My Katamari first came out, Pokkle got a lot of flack from fans who didn't like how he didn't look like a 'normal' cousin.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Those who cruised through the first game with relatively minimal trouble are in for a massive wake-up call come We ♥ Katamari, which significantly tightens the time limits for all stages; suddenly, even getting the bare minimum requirement to finish each stage becomes a buzzer-beater affair in most cases, and getting the highest ratings is a task reserved only for those who have completely mastered the game. This would end up becoming the standard for all Katamari games using the original format going forward, including retroactively in the case of returning first-game levels in Katamari Forever.
• Squick: If the premise doesn't throw you off, managing to roll up both the King of All Cosmos and the Queen in the same katamari in the second game will warp your mind. He flat out admits that getting fresh with his wife inside the katamari was amazing for them. She also appears on the result screen, smiling and leaning in his arms.
• So Bad, It Was Better: The English voice acting of the original game was incredibly hokey and stilted, but considering how bizarre the series already is, many found it to add to the insane atmosphere. As such, when Katamari Damacy REROLL opted to stick to the original, more professional Japanese voice acting, fans found themselves disappointed that the goofy English acting didn't get to stick.
• Surprise Difficulty:
  • Yes, it's a brightly-colored, wacky game with an addictive J-pop soundtrack. Doesn't mean the game won't utterly humiliate you on a few levels. Sometimes just finishing a level, especially one with special requirements, can border on Luck-Based Mission.
  • It's easy to think you nailed a level only to be told by the King that your katamari is barely acceptable. It is possible to get him to praise it, but it can be surprising how tough it is to do so, even for one who can get a passing grade with what seems to be a good amount of time left.
  • Getting Shooting Stars requires beating the level within a certain amount of time, generally about half of the time given for the level. The game also doesn't tell you about them until you get one for the first time. So not only do you need to make the katamari as big as possible to get the best version of the star or planet you're making, you have to do it fast enough to qualify for a shooting star.
• That One Level:
  • "Ursa Major" and "Taurus" in the original game, and by extension, the COW♥BEAR level in the second. Anything related to bears/cows that you pick up finishes the level, and you want something large. However, it's easy to get anything from a "WARNING: BEARS" sign or a milk bottle to finish the game, and even easier to have a larger moving object knock you into small items. The worst part about these levels is that, in most cases, when you grow beyond a certain point, the very smallest items disappear completely to save processor time. But this does not happen for these particular levels. It is very possible to grow so large that the milk cartons you tried to avoid early on become so small you can no longer see them. Ordinarily they would exist no longer, but not here. It is very possible to grow large in an attempt to get the biggest cow, then run into a milk carton that is so small it now occupies a single pixel. At least the second game allows you to immediately restart the level, without having to listen to the King berate you for the small item like he did in the first. (The same cannot be said for the COW♥BEAR level in Katamari Forever, unfortunately.) As if that wasn't enough, Cowbear is also followed by two smaller Kintaro-Bears running in front of and behind it, which are very easy to roll into by accident. A commonly suggested strategy here is to first grow just big enough to knock over the smaller bears, but not catch them, and roll into them and wait for them to run away. Then you can keep on rolling around and getting big enough to catch Cowbear. And even if you carefully avoid everything and grow big enough, it's fully possible to run out of time...
  • The COW♥BEAR level gets kicked up to eleven in Katamari Forever's Drive Mode, to the point even the King himself questions your sanity when you begin the mode.
  • And at least picking up a tiny item passes the level; the same can't be said for the hot-cold level in Beautiful Katamari and Katamari Forever. You'll never look at a fire extinguisher the same way again.
    • For those who wonder, one level requires you to pick up hot stuff (hot meal, camp fire etc.) to accumulate 10000 degrees. The problem is picking up something cold (like an ice cream) your temperature drops immensely. And the cold items fell out from nowhere, usually directly on your path. And the bystanders will kick you into them. Oh, if you were thinking "take your time and plan out your path", your temperature is also constantly dropping (the higher it is, the faster it drops). Good luck.
    • Katamari Forever makes that level even worse, as everything is now in black and white, making it harder to pick out which objects are hot or cold. Oh, and the Broken Heart power ups become traps as they will draw everything towards you, including the cold items, and probably cause an instant game over. Have fun!
    • And than there’s drive mode, with its harder to steer controls added on top of the grayscale and broken heart traps. How bad is it? The King first asks if you signed a release form before he states that you are worthy of being the future King Of All Cosmos. According to the King, the player character is shaking by the time it ends. This Is Gonna Suck.
  • To make matters worse for those who are planning 100% Completion, several items (such as the infamous Cowbear) can only be found on these levels. As a few of these items are really quite large (again, such as the Cowbear), they are not easily obtained.
  • For an example not related to cows, bears, or temperature, "Make a Star 4" from the first game. You have ten minutes to go from five centimeters to a meter. Given the item distribution, that's not enough time.
    • Even worse: When it returns for Katamari Forever, that time gets cut in half.
    • Even more painfully, the "Drive" mode makes it so you only get THREE minutes, granted, with a speed exchange, but still, time crunching at the max.
    • And in the original game, if you want to unlock Eternal 1, you have to get the katamari to 1.3 meters!
  • "Make a Star 5" is a royal pain in the ass if you're going for the highest size rating. Most of the stage consists of navigating through extremely tight spaces packed full of moving objects that will knock you every which way like a pinball, likely jolting several objects loose from your katamari in the process. What pushes it over the edge, however, is the fact that, once your katamari starts to get close to the mark needed for the top rating, it becomes too big to navigate through most of the level. You'll have to make do scrounging up what little scraps you can in the area you can still fit in, and God help you if you find yourself in the all-too-likely scenario of getting wedged in the scenery; at that point, you might as well restart as you watch large chunks of your katamari shed off in order to break free. Once you finally manage to reach the goal, it'll only be by the skin of your teeth.
  • The Underwater Rolling stage from We ♥ Katamari places Katamari's gameplay Under the Sea, and the result goes about as well as you'd expect. Charge rolling, your typical go-to tactic for clearing levels quickly, becomes suicidal here due to the water physics, which not only treat even the slightest collision with the smallest unrollable object as if you got punted full-force by something massive, but charging off of even a mild slope too fast is bound to send you flying halfway across the map, wasting precious seconds as you float helplessly while gathering nothing. As if that wasn't enough, the stage is positively infested with fish hooks that will pull you up to the surface if you touch them. Not only do their tiny size combined with the immense visual clutter make them virtually impossible to spot if you aren't at a dead stop, but getting caught by one basically constitutes an automatic restart since breaking free takes too damn long. Despite all this, the size and time goals are not adjusted to accommodate for this: you're still expected to reach the same sizes and speeds as if you were rolling in a perfectly normal area. So how does one reach such goals when the most reliable tool in their arsenal becomes an active hazard? Good question - have fun figuring it out! And as one last massive middle finger sticking out of the rotten crab cake, one of the three possible starting points^*specifically, the one by the penguins watching TV exists solely as a covert developer troll, since not only is there nearly nothing worthwhile to roll up in the immediate area, but it's on literally the opposite side of the map from the best spot to roll in the early level. By the time you're done with this aquatic ordeal, the likes of Taurus and Ursa Major will seem like Breather Levels in comparison.
  • Royal Reverie introduces a bunch of these as Brutal Bonus Levels, but special mention goes to Night School, where The King is placed in the School level at night to find five instruments. Simply touching one of the ghosts that appear here ends the level. You don't even have to absorb it into the katamari for it to count; simply bouncing off one ends the run. Several of these ghosts move quickly and erratically, making navigation a nightmare and turning the stage into an out-of-nowhere forced stealth section.
• That One Sidequest: This game makes you sweat for your 100% item completion. Aside from the unique Cowbear objects, there's objects like the Picture-Story Show and Bird Nest that require you to roll up nearly every other object in the stage to be big enough to grab it (and with the bird nest, get big enough within the starting area to grab it, and then you still have to move on and hit your target size,) as well as certain unique objects like the Gold Medal and different colors of crayon that only appear in specific stages, and can disappear if your katamari gets too big.
  • Rolling up a million roses in We ♥ Katamari is a task in pure tedium. How much tedium, you ask? This is an exercise that will take the average player weeks, if not months, to complete. The game even lampshades it, with the King wincing at the thought of how long it'll take.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Take Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, FLCL and Excel♡Saga and distill them into a drug form. You could probably call the result "This Is Your Drug on Games".
• Tough Act to Follow: We ♥ Katamari was such a huge hit with the fanbase, that every game after would be compared to it, and usually found wanting in some regard.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The countries you roll up and their flags during the credits of Katamari Damacy are based on what was accurate in 2004. Notably, REROLL doesn't update this sequence, so countries like South Sudan are missing, countries like Serbia and Montenegro are present, and other countries like Libya still have their old flags.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Figuring out some of the cousins' gender can be difficult, especially without reading the King's profiles. This definitely isn't helped by the fact all the cousins can equip all the Presents, including ones that one would normally associate with only one gender.
  • The sparkly cousin Dipp is particularly prone to this, for some reason.
  • Pu is one of the many cousins that mostly looks like the Prince with a slight difference, but unlike the others is female.
  • Beyond is sometimes mistaken for female because of his pink color.
• The Woobie:
  • The Prince for having to put up with his father's poor parenting and passing the buck.
  • The constantly ill Opeo, who has it so bad that in Touch My Katamari, he had to deal with a hole right through his chest. Again.
  • The RoboKing, fully aware that he's a Replacement Goldfish and hating every moment of it.
  • The King himself in the second game, you thought his parenting was bad? Get a load of HIS dad!
• Woolseyism: Believe it or not, the ridiculous dialogue is completely intentional (and in some cases, an accurate and direct translation of the idiosyncratic diction used in the original game). In the few cases where it is significantly altered, it's replacing a joke that only makes sense in Japanese with a similar one in the translated language.

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