How much of an introduction do you really need to Katamari Damacy? Despite its utterly bizarre premise, the actual core of the game — rolling up everything you see into a big ball — couldn’t be simpler, and perhaps because of that, it’s become one of the strangest games ever to reach such massive mainstream success. Now, PlayStation Plus is adding another way to play this offbeat classic with your subscription.
We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie is a remaster of the second game in the Katamari series, with the addition of a new mode that sees you playing as the King of All Cosmos, rather than the usual star of the series, the Prince. Okay, maybe a little introduction is in order after all. Like the rest of the series, We Love Katamari Reroll begins with the King of All Cosmos ordering his son to create new stars out of random junk he finds on Earth. That’s just how it works, don’t ask how. At first, you can only roll up the tiniest objects you find, but as you do, the ball gets bigger and thus able to collect even larger objects, like a snowball rolled along the ground gradually collects more and more snow.
The original Katamari Damacy sticks to that formula pretty rigidly, with levels varying mostly by the objects you’re meant to pick up and where they’re set. The layout of levels gets more difficult to traverse, making it harder to reach the size of ball you need within each level’s time limit as the game goes on. We Love Katamari Reroll approaches its challenges with a lot more imagination. Instead of just deriving difficulty from how you navigate the environment, it adds additional objectives that make it a much more varied game than the original.
Where collecting objects at speed was your objective in the original Katamari Damacy, its sequel adds a bit more strategy, with levels that specify exactly what you need to collect or add other bizarre modifiers. In one, your ball is replaced with a sumo wrestler trying to gain weight before a match, so you need to collect as much food as possible while avoiding other objects. In another level, you move around a racetrack at a much higher speed than normal trying to absorb the other racers. One of the trickiest levels adds the challenge of keeping a fire on the ball lit, meaning you can’t touch water and need to stay on the move or the fire will go out.
We Love Katamari adds vignettes of the early life of the King of All Cosmos between some levels, and Royal Reverie builds on both that and the greater challenge of the base game. In this version, a handful of stages are added where you control not the Prince, but the King himself as a child. As conceptually cool as that addition is, the downside is that the Royal Reverie stages are probably the least well received part of the game. Most of the new stages are actually just tougher variants of levels that were already in the base game, making this set of stages feel more like a hard mode than a genuine new chapter.
Still, even if the Royal Reverie stages aren’t your thing, We Love Katamari Reroll is a fantastic addition to PlayStation Plus. The updates between Katamari Damacy and its sequel make We Love Katamari probably the best game in the series to begin with, and the remaster adds a handful of quality of life improvements to make it even better. Along with the enhanced visual style, you can also enable an option that makes the game look more like the PS2 original if you prefer the old-school style. Despite how well known Katamari Damacy is, many players haven’t explored the rest of the series to see how good it really gets. If that describes you — or you were just waiting for a good reason to return for another round — its addition to PS Plus makes it easier than ever to check out We Love Katamari Reroll.
