Game Review: "Once Upon A Katamari"

Bandai Namco has released yet another "Katamari" game, this one titled "Once Upon A Katamari", which released October 24th, 2025. I received a copy of the game for Christmas and completed the main story objective just before the new year rolled around. I've been a big fan of the "Katamari" franchise since the PlayStation 2 era, and in 2018 Bandai Namco even provided me with a code for the re-release of "Katamari Damacy REROLL" on PC. You can see my much older video review here.

It has been nearly 22 years since the original "Katamari Damacy" released on PlayStation 2. There's really no other video game franchise quite like it. It fits somewhere between being a puzzle game and something that's nothing but relaxing, chill vibes. In each of the games, you play as the Prince of All Cosmos, who has the misfortune of having the King of All Cosmos as his dad. In the original game, the King has accidentally destroyed a bunch of the stars in the universe just because he was out and about having a good time and just sort of accidentally hit everything in his path. Your job as the Prince is to go down to Earth and roll around a special ball called a Katamari (the Japanese word for a lump, a mass, or a cluster). By rolling this Katamari around, you get random objects stuck to it, and the more objects you stick to it, the bigger your Katamari grows. It starts slow, barely bigger than a coin or a paperclip, but soon you find yourself rolling up larger objects like pencils, books, then small animals like cats and dogs, then furniture, then people. Eventually you're playing stages where the size you can roll up to feels limitless, and you can roll up literally everything on the planet. By doing this, you start to recreate all the stars in space that The King has accidentally destroyed. It's an oddball title, but it's super charming and addictive, and "Once Upon A Katamari" continues this charming tradition.

In this game, you find yourself time traveling and visiting different eras on Earth (although, The King most certainly seems to favor Japan's Edo period). You'll roll up all kinds of things based on different fixed points in time, so the variety of stuff you can pick up is now really varied and different. I was a particularly big fan of the American Frontier and the Jurassic Period. Rolling up cowboys and dinosaurs is exactly what this game needed to keep it interesting. There's also unique areas like Ancient Greece and the Ice Age. The variety in locations is extremely welcomed.

Game play functions very much like it has in previous games, and is very familiar especially to players of "Katamari Damacy" and "We ♥ Katamari". Nearly the entire game is played with your thumb sticks. I played on PS5, and it feels sufficiently similar enough to playing those first games on PS2 that I found no difficulty in jumping right in. Push the sticks forwards, backwards, and side to side to move around. Press in on the sticks to quickly 180 back behind you. The only control that felt in any way strange was in trying to move the Prince around your Katamari, typically by pushing one stick up and the other stick down, making him walk left or right around the ball. But for whatever reason, sometimes this wasn't very responsive, and the Prince was slow to rotate or didn't hardly want to do it at all. It thankfully wasn't a total game killer, but there were moments where I wish it had worked a little better. It was weird, because otherwise the game works exactly as intended, just like an older title, so I wonder why it is that this one control felt kind of funny. A newer addition to the game play mechanics is the introduction of new assist items. Picking up a magnet will temporarily draw all smaller nearby items directly to your Katamari. The rocket lets you zoom around quickly for a short amount of time. The stopwatch stops time and gives you an extra few seconds to keep rolling or to dodge an oncoming moving object. And the radar briefly sends out pings to look for special collectable items.

It's the collectable items that really make the game a challenge. Some of the same old types of challenges are back, where you have to roll up a ball to a certain size within a specific amount of time, or you have a target size you're aiming for but you have to do it completely by eyeballing it without a guide. This time, the game scatters three crowns around any given stage, at various sizes. It's not strictly required that you roll them up to beat a stage, but you'll need to keep collecting crowns in order to eventually unlock the ability to go to a different era in Earth's history, so it's still better to find them. Some are pretty easy to spot and only require that you roll your ball up big enough to be able to grab it, and others are cleverly hidden in places you'd almost never think to check. This is on top of one special present you can find hidden somewhere on a given map, which unlocks various cosmetic items for your Prince to wear, like hats and other costumes and accessories. And much like previous entries, you still have all of your space cousins to find in these maps. There's one cousin hidden on every map, all looking like some really messed up alternate color version of The Prince, all of whom can also be dressed in the accessories you find, and all of whom can also be swapped out with the Prince so you can play as them instead if you so choose. There are so many cousins, presents, and crowns you can find that even after I technically beat the game, I could still go back and find more. There's definitely a completionist aspect of the game that could keep you coming back to try it again.

"Once Upon A Katamari" also features a new multiplayer aspect called KatamariBall, which can be played against other NPCs, or even online against real world players. The goal of KatamariBall is to roll up the most amount of stuff, and then drop that stuff off at a drop-off point to collect points, and then go back to rolling up more stuff, collecting as much as you can before time runs out. You want to have more points than the other players. It's possible to roll up other players, or bump them around to slow your opponents down. Gameplay in this mode felt a little slow and cumbersome. I admittedly did not spend a lot of time in this mode, as I'm not too terribly interested in a Katamari game from a multiplayer aspect, but I'm glad that it's there for other people who might be interested in this sort of thing.

With enough time, effort, and the collection of enough crowns scattered across each of the stages, I was finally able to reach the final stage—rolling up our galaxy. All the Katamari games have a final level that feels so big, you're impressed you even made it this far at all. But even after having technically completed the narrative of the game, with all the cute little animated vignettes featuring the King and Queen sprinkled in between various stages, there's still so much more I could have done. There's still a couple of stages across all the eras of time I didn't even do before I zipped right to the end. There's still lots of crowns I haven't collected. There's still cousins I haven't located and presents I haven't rolled up. There's still quite a lot of game left that I haven't played, and that's great, because "Once Upon A Katamari" is the kind of game that you can just pick up and mess around with for a few minutes at a time, and in that time you might find yourself able to accomplish something you weren't able to when you played it last. It's a cute, fun game and a rewarding experience.

You might also be familiar with the bangin' soundtracks from previous titles. Each of the games has a phenomenal soundtrack stacked with beloved Japanese musicians. That includes famous anisong vocalist Shigeru Matsuzaki, who sang on the original "Katamari Soundtrack", with the new song "Power of Katamari Damacy". Famous singer Kenji Niinuma is also back, having performed some of my favorite tracks on the first two games, returning for the song "Chill Prince". There's also new artists like Kocchi no Kento, who has seen great popularity in recent years from songs like his extremely popular single "Hai Yorokonde". His song on this soundtrack is "Eeja Eeja Naika", a reference to a phrase that became popular during the Edo period and over time during history has occasionally morphed into a phrase associated with various forms of political protests. This game has made yet another Katamari soundtrack that I absolutely have to add to my physical music collection, alongside the soundtracks from the first two games.

In a world that could use all the joy we can find, "Once Upon A Katamari" makes for a great game to just pop in and chill with. It's bright, colorful, quirky, and fun, and mostly still represents the exact carefree feeling it had when the franchise first launched more than 20 years ago. I can see myself returning to this game, poking around at it, and trying to accomplish things I hadn't yet finished or attempt to break my old records. If you've never played a Katamari game, this is a perfectly decent place to start, and I hope you have as much fun with it as I did.

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