Katamari Damacy REROLL

It's a fun concept, but most of the "challenge" comes from the unnecessarily clunky controls and camera movement, which becomes frustrating. Katamari may have done it first, but Wonderful End of the World did it better imho.

[h2]Probably one of the most unique games out there, in general![/h2] Okay so, uh... Assuming you've never seen this game before. Have you ever seen those generic [i]"fish eat smaller fish to grow bigger and eat bigger fish"[/i]-type games? The ones you can see all over mobile app stores and the like? Think that, but the original iteration of that idea from back on PS2, in full 3D, achieving some crazy technical feats for its era just having it [i]function[/i] at all on a platform like that. [b]Katamari Damacy[/b] is basically that concept taken to its logical extreme, in the form of a sticky rubber ball, with a ton of japanese humor thrown in. And the controls are as esoteric as you could get for a game like this. To sum it up! You play this game exclusively with the two analog sticks. [b]Don't bother playing on keyboard, it's borderline unplayable. Get a controller if you don't have one because this game pretty much REQUIRES two analog sticks as your main and only means of player control.[/b] You do use buttons in like menus and such obviously, but in-game? Left and right stick only. Each stick controls one of your hands, left and right respectively. You push up with both sticks to move the ball forwards, down to move it backwards, in the same direction to roll it sideways. And if you want to turn? You use logic. You roll up with one "hand" and down with the other, which gradually turns you around, and can be smoothly weaved into your forward movement. The turning especially is important to get used to, as you can adjust how much and how fast you're turning depending on how much of a vertical difference there is between the two sticks' positions. If you want to do a quick 180 turn, you click in both sticks (L3+R3), and you can also mash the sticks up and down to charge up a really fast boost forward, which is dangerous to use but can be really good for going up steep terrain. That's the basis of the controls! So once you get the hang of it (please, for your own good, take some time to practice them in the tutorial, it's there for a reason), you're just let loose in a plethora of different levels, with different size goals (or gimmicks like picking up specific types of items in some levels) that you have to reach before time runs out, by rolling over things to stick 'em to your ball and make it slowly grow in size to let you grab bigger and bigger things. Hitting things too hard or getting run over by creatures bigger than you can make you lose size as things get broken loose from your ball too, so you gotta be careful about that. Now, I love this game overall, but I [i]do[/i] still have to say this... The gameplay is pretty janky. The controls are clunky and take a while to get used to. The physics are jerky and inconsistent and love to have you getting stuck in places and losing stuff from your ball as you jitter in place against collision in weird ways. The game is hard-locked at 30FPS because it was programmed by actual apes in a time where deltatime implementations were already well into becoming standard, and the choppy framerate doesn't help the already-janky game feel either. So it's a bit of an acquired taste. You have to go into it understanding that. That said, it's not a very hard game to beat, thankfully! You can cruise through it pretty easily once you get the hang of the controls if you're willing to put up with a bit of jank. And [b]EVERYTHING ELSE IS SO INCREDIBLY GOOD[/b] that I think it MORE than makes up for it. There's a lot of other janky games that I can't [i]at all[/i] say the same for. The artstyle is really like nothing else out there. It's got this weird, flat style, mixing really simplistic, geometric 3D models (I imagine partially so the PS2 wouldn't explode rendering 5000 models at once), extremely stylized to hell and back, mixed with random hand-drawn 2D elements wherever they see fit. And the presentation really loves to just JUMP at you, you can see it in the screenshots already with stuff like that little display of the Prince in the bottom corner. And it's full of detail too! There's cute little details for everything, there's tons of visual gags on every level with the way they lay down the props and items that you pick up, you can even see the little Prince model in the corner donning scuba gear whenever you go underwater. There's an entire item collection with like 1400+ entries for everything in the game that you can pick up, and EVERY SINGLE ENTRY has some dumb description tied to it, translated to every language. [i]Do you have any idea how much unnecessary work that must've been???[/i] And the music, dude. The [b]music[/b]. It's SO good. It almost makes the game worth playing JUST to listen to it, it's that good. The vocals, the choirs, the trumpets, the variety in styles, the jazzy vibes in a lot of the songs, the super catchy melodies. I don't think there's a SINGLE song in the game I dislike beyond maybe that one pretty annoying one with the child choir vocals but even then, I mellowed out on it after long enough. [b]Anyway![/b] This game is relatively short and you can beat it in like... what, 4-5 hours maybe? If you're just rushing through it. It's not very challenging either if you're just going for beating the story (the biggest challenge comes from completion and gathering all the different collectibles, and those [b]horrible[/b] [spoiler]cow and bear[/spoiler] levels that are made entirely as a dickmove to the player). But it's one HELL of an experience, it's worth playing through at least once and adjusting to the controls just so you can experience the insane combination of music and visuals and dumb Japanese humor that makes up the game. I'm pretty sure it goes on sale often, too? So wait for one of those, but DEFINITELY try this game. It's worth playing through at least once.

Roll stuff up and make ball bigger :]

Nice game, good music, a true classic.

good game with good music !

Can't control the camera and the FOV is garbage, can't see a damn thing. You might as well play this game blindfolded.

nostalgic and makes me want to cry sometimes but i'd cry even harder if they'd just port the older games to PC that would be quite swell