Beautiful Katamari
Developer/Publisher: Namco Bandai
Reviewed Platform: XBox 360
Release Date: October 16th, 2007
Posted: April 1, 2008
With the announcement of a new Katamari game, who could not get excited? However, the first red flag that any gamer with an affinity for the series should have noticed was its release for the XBox360. When I think of the gaming audience who would own an XBox360, I do not come up with quirky Japanese game fans. Perhaps that was exactly what Namco was going for with this release: a way to bring that alternative gaming audience over to their platform. After all, it is all about money in the end. However, how this third installment in the series, Beautiful Katamari, could manage to make any money is beyond me.
The King of the CosmosThe Katamari series is a group of three games: Katamari Damacy, We <3 Katamari, and now Beautiful Katamari. The basis of each game is that your father, the King of the Cosmos, had somehow managed to destroy all of the stars in the universe, and it is the player’s job as the Prince to clean up after his mess. In order to do this, the player controls the Prince who rolls a large ball, or Katamari, around to collect everything and anything, only to turn the mass of jumbled items into a replacement star or planet. Generally, the levels begin in small areas with tiny items like paper clips, coins, and frightened mice. From there, the Katamari grows, allowing the player to pick up larger and larger items; eventually this includes continents, and even planets! The concept, no matter how incredibly simple it may be, is remarkably fun and addictive.
Following in the footsteps of Katamari Damacy and We <3 Katamari, besides the obvious awkward design of the XBox360 controller, the actual controls featured no noticeable changes. And, unfortunately, between this and the second game, neither did any of the basic environments. Everything was rather disturbingly familiar, yet it still managed to lose game play value. Each level had the same completion requirement: a certain size in a certain time limit, and every level was based within the same small playable area. At least in We <3 Katamari there were specialized levels; such as “feed the sumo wrestler”, “collect all of the sweets”, and the ever-so-annoying “campfire level.” Beautiful Katamari has a severe lack of objectives and levels. While there was an addition of a point rating
The player controls the Prince who rolls a large ball, or Katamari, around to collect everything and anything. system for each Katamari the player makes, it has no real affect on the game, and only manages to make the player feel like a complete moron for doing so poorly.
Of course my review consists only of the content available on the original game disc itself. What happened to the good-old days where when you purchase a new game all of the content for that game was actually available on that disc? Through XBox Live players are able to purchase additional levels that are no doubt just as boring and uninviting as the others, only you get to pay extra for them instead!
This is just another sequel game meant to draw out the series and make some more money, no wonder it did end up on the XBox360 then.
TLDR: Complete the “one million roses” objective in We <3 Katamari; it will be a hell of a lot more fun.
