I've always felt a sense of ownership and stewardship with regard to the Katamari franchise because I've been here from literally day one. I bought the original Katamari Damacy for PS2 at GameStop on launch day. Back then, most people didn't know it even existed. My GameStop only ordered two copies and zero people preordered it, in fact. But I knew it was going to be special and got in on day one. And, of course, I told anyone that would listen how great it was. Honestly, that first Katamari Damacy is still my favorite. It has the best music and was so irresistibly fresh and innovative at the time.
All of the games after the original have felt like half-hearted copies to me, like they didn't understand why it was charming and fun in the first place. The music hasn't ever been as good or as memorable, and I have to say I don't care about the story and the antics of the King of All Cosmos at all. At. Freaking. All. All of the Katamari sequels have put so much emphasis on the zany kooky quirky King and all of the dumb ass cousins and I honestly hate all of that stuff. Just shut up and let me roll a tiny pile of garbage around until it's a huge pile of garbage. Straight up, I skipped all of the cutscenes in Once Upon a Katamari because I just don't care. I have absolutely no regrets.
I also have to say that my favorite aspect of the Katamari franchise has always been those levels where you start small and end up rolling up the whole planet. The sense of scale was incredible and I loved it. Once Upon a Katamari's versions of these levels are a bit disappointing, unfortunately. You never feel that exponential growth here and instead the levels are actually sort of small and claustrophobic. Like, you're 1000+ meters, but somehow still never quite feel "big" like in past games.
What Once Upon a Katamari succeeds at, however, is making all of the rest of the levels more worthwhile. I used to just blast through all of the levels once each and then did the "as big as possible" levels a few times and then I was done with the game. There just wasn't much replay value for me outside of the start small and get big gimmick. Once Upon a Katamari fixes that with the simple addition of collectibles. No, not the customization items and dumb ass cousins that I don't care about (but did get all of them), but instead there are now three crowns to find in each level. Admittedly, if all of the achievements/trophies weren't tied to finding all of the crowns I probably wouldn't have cared, but now that some sweet Gamerscore is at stake I'm finding myself going back into levels over and over and over to figure out where the crowns are, but also learning how to get big enough fast enough to actually collect them before I run out of time.
That's huge. That's a game changer. No longer am I one and done with all of the levels. Now I'm actually engaging with the various level themes and figuring out the puzzles and really learning optimal paths and strategies that I never bothered with before. I'm genuinely having more fun with Once Upon a Katamari than any of the past games.
I will say one complaint I have here is that the controls feel slightly off somehow. You violently bounce off of stuff you should be able to pick up or at least climb over way too often here. I guess the scaling is more granular and seemingly smaller differences in size have a bigger impact on what you can roll up than before, but it wasn't a necessary or positive change I feel. And I've also fallen though solid objects and couldn't move and had to restart levels several times as well, which is something that literally never ever happened to me in past games.
For the most part, the rest of Once Upon a Katamari is a definite improvement. The levels are absolutely crammed with stuff to roll up and much more densely packed than ever before. It is incredibly undeniably satisfying and fun.
All in all, Once Upon a Katamari is a great entry in the series and might just be the best yet even if I still personally prefer the music and grand scale levels of the original a bit more. Once Upon is definitely the best looking, most densely packed with stuff, and most replayable game in the series and is easily worth the $40 asking price. Definitely give it a look.
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