It was back in 2004 that "Katamari Damacy," a no-budget PS2 title from Namco, stole the hearts of gamers and Japanophiles everywhere with its innovative concept and infectiously offbeat attitude. After five years and almost as many installments in the series, "Katamari Forever" has just rolled in from Japan, and boy is its franchise tired.
I'll get right to it: "Katamari Forever," a PS3 exclusive, is a sequel of the worst kind; one that rehashes existing levels and objectives and adds a handful of new ones, then gives the whole product a fresh dusting of "new game!" before shipping it off to retailers and pocketing the savings from low development costs (as a last-ditch grab at the unconvinced, "Katamari Forever" carries a suggested retail price of $49.99).
But for whatever it's worth, the bubbly aesthetic of previous titles is back, as is the suitably goofy storyline that I am not foolhardy enough to try and explain (just know that it involves an amnesiac king and his passive-aggressive robot doppelganger). Mercifully, gameplay is as straightforward as ever: you control a tiny prince who pushes a giant adhesive ball (called a "katamari"), rolling up progressively larger objects (everything from radio batteries to the Pyramids of Giza) to make your katamari as large as possible within a given time limit.
Fans of the franchise should have no trouble getting back into the action and racking up stupefying scores, if only because they have probably committed many of these levels to memory in previous, more interesting Katamari games ("Katamari Forever" recycles about half of them). "Katamari Forever" adds the ability to jump with a flick of the controller or a button press, which is useful if you get stuck, but not a meaningful change to what is otherwise business as usual.
In fact, "meaningful change" doesn't seem to be in developer Namco Bandai's lexicon, as the game is rife with clumsy design choices. Single-player mode is infuriatingly difficult. It took numerous retries to amass even a passing score, let alone a score that I wasn't made to feel ashamed of by the surly Robo-King. In an effort to please longtime vets, Namco Bandai have effectively alienated everybody else.
"Katamari Forever" also nixes the online functionality of "Beautiful Katamari" for no apparent reason, crippling its party potential when it should have been a saving grace from single-player mode's absurd difficulty. The game requires all the horsepower of an up-rezzed PS2 title, yet suffers from dipping frame rates and frequent popping issues. "Katamari" never needed blockbuster graphics to be fun, but this should not be an issue in 2009.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing of all, the game uses being a celebration of the series' history (its Japanese title roughly translates to "Katamari Tribute") as an excuse not to innovate, when innovation was the reason we fell in love with the series in the first place.
The game's quirky humor still elicits an occasional smile, and rolling up your tiny katamari to eventually be the size of a small planet is still satisfying, but who is this game for: series vets who have played it already, or newcomers who are told they aren't good enough? "Katamari Forever" isn't a celebration, it is a lazy, stagnant game that won't turn heads, and doesn't feel fresh or new at all; in short, it's everything we never wanted Katamari to become.
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