Beautiful Katamari, sequel to the Katamari Damacy series, makes its way onto the Xbox 360, and may bring with it the same gameplay and other features that made the game a success on the PlayStation 2, but doesn’t quite have the same soul as its predecessors, and even though it comes at a reduced priced compared to other top-tier games, the overall length of the game is questionable.
Once again charged by the King of the Cosmos to cover for one of his mistakes, you as the Prince are tasked with rolling up objects on a “katamari” - a ball-object that can pick up objects smaller than itself and grows in size as it accumulates more and more stuff. You may start small, picking up household items, and end up picking up people, buildings, or entire landmasses. The overall sense of the massive change of scale that persists in the series is true to form, from rolling about on tabletops all the way though grabbing planets and stars.
Structured in the form of requests from the King to create specific planets, you’re generally given a limited amount of time and a target size for the katamari, but the main addition in Beautiful Katamari is that the King will also request that you collect a majority of objects in the katamari that fit the theme of the request: “ring” objects for Saturn, “ocean” objects for Neptune, and so forth. Depending on how many you collect as well as meeting the other challenges in the game, you’ll end up with a better rating at the end of the challenge.
The major issue with Beautiful Katamari is that it is rather short, consisting of about 12 total challenges, though the game encourages you to go back and improve your score, attempt a time attack, or just fill out your collection of objects and improve your standings on the worldwide scoreboards. These challenges can easily be finished in a short period, about four hours and about the same length as the first Katamari Damacy game. While Namco-Bandai priced the game at a reduced cost, it still feels likes its overpriced. There’s not a lot of ‘odd’ challenges, not even a single “cowbear” type level, and while the updates in high-resolution graphics and Xbox Live support are definitely worth something on their own, the fact you’re left feeling like “that’s it?” calls into question the game’s price-point.
Another problem in the game is not so much that it’s faithful to the core gameplay, even down to keeping the exact same control scheme as the PS2 version, but its that it feels just like a follow-through without any additional creative elements. Most of the same objects are used throughout, but unlike previous installments where certain object placement was used to convey humor, there’s not a lot of that in Beautiful Katamari, and when its used, it’s rehashing the same humorous elements from the past games. The story fits with the eccentric behavior of the King of the Cosmos, but its lacking some charm; even the King himself is a bit more coherent and really doesn’t seem as funny to listen ramble on previously. Everything’s there — but it’s mostly a duplication without inspiration, and leaves the game feeling a bit empty.
Beautiful Katamari does add in Xbox Live support, and does a pretty good job at this as well. Global scoreboards keep track of your progress relative to the rest of the world on per-request basis as well as overall single player performance. You can now go at it with 3 other players over Xbox Live in a mode to try to pick up the most objects as dictated by the King, using speed bursts to disrupt other players and dislodge objects from their katamaris. There’s also off-line play using the same console for two players in either co-operative mode or verses.
The game still looks good, staying consistent with the boxy, low polygon count representation of objects instead of trying to improve the graphics. By keeping to the low level of detail, the game is able to display a lot on the screen at any time, though once you start getting in the large katamari range you’ll see some slowdown. The sounds and music are typical for the series, with background music still consisting of a selection of quirky Japanese pop songs; you may not know the words, but these songs are as catchy as any of the other katamari soundtracks.
Its not that Beautiful Katamari is a bad game, but it is one that suffers from being through the sequel ringer one too many times. All the praised elements are there, and the game’s been updated to work on the next-gen hardware with a few additional options in gameplay, but because there’s no significant change in the well-established gameplay, it would have been nice to have much more in the game to really use that gameplay to its fullest extent. There’s just a lot of places in this game that feel just done because the past games did that but with no consideration of trying to be even more creative. Its still an enjoyable experience, but one that really just feels lacking once all is said and done.
Primotech Rating: 
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[…] Cavin Smith wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptBeautiful Katamari, sequel to the Katamari Damacy series, makes its way onto the Xbox 360, and may bring with it the same gameplay and other features that made the game a success on the PlayStation 2, but doesn’t quite have the same … […]