The King of All Cosmos, infamous for his continuous talk of himself and our protagonist in the second-person, is back and offbeat as ever. Katamari Forever pushes the knob up even higher by offering not one, but two Kings for your enjoyment. We are quite moved to tears by the insanity of it. The charm of the series has returned and offers even more inexplicable gameplay than before, giving us another just-for-fun and family friendly Playstation 3 exclusive. To newcomers to the series I will spell out the cardinal rule of the Katamari series; nothing will ever, ever make sense. It's not supposed to, so just go with it. Laugh at any random little thing you want, since there's no time where it would be inappropriate to laugh. Also, keep in mind that since the game is originally Japanese that a lot of the story "animations" and items you'll be rolling up won't be familiar to an American audience... but this doesn't at all subtract from the fun.
It seems the King has lost his memory after being stuck by an asteroid during a jumping contest, forcing The Prince and his Cousins to create a robot King to keep order of the universe and create new stars. Further details are not important, but it brings us to the "gimmick" of this game and what gives it its depth-- besides there being plenty of new ball-rolling quests to undertake, you'll be revisiting a lot of the classics we've already seen (mostly from 'We Love Katamari'). Naturally, recycled content can only count so much, but it's rewarding and fun to play them all over again now with high definition graphics and a storyline even sillier than last time.
Well then, time to get being your infinitely-sticky katamari and roll up the galaxy once more, one room at a time. The game controls remain wonderfully simple and precise, with all game control done with the two analog sticks. Turns, spins, etc... all of it is done without having to push a button, and the game even makes use of the L3 and R3 buttons as one of your special moves. One new feature here is the "Prince Hop" jump which comes from the motion sensing of the Dualshock 3 controller. It can be kind of awkward and requires one to be sitting up perfectly straight to pull off, but there don't really seem to be any times during the game where you're forced to use it. Consider it just an optional bonus wacky game feature.
Just in case your eyeballs weren't already popped open and fixated on the blob of items before you, there are some beautiful new artistic touches added. The tried-and-true "old" graphics are gone-- not the modeling, but the coloring and shading. "Watercolor" and "Sketchbook" are good words to describe the environment you'll find to start. In case these don't quite sit well with you, there is an option you can unlock that changes the style to your choosing... including the original coloring and filter you're accustomed to. One quite clever graphical gimmick is that when 'recreating' a katamari from the past to return the King's memories, the level will start out as little more than a black and white fuzz outline of the environment. Quite literally, you're digging around his memory and fixing it. As you roll over objects and get larger, more and more comes out in color.
As is tradition for the series, the soundtrack is top-notch ...in its wildly quirky style, mind you. A lot of the songs are remixes of things we've heard before, but it sounds fresh nonetheless and never gets dull no matter how many times you might repeat a level. Just in case you're sick of a default music, you're free to change the track before you start your next adventure. Along the same lines as the music never getting dull, the levels won't wear your out and you'll likely be repeating levels several times in order to get better results and try to drag out even a few words of praise from the King or Robot King. Besides just the normal size and time results from the past, you're now given a letter grade mark as well as a score on a scale of 1 to 100. Getting top ranks over 80 can be quite challenging, so try to look past how depressed and sad the Robot King gets when things don't go quite right and keep trying. Replay value is, thus, excellent.
Of the few critiques I might give is a lack of online play. There are leaderboards for results of the normal missions and there are 2-player game modes, but nothing you can do with a distant friend or random player. Since this is far from a competitive game once can forgive Namco for not wanting to pit players against one another competitively, but the option for it still would have been nice. Besides that, I really don't know what the game could do to warrant a 5-star rating... but there is only so much a game like this can do. It will never be an epic multi-million pop culture title like Action and Role Playing games can, but then again this is never supposed to be. Why try to fix what isn't broken? This is both the basis for fun and the crutch of the Katamari series.
What are you waiting for? Get rolling! We eagerly await your results. Though far from a deep and complex puzzle game, Katamari Forever will give a great 'smiles per dollar' rating on the purchase price and is the type of game absolutely anyone can pick up and enjoy just like the other games in the series. Very few other games can manage to appeal to all ages and audiences like 'Katamari' can.
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