There has truly never been a game quite like the strange and wonderful Katamari Damacy. To merely say that the game's design is "original" seems an understatement of epic proportions--every aspect of this delightfully oddball title is saturated with surreal style. The gameplay mechanics aren't necessarily all that remarkable, requiring you to use the dual analog sticks to guide your burgeoning katamari through the perils of suburbia and beyond. But it's the nuances of those controls and the environments in which you ply them that begin to bring out the unique nature of the game. The world becomes a Zen garden, only instead of manipulating foliage and rocks, you'll instead deal with meticulous rows of common household items, be they perfectly scattered buttons, carefully stacked erasers, or the precise arrangement of parsley on a nearby plate. The game's visuals are quite simple, but nothing about the design of the game feels cheap or out of place. The look of Katamari Damacy doesn't exactly tax the PlayStation 2's hardware, but with the angular characters and objects and your ever-rolling ball, everything you see becomes part of a distinct, complementary whole.

Katamari Damacy's originality finds expression in the themed soundtrack and all its incredible different pieces of music, in the charm of the stylized visuals, and in the bizarre, often patronizing, and yet always fascinating ramblings of the majestic King of All Cosmos. The deceptive simplicity of its design, the organic flow of the levels as you slowly build your katamari, and the sheer joy conveyed by gathering up all the items of the world into one gigantic orb of existence make this bizarre title singularly great, and singularly satisfying. There's even a sequel in the works, but for us, the original game will remain one of the most memorable highlights of 2004.