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When Nintendo debuted Zelda: The Four Swords for Nintendo Gamecube at E3 2003, they admitted during the press conference that they didn't "know what to do with it." They didn't know how they were going to package it. What they had, at that time, was a brilliant multi-player, room-to-room, dungeon-crawling action game with beloved characters already built in. The game took a year to see release. When it came out, it was clear that Nintendo had decided, somewhere during the hiatus, that because the game starred four look-alikes of a character (Link) whose games (the Zelda series) involved sometimes talking to people in villages, that this new action game needed to require lots of talking in villages as well, and a yawn-worthy "story" that just doesn't shut the fuck up, while your friends sit and scream and skip through cut-scenes in which the god-damned owl is telling you what to do and if you don't know what to do you can't very well do it. This birthed a game that makes people hate their friends for life.
Good one, Nintendo.
Namco, similarly, sat on Katamari Damashii for some time. In the end, it was the game's complete lack of character that pushed them to leave it exactly as it was, structure-wise, while they piled in character after it. As has been covered already, the structure of Katamari Damashii is brilliant in its cleverness. The progress of each stage is logical even when the placement of the items on the ground is not logical at all. The objects themselves are important, or, at least, it's what the objects are as objects that caused my friend in Setagaya to buy the cursed game in the first place.
Allow me to clarify in more detail. After I eat my spaghetti.
. . .
That was some damned good spaghetti.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Objects. I mentioned, earlier, a ring of rotary telephones in the grass, situated around a tree. These telephones don't have to be telephones. They can be merely cubes. Hell, every object in the game can be a cube which, when absorbed, causes your sphere to grow larger. Yet they're not cubes. They're telephones. Apples. Rats that make this horrifying "skQwEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" when you absorb them. Guys with mullets and the motorcycles they're riding in slow circles on the beach. Cows that moo. Sumo wrestlers swimming with children in a lake. Schoolgirls who scream in terror, running away. Giant octopi straddling baseball stadiums. Pachinko parlors. In a game about building a giant ball of stuff, Namco has seen it important to make the stuff personable, blackly humorous, and latently malicious. It's great. Going with the squares and sphere model, how would we know how big the squares were that we were picking up, unless we cared how big they were? In Katamari Damashii as it exists now, when I can see a Ferris wheel sticking out of my collage, it makes me remember amusement parks. It triggers something mental. I know how big I am. I'm this big.
They've also put a story onto the game, like you'd put a sweater on your little nephew, turning him into your cute little nephew. The idea of rolling a ball around, growing larger and larger and larger is simple enough to be called "cute," one might say. Yet, can we really say it's "cute" without some perspective? Of course not. We need the Ferris wheels sticking out of the clump to understand why we're so thoroughly enjoying ourselves: we're making a star. We're making a star because we need to repopulate the night sky, because our (and by "our," I mean the little green guy a centimeter tall who's controlling the ball with his psychic powers) dad, the kilometer-tall King of the Cosmos, got drunk and smashed up all the stars in the sky on accident. If we bring him these balls of garbage (and, uh, humans, and . . . cats) from earth, he can compress them using nuclear fusion, and make stars. So that's what we're doing. Sometimes, we get presents for finding secret items in each stage and absorbing them one at a time. One of those presents is a white guitar, which the Prince wears on his back. It's a genuinely cute design.
That's what Namco wanted, so that's what they got. After analyzing the potential infectious nature of this simple, devilish gameplay concept, they saw fit to lavish a large budget on character. The Prince's character design will probably appear on a few T-shirts to be sold at American stores for cool kids who don't buy their videogame-related apparel at Hot Topic. This is a compliment, if you can see through the triple-edged sarcasm. (I trust you, insertcredit.com readers!) I'm saying he's a smart character design designed by a smart designer. So is his dad. Every little object in the game is smart, too. Let's give them all a little credit for intelligence, here. Each stupid little object has been glossed over with an intelligent and witty attention to detail. Namco knew that the amount of computing necessary to run the game without turning the PlayStation2 into a time bomb meant the graphics couldn't exactly represent the real world (wouldn't that be interesting, though?), so they settled for a flat-shaded look drenched in the syrup of personality. Get it, syrup? Syrup is sticky -- things . . . stick to it, like in the game?
Hell.
The music!
I don't like the music. Yet so much money has been poured into it, and I don't hate it. So I'm able to give them a hearty "right on" about that. It's high-quality, it's not licensed, and it doesn't feel merely cut-and-pasted onto the collage that is the game. We have real voices singing real songs, and many of them are about katamari ("clump," or "collage") or damashii ("spirit"). (The two kanji are very similar, by the way: ??. Only a stroke's difference. Cool, huh? Is this title meant to visually represent the quirky feeling when you realize the house you absorbed also contains people, plants, rats, and housecats? I don't know. If I were to make this its own paragraph and not just a parenthetical, I could certainly make it seem so.) There's some brassy stuff, some quiet stuff, some ambient stuff (the only track I can say I come close to hating is this pretentious sounding blip-bloop bullshit), and a really, really, really nice pop song. I'd name-drop the song title and the name of the artist (it's seriously my favorite track in the game) if the instruction manual had music credits.
The instruction manual is excellent, by the way. I actually received my own, eventual copy of Katamari Damashii, whether I wanted it or not, as a random gift from the woman who edited the instruction manual. True story: we were in a restaurant, eating fried potatoes, when she gave it to me. I opened it up, flipped through the manual, and commented, "This is a nice manual." She blushed. "You know, I edited that manual." "Oh -- did you?" I thought she was kidding. She actually wasn't. There might have been a ten-meter-tall ball of waste rolling around outside the restaurant. If it had absorbed us and killed us all with the power of fusion, would it have understood the irony? Probably not.
The cinematics are a different thing altogether. To be blunt -- they're fucking awesome. The introduction plays out under the crashing, brassy 1970s Shibuya-kei "Katamari Damashii" theme song, and includes, among other things, hula-hooping pandas and a chorus of wild geese. You'd almost think that God had brought Yasuharu Konishi back from the death of un-fame, and given him a crown of rainbow to wear while he danced and sang about the death of poetry in a Chinese communist youth-patrol uniform, brandishing a pistol. The in-game cinematics look as though done by a different, equally talented team, almost -- they're light and airbrushed, while the intro is computer-animation that looks like paper cut-outs. It's probably the same team, showing two ends of their versatility. The in-game cinemas don't make no sense, neither, to be equally blunt. They're nearly silent affairs involving a pair of literally block-headed children (brother and sister) and their mother as they head toward a rocket launch site. Their father is going to the moon. The kids are watching a monster movie in the first scene. The mother ducks in, and says, "Get ready." The boy doesn't look away from the television. Suddenly, a news report flashes up. "Breaking news -- the stars have disappeared from the sky. Now back to your regularly scheduled program." The boy tells his mother, "Hey, the TV says the stars disappeared." The mother says, "Now, don't make up stories." The boy says, to his nodding sister, "If that were true, it'd be really cool." He says this with no emphasis at all.
That was the hardest I laughed in a long time, I tell you. The people who made this stuff really understand the ignorant maliciousness of children. My little brother has often heard of someone getting killed by a wild animal, or something, on TV, and laughed up chicken fingers. He's the kind of ignorant asshole child (I know you're reading this, man; you know it's true, anyway) who would see a news report about the stars disappearing and yell "ROCK!!" He thinks not of consequences, or . . . anything, or anyone, really. And I think it makes him funny. In summary -- the game is funny.
Its sense of humor is par for the course, however. If you're the kind of person who sees the box art (in its Japanese state: a giant ball including an octopus, a Ferris wheel, and a baseball stadium sits on the horizon, beneath a rainbow. A cow stands in a vast meadow in the foreground, unaware) and is immediately intrigued, chances are every little piece, musical, graphical, or designed, inside this game, like the people and the rats and house cats inside the house picked up by a rolling celestial boulder, each element will appeal to you equally. I say this with the highest sense of admiration and honor. Yet there is a darker feeling, one I can't get out as well as I'd like. I started this review in the mood to get that point out, and I just haven't been able to do it yet. I thought that bullshitting for a couple thousand words would warm me up. It has not, however, made the grave matter any easier to disclose. I'll force it out, then:
I don't play this game anymore.
I can't. I don't want to. I wouldn't dare. I've always kind of been in line with the Heian Japanese belief that the world is in a constant state of decline. I believe that art taints all art that comes after it, and that all art taints humanity, in general.
I don't believe this game is art, however. It's far from that. It's a tool for teaching people something, in addition to being a videogame and a hell of an interesting programming experiment. It is also very entertaining to someone who doesn't know what it is.
When you do know it, however, it pushes you away, and tells you to play something else. When you play that final stage in free mode, once you're awarded free mode, and you collect all there is to collect, you roll around, free of a time-limit, looking, praying for more icebergs. None will come. Nothing a man makes can be infinite. This game, with its carefully designed world, cannot and will not go on forever. Sitting in the middle of the ocean, staring at that huge lump you've made, you'll wonder what the point is of it all. Just -- what the point is of anything. Not just Katamari Damashii, by Namco, for PlayStation2 -- gaming in general. Not just gaming in general, either -- what's the point of anything? Living? Working? Drinking Coca-Cola? Though you have the option to exit out of the stage through the menu, chances are you'll do what I did, and just turn the game console off now.
The game doesn't end. It breaks up with you.
The flaw of Katamari Damashii is that, when I introduce someone to it, I tell them to play my save file, and just do the final stage. The rest of the game is arbitrary to a person who doesn't normally play videogames, and to some people who do. If they can't figure out how to get to the right menu selection, I do it for them. Sometimes, if the person doesn't play videogames, I put it on free mode (protip: earn free mode by picking up the rainbow (700 meters) in the final stage!) and let them at it for an hour or more. Eventually, even the non-gamers reach the dead-and-fat-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean state, and announce they're finished. They might be sweating, kind of. The gamers tend to beat the twenty-five-minute time limit nine and a half times out of ten. When they're done, they never really say how they feel. They sometimes express interest in getting the game when it comes out, so they can "play it some more," though I think "play it some more" means "make other people play it." The special stages -- such as the one where you build the constellation Cancer by collecting crabs, or Ursa Minor by collecting bears ("those goddamn bears," as the King calls them, and then he calls them "fucking bears" and "son-of-a-bitching bears" as well; that's a rough translation (hell, the dialogue in this game needs good localization)) -- are gimmicky in theme, and feel kind of tacked on; the whole game is just a prelude of dubious motives, to a cathartic opus of a final level. If I sound displeased with the game, maybe it's because I'm displeased with myself for being unable to presently imagine how each stage could evoke the same catharsis as the end of the final level. Would gamers want that catharsis? I don't think so. Still, it'd be an interesting endeavor. As I did not birth this game concept myself, with regard to its evolution, I am inferior to its creator with regard to all imagination surrounding it. I find this disconcerting, yet it is a valid lesson.
***
I'm more than sure it will sell well in America. The very simple fact that the game has had a clever English Romanization -- "Katamari Damacy" -- waiting for it since its release in Japan has indicated to me, from the beginning, that the game is meant to sell better in America and Europe than in Japan. Recently, in Seoul, I witnessed the game selling like hotcakes, and those people technically don't even buy games at all. That its price tag in Japan was originally only 4000 yen (Dragon Quest V for PlayStation2, for comparison, was 8800 yen, because they knew it was going to sell) indicates that they were cautious. Yet it sold unbelievably well. In America, it will surely sell more. It has been destined, from the moment Namco signed that advance check for the graphic design, to be one of those games like Jet Set Radio, which sells more in America than in Japan because it's "too Japanese." Witness a real, live comment from a young man who played the game a little bit from the beginning just two days ago, prompting me to write this review today: "This game is great. It fucking rocks. It'd never get released in America." Guess what, big man? The game comes out in America at the end of September. You are its target audience. Go buy it.
Unlike Jet Set Radio, full of interesting music and character, Katamari Damashii is blest with a purity of concept. Jet Set Radio was made by people who wanted to make a game that included music by Guitar Vader and characters who spraypaint graffiti while magnetic-rollerblading. The genre and the gameplay hook, however, was not yet decided. In music terms, it was a song made by genuinely cool people who just wanted to be in a band. Katamari Damashii is something else. It is easily the better game, and the more important landmark as far as game history will be concerned. It is not a cult hit. It is a superstar. It is coming to your town for one night only, to rock you, and love you, and love you, and leave you for dead an hour later.
Open up your arms and whisper a little prayer.
Nanmandabu nanmandabu.
Kuwabara kuwabara.
Et cetera et cetera.
tim rogers ain't dead already, and whoa girl, you know the reason why
OMAKE MODE!!
I have envisioned a soundtrack for this game. Based on the type of fruity music it holds in high regard, and in cooperation with the type of fruity music I used to love above others, I have compiled a playlist of songs that will go well with Katamari Damashii once the game gets old and you don't care to hear the music or even the popping of trees and screaming of rats anymore, much less the cacophony of hundreds of humans screaming from within your giant ball as you roll down a hill street picking up taxicabs. The songs are arranged in a kind of logical order. Kind of. The earlier the song, the smaller the ball. By the last track, you should already be sitting there in the middle of the ocean, alone and depressed, with absolutely nothing left to pick up.
the insertcredit.com mix CD series, number one: tim rogers vs. katamari damashii:
09092004
1. Pizzicato Five -- The World is Spinning at 45 RPM
2. Unicorn -- Jinsei wa jojo da
3. The Blue Hearts -- Shalala
4. Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchesta -- Tetris
5. Halcali -- Tandem
6. Pizzicato Five -- Adult-oriented Cha-cha
7. Cibo Matto -- Spoon
8. Quruli -- Wandervogel (Tsutchie (from Shakkazombie) Remix)
9. Maki Nomiya -- Usagi to watashi
10. Takako Minekawa -- (T.T.T.) Turntable Tennis
11. Yasuharu Konishi -- Son of Godzilla
12. Lemon Jelly -- Space Walk
13. Django Reinhart and Stephane Grappelli -- La Mer
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