As far as I’m concerned you haven’t lived if you haven’t played a Katamari game, and last year the best one in the series just casually rolled into my life. After over a decade of waiting for a new adventure with The King of All Cosmos, fans of the original weird gaming series had something to celebrate. Now the game is available on the Nintendo Switch 2, ensuring that you can show off your weirdness as you’re on your commute or in a trendy coffee shop. Once Upon a Katamari is still a treat, and if you haven’t played it yet then you absolutely should.
The story of all the Katamari games is suitably ridiculous, and this one is no exception. The iconic King of All Cosmos has once again destroyed the entire universe, this time while attempting to do sick tricks with a scroll (obviously). Now it’s up to you my dear Prince to restore the world, by rolling up objects with a big sticky ball and having the king throw them into the sky to create replacement planets. The cutscenes and accompanying music are just sublime, and really get you in the mood for some nonsense.
If you’ve not been rolling before then the aim of each stage of Once Upon a Katamari is very simple. You need to roll up as many items as you can to grow bigger, and once you grow do you’ll be able to stick on larger objects that were previously too chunky to absorb. At the start of a stage you’ll probably roll up coins and sushi to slowly grow into a more sizable sphere, but by the end you’ll be gathering humans and horses who flail about in horror as they’re added to the Katamari. It’s less disturbing than it sounds though, because there’s always plenty of colour and lots of catchy tunes playing as you roll.
The fun hook of this particular Katamari game is that it takes place across different eras, which are full of totally different stages. Rolling around a Japanese tearoom is delightful, but after a while you’ll hunger for the thrill of tumbling through a saloon in the old west and picking up horseshoes and tumbleweed. The varied environments just make the game feel fresher than ever, and it’s easy to get stuck playing one more stage because you want to see what’s next.
The variety isn’t just the themes of the stages though, it’s also the objectives. While there are a nice amount of stages dedicated to that classic goal of getting bigger, there are also plenty of stages that mix things up. One early level tasks you with making the most valuable ball possible while only gathering fifty items total, whereas another requires you to gather beverages specifically instead of just any old junk. All of this just means it’s hard to ever get bored playing Once Upon a Katamari, and that’s not the case with every game in this illustrious series.
It wasn’t really a surprise that I enjoyed playing a game I love again, but what did surprise me was how good the Switch 2 version of the game was. Like so many other Switch 2 ports it performs flawlessly, and it also comes with the ability to play with mouse controls. These are actually really fun, mimicking you rolling the Katamari itself with each mouse serving as a hand. It’s probably not how I’ll ever play the game by default, but it’s surprisingly fun to play around with.
Thanks to a practically perfect Switch 2 port, there’s not a whole lot more to say about Once Upon a Katamari that I haven’t said before. It’s still absolutely the best Katamari game in the series, and the only real complaint I have with it is that not all the objectives are created equal. If you love Katamari games though then you’ll absolutely adore this entry, and if you’re uninitiated in ball rolling then consider this your call to action.
