Beautiful Katamari's wacky and addictive gameplay shines through the game's stubby core.
In Beautiful Katamari you play as a green horizontal tube shaped headed fella named Prince. Prince has a lot of pressure on his shoulders. You see, he is in charge of fixing the universe. King, who is supposedly the ruler of the universe, was actually responsible for ruining the universe in the first place. In a game of tennis, he hit the ball so hard, that he knocked a black hole in the sky. Sucking up everything in the universe. To rebuild the galaxy Prince must go and roll up the things necessary to rebuild the planets, moon, and sun. Failure to do so will result in eternal punishment on a pool table. You'll see what I'm talking about when you die. And you will die. Beautiful Katamari is a very challenging games. Especially if you're a Katamari rolling rookie. The Katamari ball is capable of picking up anything in the universe, but not all at once. You'll have to start out picking up small items such as candy pieces, mice, bugs, etc. But as your Katamari grows bigger you'll be able to roll across new areas of the stages and pick up bigger things such as humans, houses, dinosaurs, etc. Your goal is to get the Katamari to a certain size in a limited amount of time. Doing so will mean you have accomplished your task. However, if you want to impress King you will need to grab specific items. For example, when playing a stage where king tells you to collect cold items to rebuild the planet Pluto (which is now a planetoid by the way), how many cold items you get will reflect on your total score. Not every stage makes you roll up the Katamari to just a certain size. For example, when rebuilding Mars you must continually roll over hot items until your Katamari reaches a blistering temperature. Bulldozing over hundreds and hundreds of the game's items is a lot of fun. It's pretty simplistic but also very addicting and challenging. Now to share some of my gripes with the gameplay. The controls are pretty tough to get used to. Both analog sticks are a necessity for rolling the Katamari around. You have to tilt both sticks in the direction you want to move. But the left analog stick is also the stick that controls the camera. It makes backing up with the Katamari very slow, and makes for an aggravating camera as well. Another thing that really annoyed me is how the Katamari gets stuck a lot. It understandable at times when you try and squeeze through a tiny area with an enormous Katamari. But sometimes it gets stuck for no apparent reason. It rarely happens, but can be potentially deadly to your mission.
Beautiful Katamari is a very sharp looking game. There are better looking games on the 360, but few with such colorful, animated style. The sound effects are very good. When rolling up items you hear a nice little popping sound. Kinda like when you suck in your cheeks and beat on them with your index finger... The game's soundtrack is primarily Japanese pop. I wouldn't go as far to say that the game's music is great. But the songs fit the game very well. I can only think of one track that I didn't really like. And it was one that sounded like a 3 year old Japanese toddler talking over a bunch of pop arranged instrumentals. Beautiful Katamari suffers in value. The single player campaign is short, but should take up a little bit of time due to the game's difficulty. The game does have Xbox Live, but I won't be able to provide any info on that, since I do not have Xbox Live. There is a co-op mode to go along with the rather short single player campaign. But the co-op mode has nothing to do with the single player campaign. All you can do in co-op is beat three levels with a buddy. Battle mode is another multi player mode. There are a good bit of unlockables, but nothing very special. Mainly just other characters and costume attachments for them. So while the game is short, it's also sweet. It may be the same game for the fourth time, but for those of you that haven't played it, treat yourself to this game and enjoy. Everyone else who is familiar with the series may not have much to get excited about.