For every drooling, mind-numbed Japanophile this is a slice of heaven. For everyone else, it's eye-cancer.
… Ahem.
Team Ico. I love Team Ico. Team Ico seems dedicated to making games that are unique both in design and experience. They, like me, adore innovation and pushing the boundaries of what we know as gaming. Why, I think there needs to be more people making games like Team Ico.
Just so long as they're not making games like "Beautiful Katamari". I actually think this is a game all game developers should play. While the rest of the gaming community can happily ignore this, I think developers should all be forced to suffer this. "Beautiful Katamari" is a great example of a good idea and a dream gone bad. This is what we call failure at innovation. Not a miss-step in innovation like "Mirror's Edge" but a true failure when trying to do something important in the industry.
The Katamari game series is one straight out of Japan and usually this is a positive sign. Japan makes a lot of good games and there's so much about this from the style to the idea that is very Japanese. For most people this will either annoy you a whole lot or just slip under the radar. Japanophiles, on the other hand, will adore it. They'll love this true slice of Japanese culture with all its bright colours and its J-Pop music. I'm sorry to say that these are actually the best features the game has to offer.
"Beautiful Katamari" is really a casual gamer's game. That, in a way, puts it at a disadvantage right away but I don't see how this game could be popular even with casual gamers. I'd even suspect they hate it more than me and my seasoned gaming abilities.
The plot, if it can be called such, is some cute story about the King of The Universe f**king things up for everyone and leaving the prince to fix it for him. Your standard Katamari experience. Your goal is to go around Earth with a little ball and roll it over random objects to make a bigger ball of junk and then your father, King of The Universe, will tell you what a failure you are and how ashamed he is of his son and then throw the ball into the night sky and make you do it all over again.
So far so good. We've got a funky soundtrack, we've got a neat game idea, we've got an adorable cartoon visual style. I should love all this creativity, right? Right? RIGHT!?
Let me tell you something. Let me explain to you the problem here. This game has the worst controls in the world. I can't even begin to comprehend how you screw up controls this bad. The game is so simple and they did it so wrong. Let me keep this simple: Left stick, move. Right stick, camera. There's nothing difficult about that. There are 12 other buttons you can use for turbo charges and jumping and changing direction. You do not need the analogue sticks for anything other than camera and simple movement.
Katamari forgets just how much you can do with all those buttons and gives you the most awkward controls in the universe for moving your katamari in TWO DIMENSIONS. If this ball was flying and you had three dimensions to move in, then okay. Hell, if this was some string theory, brain melting ball that moved in four dimensions I could understand experimenting a little. But you roll the ball in this game. There's only four directions it can move and it doesn't need to be as difficult as it is.
To make matters worse, each level has a time limit to roll over objects of an increasing size but you're never sure what size you can actually pick up. One pen might be fine but one pen that looks exactly the same might be too big and you'll just get caught on it, forced to try and work out how you reverse with your magic ball. So when you finally think you've got control, everything goes to hell and you panic because you've just wasted ten seconds of your thirty second time limit to roll over every building in Tokyo.
Beautiful Katamari could have been a great casual game and an enjoyable distracting for gamers across the world. As it stands, you apparently need to be born into a true ninja blood line and spend your years in the hidden temples of the Japanese mountain ranges before you can learn how to actually play this game. Unfortunately, I'm just a pathetic white man who occasionally eats sushi and likes Utada Hikaru's dance remix of "Fly Me To The Moon. So if you are a master of the ancient Katamari arts, then go for your life.
On the other hand, if you're looking for some simple pleasures in life before you need to go do something productive with your time, I hear some game disks make good Frisbees.