You Must Love Katamari Damacy

1up.com has a feature up discussing their deep and abiding love for Katamari Damacy and its sequel. From the article: "The original Katamari Damacy is to many the best example of innovation the game industry has seen in years. It's not easy to define, it doesn't use traditional game mechanics, and it's a game where the music and the feeling of playing are as important as the objective. You roll a ball around, it picks stuff up as you go, and it's a swell time. But to hear game director Keita Takahashi describe it, the concept of "fun" comes before 'innovation.'"

Comments

Okay Slashdot!

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

I've heard enough stories about this game. I'LL BUY IT. Just PLEASE stop posting about it for heaven's sake.

On a somewhat similar note, does anyone know how to pronounce this game? Katamari isn't too bad, but is Damacy pronounced "Dama-chee" or "Dama-see"? I don't want to look stupid when I go into the store to buy it.

Fun

[ZephyrXero]

Fun should always be the number one priority in a video game, but most people seem to forget that these days... Everyone's too obsessed with graphics and celebrity voice overs to remember that gameplay and fun come first. I'm happy Katamari ever got any press at all in the first place :) This new one looks very intersting (again)...

Re:Fun

[rohlfinator]

This might not be the case, but I would assume that if the game is based on a "fun" idea, it should be relatively easy to fix once the team realizes that it's not fun. Whether it needs a change in control, a different level of difficulty, some revamped missions, those should all be pretty easy to spot and modify before release.

On the other hand, if the game's premise was already horribly flawed to begin with, someone should have caught that before they started writing the game. I'm not a game developer, but from what I understand, they usually outline the game very specifically in some kind of design document. If a game idea inherently sucks, you'd hope that someone on the team has the brains to figure that out from the beginning.

But for the most part, game ideas are pretty good. It's the execution that tends to break down. The controls are shaky, the camera is glitched, there's a huge fetch-quest mission that nobody wants to play. Those can all be ironed out later in the development process. Like Shigeru Miyamoto once said, "A delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is bad forever."

Couldn't agree more

[LKM]

I couldn't agree more. It's almost as if a bunch of breathless PS2 fanboys who finally found an innovative game were beating it to death by posting daily stories about it to Slashdot.

The quote from the article is telling:

"The original Katamari Damacy is to many the best example of innovation the game industry has seen in years"

What, did they miss Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Wario Ware, Electroplankton, Nintendogs, Killer 7 and countless other examples of innovative games that just happened to not (or not yet) run on the PS2?

Why didn't we see daily updates when Pikmin 2 came out? Why don't we see daily updates about Animal Crossing DS, which is certainly at least as interesting as Katamari Damacy 2?

Or maybe I should stop complaining and write some news stories :-)

Re:Couldn't agree more

[rohlfinator]

The only similarity between Animal Crossing and a typical RPG is the camera angle. I don't know if I'd call the game as a whole innovative, but it has a lot of clever ideas. It's definitely not an RPG, though.
And while Nintendogs may be the spiritual successor to Dogz, it's only the fifth game to receive a perfect score from Famitsu, one of Japan's harshest and most respected publishers. It's implementation of voice recognition, touch screen interaction, and wireless interaction make it the one of the most innovative games in recent years, and a huge leap over previous "virtual pet" games.
I can't speak for Killer 7, but I've heard from several people that it's a very interesting game. You assume that its cel-shading is the only form of innovation it contains, and from what people have told me, that's just the beginning.

It sounds to me like you haven't played any of these games you're so quick to dismiss. Any one of them looks pretty average in screenshots, but innovation doesn't always jump out of every scene like it does in Katamari.

And I agree with the GP about Katamari's "overratedness". It's a very fresh and interesting game, but it's gotten a ridiculous amount of media attention while other similarly innovative games have gone completely overlooked. The game's distinctly unique style may have contributed to media perception, but I think its "innovation" has been exaggerated a bit, especially now that its sequel is using a nearly identical formula.

Re:Couldn't agree more

[LKM]

I agree with you about all the games you mentioned, but disagree about Katamari Damacy.

Just do clarify: I have nothing against Katamari Damacy. It's an awesome game. But claiming it's "the best example of innovation the game industry has seen in years" is just plain wrong, and the (almost) daily Slashdot news posts on its sequel (which seems to be almost identical to the first version) are, well, not really needed.

Re:Couldn't agree more

[LKM]

No, I haven't played Nintendogs or Animcal crossing. I'm a straight male, thanks.

Wow, that is such a pathetic thing to say. Anyway, when mentioning your attributes, you forgot "insecure". And since you haven't played those games, you're in no position to judge their qualities.

I never said Killer 7 was a great game. Some people like it, some hate it, but the fact remains: If nothing else, it's at least innovative.

Re:Couldn't agree more

[MilenCent]

Well the thing about Nintendo has to do with...

1. Expectations concerning the quality of their games. Nintendo's games are almost always at least above average. There's usually some "thing" about most of them that's unique. It's impossible for them to top themselves forever, yet when it happens people are ready to attack. Pikmin 2 is just about as great a game as you'll find this generation, with real improvements over the play in the first game and surprisingly good multiplayer, but it's either like people've never heard of it, or if they have, Nintendo's betrayed the public's trust by making another sequel.

2. Expectations concerning theme. For all people say about how "dark" it is, Katamari Damacy really isn't dark at all. It's true that the fate of people rolled up into katamaris that are up in the night sky (or even turned into stardust) is up for question, but the game doesn't dwell on that. Nintendo games tend to be about as dark. (All those Goombas you squashed? Dead, dead I tell you, DEAD!!)

If you know where to look, you can actually find Nintendo games that acknowledge the darkness of the Mario universe. In Paper Mario 2 this provides some of the most hilarious moments, like encountering a Hammer Brother out for revenge for what happened to his grandfather in World 7-3....

3.
If Katamari did come out for a Nintendo system, I actually think it would still be as adored, but since the Gamecube has a much smaller user base than the PS2, there would be correspondingly fewer people crowing about it.

One thing about Katamari is that it is nearly an epiphany in game form. I was playing it on a school game machine, and someone watching actually told me it opened his eyes. (To what, I didn't ask, but it's what he said. Weird.) People who've played these games dating back to the classic era (where a lot of Nintendo fans come from) are less vulnerable to this epiphany; for them Katamari merely confirms something they already knew. But for someone raised on FPS, RTS, sports and fighting games, the fact that a game this fun comes outside of any genre they can identify may come as a bit of a shock. More people in the gaming press are like this than they'd admit, which accounts for KD's high press reputation.

It may come as a shock to them, but it is a shock that, after experiencing it, can only leave them more receptive to the charms of Nintendo's games.

"Doesn't use traditional game mechanics?"`

[MilenCent]

Actually, Katamari uses very traditional game mechanics:

1. Before you can go there, you must get something here.

In Zelda and Metroid, these are usually special items that give you abilities. In Katamari, it's raw mass.

2. To increase tension, the player must have a risk of failure. Not all levels have this, but in the most important ones (the "just size" levels) the player must make a minimum diameter before a time limit expires or acquire the wrath of the King of All Cosmos (who shows his bad parenting skills to the utmost, especially in the new game coming out). A time limit is a fairly arbitrary limiting factor that, neverthless, can be put to good use.

3. High scores; the game begs to be played again and again, in order to better your past efforts. That's about as traditional as you can get.

In my mind, Katamari Damacy is acres more traditional than all these games with boss enemies, pickup powerups and such. It's just a really pure action game that's not afraid (unlike many games) to discard those elements that are not essential to it.

In any real work of art, music, literature, visual arts), all that is unnecessary is discarded. The same applies to game design.

GayStation, LameCube, Suxbox, etc.

[tepples]

A character-for-character English transcription of the Japanese title is "Katamari Damashii". Simple, only one way to pronounce it. For some bizarre reason, they changed it to "Katamari Damacy" when it came here.

A 13-year-old is less likely to change "Damacy" into "Damashit" than "Damashii" into "Damashit" on some message board.