2025-12-12

Once Upon A Katamari

I love Katamari Katamari Katamari Katamari Katamari fun roll roll roll na na na na na na na Once Upon A Katamari fun fun roll game roll Katamari around good music fun fun fun Katamari Katamari Katamari Katamari fun game fun fun good game funny king funny cousins funny prince funny things go boing bing bing na na na na na

Basically this game stops you from progressing if you haven’t gotten enough crowns, and there’s 3 crowns to find per level. It’s kinda stupid to gate progress like that, but also it’s kinda nice to have a game that knows it’s a collect-a-thon. Once Upon A Katamari has a whole lot of stuff, I feel like I’ve only played half the levels by the end of the game.

All of the levels have been great, too. Unfortunately, none stand out as very memorable locations, but the level design is fantastic. I was initially disappointed the game didn’t have the wide open spaces we got in Beautiful Katamari, but the levels are properly sized here. Powerups are never infrequent, but never too powerful. Chains of items are placed well, camouflaged platforming challenges are often around the corner. There’s some parts later in the game where sense of scale really popped. Loading screens do still separate size transitions, which I thought would be streamed in, as things usually are in current year. It would’ve been nice to see that technical limitation get erased for a new entry.

I won’t be mad though, since the game looks and performs great. Playing on Steam Deck is great, pushing the graphics to high introduces some slowdown which feels exactly like the PS2 games. It’s funny that my revisiting PS2 hardware this year has made me nostalgic for when games didn’t run at locked 120fps. Still, you don’t need good graphics in a game like this, the low-poly models and flat lighting makes everything perfectly visible. I am very very glad this style has not changed since the first game.

Honestly this may be the least flawed Katamari game in the series. The physics feel a little different, but I just played a little more carefully and rarely got stuck. Between all the completion tracking, and the soundtrack DLCs, I might be happy with this being the last new Katamari for the next 13 years. But I would prefer to have them more frequently than that.

Score: 3/3. On par with the best of the series, it’s really really really good. Play it!