Developed By: RENGAME
Published By: Bandai Namco
Category: Adventure
Release Date: 10.24.25
Price: $39.99
*Game Download Code graciously provided for the purpose of review
When I first booted up Once Upon a Katamari, I had no idea of the silliness and chaos that I was about to get myself involved in. I did have to admit that the game did infuriate me at times. The controls often pissed me off, but I still found the game to be fun and silly for the most part.
The Katamari series is about rolling items together like a snowball. As things get attached to your ball, it grows bigger and bigger. In Once Upon a Katamari, The King is playing with a scroll, but he accidently throws it into space and destroy the earth, moon, and other planets. Now it’s up to you, The Prince, to fix things.
Fortunately, The King found a time machine mere minutes before the incident that allows you to travel back in time to different Japanese eras. Your job is to roll up giant balls using whatever you find, which eventually become the new stars and planets. Each era has a large map to explore, including different levels and other things to do.
Some levels might be small, as in a house or other small buildings. The ball you roll might only reach a few centimeters or meters. But some of the levels require you to roll a much larger monstrosity. Towards the end of the game, you’re even rolling entire city buildings. The chaos of the rolling grows as you progress through the story.
Some of the levels require you to reach a certain size in a limited amount of time. Other possible requirements include rolling a certain number of items, rolling a certain number of value, etc. I did not personally enjoy having a timer. It often forced me to rush forward instead of enjoying the level. Sometimes I had trouble finding the final few items that I needed to roll, or I wanted to take a break and couldn’t.
You are able to redo levels as much as you want, but I didn’t like that there was no option to just play the level at our own pace. I also wasn’t a big fan of the controls. Sometimes it was simply to difficult to move where I wanted to, even with the simple controls on. There were dozens of moments where I would get stuck on something, move the wrong way, or be rolling to fast or too slow to correct my movement.
But even with that being said, the gameplay itself is still fun, even with all the infuriating moments. But for me, everything outside of the gameplay were the strongest points. Everything The King says is a meme. There are so many silly moments that I kept pushing through the levels just because I wanted to see what happens next.
The soundtrack was also phenomenal. All the songs are up beat and catchy. Some of them I just thought were iconic like the main theme, a few of the ones that play in the levels, and the one that plays when you’re speaking to The King. There’s also a special edition of the game that costs an extra $20 and adds more than 50 extra songs from the series.
The base game is $40 and can take you anywhere from 5 to 15 hours to beat. If you’re a fan of the series, it will be a must-buy for you. If you want to get into the series, or just really love good music, you’re going to want to check it out as well. I just personally wasn’t a fan of the controls or the stress induced from the timer.
4/5
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